Understanding the relationship between healthy ecosystems and healthy lives.

We Were Never Separate

Human health and environmental health are often discussed as if they belonged to different worlds. One concerns our bodies, our minds and our communities; the other concerns forests, oceans, soils, wildlife and climate.

Biology tells a more connected story.

Every human life depends on processes taking place far beyond the boundaries of the body. The food we eat begins with soil, water, sunlight and living organisms. Much of the diversity in our diets depends directly or indirectly on pollination. Forests and other ecosystems influence water cycles, local climates and the movement of nutrients through landscapes. Plants, algae and microorganisms participate in the atmospheric cycles that make respiration possible.

These connections are now increasingly reflected in scientific approaches such as One Health and Planetary Health, which examine human health alongside the health of animals, ecosystems and the wider environmental systems upon which societies depend.

This does not mean that human health can be reduced to environmental conditions. Genetics, healthcare, social circumstances, behaviour, economics and many other factors matter enormously. Rather, it means that human wellbeing cannot be understood completely without considering the environment in which human life takes place.

We are biological organisms living within biological systems.

Our cities may sometimes make this relationship difficult to see, but they do not remove it. Water still has to come from somewhere. Food still has to grow somewhere. Materials still have to originate somewhere. The atmosphere continues to circulate around the planet regardless of national borders or city limits.

The more closely we examine life, the harder it becomes to identify a point at which humanity ends and the rest of nature begins.

Perhaps we were never as separate as we learned to imagine.