Plenty of public health studies reveal that people’s mood is lifted by spending time in parks, green spaces and on hiking trails in wild places. But human-caused climate change and an individualist mindset are interrupting the innate relationship humans have with nature and the planet, health experts say.

At an APHA 2024 session on Wednesday, experts unpacked an approach to public health that views planetary health and population health as one system.

Throughout the event, a strategic and systems public health approach was crystalized through the wisdom of indigenous people, who lived close to the land for millennia before colonialism.

An indigenous woman holds a toddler girl in her arms outdoors with green grass and trees surrounding them. Both are laughing“There are things to learn from indigenous ways that can benefit everyone’s health,” said Emma Rawson-Te Patu, a member of several Māori tribal Polynesian groups in New Zealand and president of the World Federation of Public Health Associations. “People have forgotten what it is like to honor the planet.”

Speakers at the session, “Planetary Health Is Public Health: Addressing the Ecological Determinants of Health,” described the need for what one presenter called “the great transition”: adopting an eco-friendly way of how humans live in the world.

“Achieving planetary health requires learning to do nearly everything differently,” said Jessica Kronstadt, program director at Planetary Health Alliance. This includes “the stories we tell ourselves about our place in the world, our relationships to nature and what it means to live a good life.”

Understanding ecological determinants of health requires a planetary health perspective on how disruptions to Earth’s clean air, clean water and healthy environments due to human-caused pollution impact human health. The approach offers the public health workforce a broader or socio-ecological context to improve people’s lives.

“There is a growing recognition that Earth is itself a living system and that the ultimate determinant of human health (and that of all species) is the health of the Earth’s life-supporting systems,” a 2015 report on ecological determinants from the Canadian Public Health Association says.

A decade later, the approach is gaining foothold in U.S. health departments. The California Department of Public Health, for example, has formed the Climate Change and Health Equity Workgroup, which consists of 60 staffers at health centers and programs across the state. An advisory board is forming with its first scheduled meeting in January.

Meanwhile, Jessica LeClair, a postdoctoral trainee at the School of Nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is spearheading training for public health nurses in planetary health. She is also striving to build capacity of grassroots workers promoting planetary health locally.

These actions and more suggest the wisdom of a Polynesian aphorism, often cited by Rawson-Te Patu: “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.”

Photo: By FatCamera, courtesy iStockphoto.