Imagining Planetary Health, Well-Being, and Habitability

Location: Evangelische Akademie Tutzing, Schlossstr. 2+4, 82327 Tutzing, Germany
Conveners: Lijuan Klassen and Christof Mauch

Keynote Speakers:
Ursula K. Heise (University of California, Los Angeles)
Jennifer Gabrys (University of Cambridge)
Malcom Ferdinand (Paris Dauphine University - PSL, National Centre for Scientific Research [CNRS])

Future scenarios involving demographic pressure, pandemics, and climate migration present new challenges to multi-species coexistence by rendering parts of Earth uninhabitable. These developments and tendencies have stimulated the rise of new research paradigms, such as “planetary health” (Whitmee et al. 2015) and “planetary well-being” (Elo et al. 2023), which seek to establish an integrative notion of human and animal health as well as the health of organic and inorganic systems. So far, these concepts have mainly been informed by the medical and earth system sciences, but planetary health and well-being must also be discussed in light of the ethical, philosophical, aesthetic, and political questions they provoke—questions that are now being addressed and discussed within the environmental humanities.

From a humanities perspective, we may ask what novel understandings arise from imagining health and well-being—encompassing sickness, mourning, toxicity, and extinction—on a planetary scale. How must planetary health be reconfigured, when the planetary is not understood merely as “a settled unit of analysis” within a whole-earth-system view, but rather as “a figure of collective responsibility and environmental relation” (Gabrys 2020)? What forms of attunement and analysis are necessary to address a multi-species health collective and their demands for justice (Heise 2016)? Such questions are posed against the background of continuously transgressed climatic tipping points and ecological boundaries, leading to inevitable shifts in the earth’s systems. As these changes are irrevocable, planetary health cannot merely be a question of finding a cure that would reinstate a past state of the earth. This does not mean that all is lost, but rather, it stresses the dire necessity to overcome the destructive modes of inhabiting the Earth (Ferdinand 2022), including fossil-fueled capitalism (Malm 2016), plantation monocultures (Tsing 2015; Chao 2022), and colonialism and slavery (Clare 2013; Yusoff 2018). Planetary health therefore also raises the question of Earth’s habitability—a question, precisely, of how to live well and ethically together on a planet whose habitable space is increasingly shrinking.

The workshop is part of a project titled “Strengthening the Environmental Humanities” at the Rachel Carson Center (RCC) and is funded through the Volkswagen Foundation’s project “University of the Future.” It is organized by the RCC in cooperation with the Munich Science Communication Lab (MSCL).

This workshop is an in-person event only.

Please see the attached workshop program below.