Crisis of planetary health: Epistemological holism and the production of environmental risk

The concept of ‘planetary health’ is a novel transdisciplinary research and policy framework introduced in a 2015 report by the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health. This paper offers a reading and philosophical critique of that report by interrogating the more fundamental theoretical assumptions underlying the planetary health framework. This involves, firstly, understanding the dominant conception of environmental crisis as a physical threat to a planetary system and ‘planetary health’ as a solution to this threat. After that, this paper examines the distinctive holistic methodology of the ‘planetary health’ framework before arguing that the initial report overlooks the fundamentally qualitative nature of holistic definitions of ‘health’. The paper concludes by recommending a more qualitative, value-driven assessment of planetary health that is attentive to global inequality and conflict over land use. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .