<div dir="ltr">From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Stig Wall</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:stig.wall@epiph.umu.se">stig.wall@epiph.umu.se</a>></span><br><div class="gmail_quote"><br><br><div link="blue" vlink="purple" lang="SV">
<div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)" lang="EN-US">Dear Friends,<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)" lang="EN-US">We published this in Lancet yesterday and it is available at <a href="http://www.thelancet.com" target="_blank">www.thelancet.com</a> for endorsement.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)" lang="EN-US">Best<span class=""><font color="#888888"><u></u><u></u></font></span></span></p><span class=""><font color="#888888"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)" lang="EN-US">Stig<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)" lang="EN-US"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></font></span></div></div></div>
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<p><span style="font-size:17pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet';font-weight:700">From public to planetary health: a manifesto
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<p><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet'">This manifesto for transforming public health calls for
a social movement to support collective public health
action at all levels of society—personal, community,
national, regional, global, and planetary. Our aim is
to respond to the threats we face: threats to human
health and wellbeing, threats to the sustainability of our
civilisation, and threats to the natural and human-made
systems that support us. Our vision is for a planet that
nourishes and sustains the diversity of life with which we
coexist and on which we depend. Our goal is to create a
movement for planetary health.
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<p><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet'">Our audience includes health professionals and public
health practitioners, politicians and policy makers,
international civil servants working across the UN and in
development agencies, and academics working on behalf
of communities. Above all, our audience includes every
person who has an interest in their own health, in the
health of their fellow human beings, and in the health of
future generations.
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<p><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet'">The discipline of public health is critical to this vision
because of its values of social justice and fairness for all,
and its focus on the collective actions of interdependent
and empowered peoples and their communities. Our
objectives are to protect and promote health and
wellbeing, to prevent disease and disability, to eliminate
conditions that harm health and wellbeing, and to foster
resilience and adaptation. In achieving these objectives,
our actions must respond to the fragility of our planet
and our obligation to safeguard the physical and human
environments within which we exist.
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<p><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet'">Planetary health is an attitude towards life and a
philosophy for living. It emphasises people, not diseases,
and equity, not the creation of unjust societies. We seek
to minimise differences in health according to wealth,
education, gender, and place. We support knowledge
as one source of social transformation, and the right to
realise, progressively, the highest attainable levels of
health and wellbeing.
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<p><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet'">Our patterns of overconsumption are unsustainable and
will ultimately cause the collapse of our civilisation. The
harms we continue to inflict on our planetary systems are
a threat to our very existence as a species. The gains made
in health and wellbeing over recent centuries, including
through public health actions, are not irreversible; they
can easily be lost, a lesson we have failed to learn from
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<p><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet'">previous civilisations. We have created an unjust global
economic system that favours a small, wealthy elite over
the many who have so little.
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<p><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet'">The idea of unconstrained progress is a dangerous
human illusion: success brings new and potentially even
more dangerous threats. Our tolerance of neoliberalism
and transnational forces dedicated to ends far removed
from the needs of the vast majority of people, and
especially the most deprived and vulnerable, is only
deepening the crisis we face. We live in a world where
the trust between us, our institutions, and our leaders,
is falling to levels incompatible with peaceful and just
societies, thus contributing to widespread disillusionment
with democracy and the political process.
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<p><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet'">An urgent transformation is required in our values and
our practices based on recognition of our interdependence
and the interconnectedness of the risks we face. We need
a new vision of cooperative and democratic action at
all levels of society and a new principle of planetism and
wellbeing for every person on this Earth—a principle
that asserts that we must conserve, sustain, and make
resilient the planetary and human systems on which
health depends by giving priority to the wellbeing of all.
All too often governments make commitments but fail
to act on them; independent accountability is essential to
ensure the monitoring and review of these commitments,
together with the appropriate remedial action.
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<p><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet'">The voice of public health and medicine as the
independent conscience of planetary health has a special
part to play in achieving this vision. Together with
empowered communities, we can confront entrenched
interests and forces that jeopardise our future. A powerful
social movement based on collective action at every level
of society will deliver planetary health and, at the same
time, support sustainable human development.
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<p><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet';font-style:italic">*Richard Horton, Robert Beaglehole, Ruth Bonita,
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<p><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet';font-style:italic">John Raeburn, Martin McKee, Stig Wall<br>
</span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet';font-style:italic">The Lancet, </span><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet'">London NW1 7BY, UK (RH); University of Auckland,
Auckland, New Zealand (RBe, RBo); Department of Public Health,
AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand (JR); Department of Health
Services Research and Policy, London School of Hygiene & Tropical
Medicine, London, UK (MM); and Department of Public Health and
Clinical Medicine, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden (SW)
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:7pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet'">We declare that we have no competing interests. RBe and RBo gratefully
acknowledge their Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio joint residency.
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<p><span style="font-size:7pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet'"><a href="http://www.thelancet.com">www.thelancet.com</a> </span><span style="font-size:7pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet';font-weight:700">Vol383 March8,2014
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<p><span style="font-size:7pt;font-family:'Shaker2Lancet';font-weight:700">847
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