Abstract
In this chapter, I review the current unsustainability crisis, attempting to build bridges between the different dimensions of sustainability, and linking planetary health with inequality with cooperation. I first show how health is being degraded by environmental crises (climate change, ecosystems degradation and biodiversity destruction), then detail the inequality crisis whereby domestic and global inequality have widened in the last four decades, to finally focus on the cooperation crisis, which developed in part because of the growing impact of digital tools on human lives and socialization habits.
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Notes
- 1.
Life expectancy first increased among the youngest (in the first half of the twentieth century) before progressing among the oldest (in the second half, especially the last quarter, of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first century).
- 2.
The first laws regulating French industrial establishments and in particular the imperial decree of October 15, 1810 was the first legislation in the world regulating pollution (it was extended by the law of December 19, 1917).
- 3.
A zoonosis is an infectious disease that can be transmitted from a non-human animal to humans.
- 4.
“COVID-19 pandemic triggers 25% increase in prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide”, WHO, March 2022, https://www.who.int/news/item/02-03-2022-covid-19-pandemic-triggers-25-increase-in-prevalence-of-anxiety-and-depression-worldwide.
- 5.
The 2021 State of the Environment report, accessible at soe.dcceew.gov.au.
- 6.
In 2015, the Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission on Planetary Health published its report “Safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene epoch” in The Lancet, defining “planetary health” as a solutions-oriented, transdisciplinary field and social movement focused on analyzing and addressing the impacts of human disruptions to Earth’s natural systems on human health and all life on Earth (Redvers 2021).
- 7.
This increasingly visible intersection between the health issue and the ecological challenge was recalled on October 11, 2021 by the WHO in its report published for COP 26 (“Acting for the climate in the name of health”) and accompanied by a call for 45 million health practitioners to sign a “climate prescription”.
- 8.
According to the EEA, exposure to fine particulate matter caused 379,000 premature deaths in EU-28, where 54,000 and 19,000 premature deaths were attributed to nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ground-level ozone (O3), respectively (EEA 2018).
- 9.
The Marmot Review (Marmot et al. 2020) showed that for the first time in more than 100 years life expectancy has failed to increase across the UK, and for the poorest 10% of women it has actually declined.
- 10.
Fenton L, Minton J, Ramsay J, M K-B, Fischbacher C, Wyper G, et al. (2019), “Recent Adverse Mortality Trends in SCOTLAND: Comparison with Other High-Income Countries.” BMJ Open.
- 11.
Lozano et al. (2020), “Measuring Universal Health Coverage Based on an Index of Effective Coverage of Health Services in 204 Countries and Territories, 1990–2019: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019”, The Lancet, Volume 396, Issue 10258, pp. 1250‒1284, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30750-9.
- 12.
The UHC effective coverage index aims to represent service coverage across population health needs and how much these services could contribute to improved health.
- 13.
Studies and data relating to climate change, the destruction of biodiversity, the degradation of ecosystems and the consumption of natural resources, which are increasingly precise and solid, are now largely consensual: the climate is destabilizing rapidly and dramatically (IPCC 2021), ecosystems and nature's contributions to human well-being have been significantly degraded, biodiversity has been enormously eroded (IPBES 2019) and the consumption of natural resources is at a record level (IRP 2017).
- 14.
One needs to distinguish between the aggregation and political-economy effects of income redistribution. Aggregation leaves the relationship between income and environmental degradation per dollar unchanged; assuming the marginal impact per dollar diminishes with rising impacts, progressive redistribution increases total impact. The political-economy effect arises from shifts in the relationship so that redistribution may lead to lower impacts per dollar across the whole income spectrum.
- 15.
British evolutionary biologist William Donald Hamilton even proved decades ago that individuals of certain species help members of their first circle to reproduce, which ensures an indirect form of gene transmission to the next generation (Hamilton 1964).
- 16.
Each participant was invited to submit to the organizers a strategy in the form of a computer program. Each program was pitted against the others over five games consisting of two hundred innings. This confrontation must determine the best possible strategy, the one that will allow you to pocket the maximum gains. Gains are distributed as follows: a program that chooses to cooperate while its counterpart decides to defect wins 0 points, while its counterpart wins 4; if the two programs opt for cooperation, they each gain 3 points; if both defect, they each earn 1 point.
- 17.
Game theory, invented by the American mathematician John von Neumann in the 1920s and refined in particular by John Nash in the 1950s, aims to determine, in situations of uncertainty or incomplete information, the best possible choice given that of others, studying “strategic interactions” between players of formal games, the most famous of which is the prisoner’s dilemma.
- 18.
More precisely, trust is an expectation of reliability in human behavior, which presupposes a relationship with another human being (a relationship that can be mediated by a collective norm possibly embodied in an institution, in which case trust is based on respect for this norm), in the context of an uncertain situation (which includes the possibility of seeing the trust granted betrayed, the person who takes this risk placing himself in a position of vulnerability), in a specific purpose and context (not everyone can be trusted, at any point and at any time), this expectation of reliability being the fruit of an individual will (granting one's trust is a personal choice, even if it is often influenced by a social context). Trust can take different forms (trust between people, trust in institutions), be built according to various methods (familiarity, habit, calculation, culture) and have varying degrees (one can have weak or strong trust, blindly or absolutely not trust).
- 19.
There are two possible ways to understand this expression, which is particularly astute. The first, which takes it literally, refers to a contagion of loneliness, which is an oxymoron: the spread of an epidemic precisely presupposes encounter, otherwise transmission is impossible. In reality, this transmission takes place through institutions, which gradually isolate individuals. The second way to understand this “epidemic of loneliness” consists in considering not its mode of transmission, but its consequences, which are considerable in health terms. The term “epidemic” is then justified, since loneliness can be likened to a form of pathology or pathological vector that degrades human health.
- 20.
Based on the observation of the progressive depopulation of bowling leagues in the United States (the practice of bowling dates back to the seventeenth century and experienced a veritable golden age in the post-war decades), Putnam postulates the gradual but continuous decline of the social capital in the country. This leads to a fall in democratic participation and ultimately to a degradation of the quality of public life.
- 21.
Today, on average in OECD countries, only 17% of employees are union members, compared to 30% 30 years ago; only a third of workers are now covered by collective agreements, whereas almost half were 30 years ago.
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Laurent, É. (2023). Predicament: Our Intertwined Crises. In: Toward Social-Ecological Well-Being. Palgrave Studies in Environmental Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38989-4_2
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