The ninth Global One Health conference has just finished in Lisbon, a gathering of biological scientists and ecologists, medical practitioners and researchers, staff of UN agencies and non-government organisations (you might call them the Champions of Life), and a few politicians like me. I was there, with the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, to speak about political and parliamentary efforts to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – just one way in which humans are unbalancing, and making far more dangerous, this battered planet.
More than a thousand people from around the world – expert, smart people – gathered to discuss how they are working to turn around the collapse of global biodiversity and the unhealthy environments in which animals and people are suffering unnecessarily. But they work with crumbs of government and private funding, and even those scraps are disappearing with US, UK and other aid cuts, and Global South countries laden down with debt. (Many participants joined me in lamenting the closure of the UK’s Fleming Fund, which was doing great AMR work, particularly in the Global South.)
Where the money goes
Meanwhile, billions and billions are poured into the undeliverable, inflated claims of artificial so-called intelligence – technology that relies on environmental destruction, with giant datacentres consuming our energy, water and mineral resources. The broligarchs (tech oligarchs) pursue the fantasy that we can engineer our way out of planetary crisis, or else, having trashed this planet, jump onto 1950s-style sci-fi rocket ships and start again in another part of the solar system. This reactionary futurism threatens ecology, democracy, and the health of us all. These are fictions built on a desire for dominance from a handful of men closely allied with the Trump regime.
Solutionism – seeking simple tech solutions to ‘wicked’ problems
Medical research funding, meanwhile, is focused on ‘solutionism’ – seeking to find a pill or an injection, a form of genetic manipulation or a medical device to treat, or perhaps cure (though that generates far less profit than continual treatment), people being made ill. Not exactly deliberately, but as a direct consequence of the actions of mass profit-scooping Big Food (dominated at each stage by a handful of giant companies), polluting Big Oil and Big Plastic, and the poverty-spreading impact of a few cornering the majority of the fruits of the globalised economy, leaving a dwindling share of crumbs for the rest.
So the UK government’s Life Sciences Sector Plan talks of “using genomics, early detection, and personalised medicine to keep people healthier for longer”, and ministers talk excitedly about research in universities producing “spin out” companies that might become “unicorns” with new drugs or diagnostics. Of course, some of that has a place, but how often do you hear ministers talking about taking a “One Health” approach, expressing an understanding of the social determinants of health, or talking about ecological repair and restoration as a public health measure?
The crucial research we’re not funding
I spoke to researchers from Bangor University, who are part of a global consortium examining how quality restoration of ecosystems can improve public health. While I hope to visit them to see the results on the ground, how often have you heard Westminster politicians applauding such work? In the UK, and in most parts of the world, where does the balance of governments’ research funding lie?
Overwhelmingly, it’s with solutionism.
That such an approach allows the damage – to people and planet – to continue at unsustainable, unbearable, hugely destructive levels, is not acknowledged. That it must ultimately fail is obvious. There is no continuation of human (or more-than-human) life as we know on a wildly overheated, poisoned, trashed planet.
Degrees of understanding
Even at the One Health conference, there were varying levels of grasping the reality of the state of public health on this abused planet. Some assume that we can “green” and “healthify” the current economic system. (I groaned when I read the CGIAR briefing about assumed massive increases in meat consumption in the Global South by 2050, built on the idea that those nations will inevitably follow the North with the disastrous Big Food approach that has caused such health and environmental damage.)
Some, like the researchers talking about the awful disease podoconiosis (often massive swelling caused by exposure of bare feet to irritant, alkaline clay soils), want to highlight how simple, low-cost measures – such as ensuring access to shoes and public education – understandably focus on the detail of their issue. They point to how a small injection of funds can indeed provide a solution to a huge systemic issue.
Working with communities, not around them
But most issues – AMR and zoonoses (diseases transmitted from animals to humans, like flu and Covid) being the ones that have received the most attention – do not have such simple solutions. Some of the most inspiring presentations at the conference were those where researchers worked with local communities to find ways of tackling their “wicked” complex issues, co-producing a sustainable, healthy way forward, specific to the place and its community culture.
Researchers pointed out that efforts to tackle rabies, still out of control in too many parts of the world, could be boosted by listening to the knowledge and understanding of children, its most frequent victims. Others highlight how simply saying “ban bushmeat”, when it is a crucial part of the diet in parts of Africa, will not work, but instead that health efforts need to work with market vendors to address the zoonotic risks bushmeat poses. Another project draws on the local knowledge of pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa to gain insight into the prevention of tick-borne diseases.
Learning from each other
Healthy, sustainable ways forward have to be co-created with communities. And it is often those communities working with limited resources, little access to technology, and using local materials that show greatest progress.
This raises another approach that we almost never hear the UK government talking about. Rather than ‘white saviours’ popping up in the Global South to ‘deliver’ solutions, we need to recognise that our own societies – struggling with the impacts of austerity and inequality, with collapsing infrastructure and increasingly poor health – have a lot to learn from such successful projects. We should arrive to listen and learn – perhaps, as one report at the conference showed, from the genuinely successful delivery of One Health education in Ethiopian schools.
Speaking up, speaking out
One Health practitioners are not inclined towards conflict. The nature of their thinking, their cooperative approaches, is to try to explain, patiently and calmly, that we have to change path, that we are part of nature and need to work it. But as I said in a plenary session, we need to speak out about what is wrong with solutionism. We have to shout about the exceeding of seven of the nine planetary boundaries; explain that – as we learnt during Covid but seem to have forgotten – no one is safe until everyone is safe.
It is not enough to provide the practical, complex, iterative, approaches to the wicked problems our planet faces. We need to challenge those who would, through financial and political dominance, cause further unbearable damage – damage that the poorest and most vulnerable will suffer the most, but that none of us can escape.
More from Natalie Bennett
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