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We all depend on environmental biodiversity for clean air, safe water, adequate nutrition, effective drugs, and protection from infectious diseases. Today's healthcare experts and policymakers are keenly aware that biodiversity is one of the crucial determinants of health – not only for individuals but also for the human population of the planet. Unfortunately, rapid globalization and ongoing environmental degradation mean that biodiversity is rapidly deteriorating, threatening planetary health on a mass scale.
In Wounded Planet, Henk A.M.J. ten Have argues that the ethical debate about healthcare has become too narrow and individualized. We must, he writes, adopt a new bioethical discourse – one that deals with issues of justice, equality, vulnerability, human rights, and solidarity – in order to adequately reflect the serious threat that current loss of biodiversity poses to planetary health. Exploring modern environmental challenges in depth, ten Have persuasively demonstrates that environmental concerns can no longer be separated from healthcare challenges, and thus should be included in global bioethics.
Going beyond an individualized perspective, he poses audacious questions: What does it mean that patients are poor or uninsured and cannot afford suggested medicines? How can we deal with the air and water pollution that are producing a patient's illness? How do we respond to patients complaining about the safety and quality of drinking water in their neighborhood? Touching on infectious and noncommunicable diseases, as well as food, medicine, and water, Wounded Planet transcends the limited vision of mainstream bioethics to compassionately reveal how healthcare and medicine must take a broad perspective that includes the social and environmental conditions in which individuals live.
Preface
1. Global Bioethics and the Environment
2. Biodiversity
3. Health
4. Disease
5. Drugs
6. Food
7. Water
8. Global Bioethics in Practice
Notes
Index
Henk A.M.J. ten Have, MD, PhD, is a professor in the Center for Health Care Ethics at Duquesne University. He is the author of Global Bioethics: An Introduction and Vulnerability: Challenging Bioethics.
"An important and stimulating deep study on the interaction among environmental issues, health, biodiversity, and bioethics. ten Have offers an original and urgent view."
– Renzo Pegoraro, Pontificia Academia Pro Vita, coeditor of Hospital Based Bioethics
"A well-researched, erudite exposition of a trajectory of millennia of human existence within nature's self-renewing systems, through a few thousand years of living symbiotically with its bountiful offerings, to now-mindless destruction of our planet by our so-called 'sapient' species. Connecting bioethics and health to biodiversity is explicated as the most urgent and vital means to future health."
– Solomon Benatar, Emeritus Professor, University of Cape Town, coeditor of Global Health and Global Health Ethics
"Henk ten Have's focus on biodiversity goes hand in hand with a more encompassing approach to bioethics; environmental dimensions are crucial, along with social and political challenges which go beyond domestic concerns and the focus on individual rights involved in medical practice. Bioethics is 'global' because the future of humankind is at stake."
– Stefano Semplici, University of Rome, author of Costituzione Inclusiva: Una Sfida per la Democrazia
