Extractive and exploitive human activities are having severe, adverse effects on planet Earth, which, in turn, affect our health, physical and mental. The terms used to describe this include climate change, climate crisis, planetary boundaries, and Earth system boundaries. None adequately integrates our mental health with how we treat the planet.
Planetary dysregulation
The Centric Lab, a neuroscience lab focused on health justice based in London, is exploring the phrase “planetary dysregulation, defined as “the impaired ability of planetary systems to maintain and the processes required for self-regulation, particularly due to unsustainable exploitation of ecosystems and chronic exposure to industrial contamination.” The importance is focusing on root causes, to explain not only what is happening, but also why it is happening.
The manifold effects on humanity emerge. Overexploiting ecosystems reduces green space around us, including its ability to filter pollution and absorb runoff. The physical effects of pollution and of flooded infrastructure lead to stress, distress, anxiety, and feelings of depression. Intertwined mental health and physical health continue to decline.
The lack of green space can disincentivise physical exercise. Adequate nutrition and clean drinking water are influenced by ravaged nature. And without adequate physical exercise alongside sufficient food and water, mental health and physical health experience interconnected difficulties. Planetary dysregulation connects all these issues and more.
Conversely, framings that focus on the changing climate cover only that one symptom: human-induced climate change. Concepts involving boundaries tend to be mechanistic, distilling complex processes to specific numbers imbued with debunked assumptions regarding how nature works with respect to “thresholds” and “tipping points.” They do not reflect how our mental health responds to changing environments, notably through cumulative loads and chronic exposure.
Planetary dysregulation explicitly expresses the interaction among human and environmental processes, embracing all forms of human health and environmental health. They interlace and always have.
Improving from planetary dysregulation
Moving forward constructively means adequately framing planetary dysregulation and responses to it. This framing serves as a tangible pathway for solutions by centring our exploitation and extraction of our environments as the cause of dysregulation, and thus by allowing us to organize ourselves to improve. The definition implies healthy self-regulation, requiring multiple processes to support one another. These processes include human actions that change the environment, but for mutual gain rather than being parasitic and contaminating.
Nothing within overcoming planetary dysregulation requires dismantling our homes, letting nature kill us in cold or heat, or wrecking the social services we seek as basic rights, such as formal education, health care, clean drinking water, and nutritious food. Instead, planetary regulation accepts changes—including human modification of the environment—for health and safety, in ways that support self-regulation in local-to-global environments. It draws on the wealth and breadth of human wisdom and experience, including Indigenous, traditional, local, vernacular, and modern science and technology.
Static and stable environments are neither expected nor sought—nor are they even feasible. The environment and humanity together thrive on being ever-shifting, provided it is a positive change. “Climate chaos” and “human chaos” are the norm, as long as they are self-regulating and keep people, society, and the environment healthy. No inevitability exists of rigid boundaries or of specific limits that must never be crossed.
Staying physically and mentally healthy requires self-regulation through one’s own individual and collective actions. When it is not possible, outside support should be available to guide us to a state in which self-regulation is possible, without too much harm having occurred.
Doom-and-gloom framings are not support systems. Vocabulary such as climate crisis, climate emergency, and climate breakdown projects despair and hopelessness; these terms do not galvanise us into action through urgency. They add to our mental health woes and, thus, to planetary dysregulation.
Environment Essential Reads
At the moment, exploitive and extractive human activities are pushing planet Earth along multiple destructive pathways. This harms us physically and mentally. Appropriate framing of why this is happening, in addition to what is happening, through planetary dysregulation, is a starting point for guiding the Earth back into a state of self-regulation, also supporting our physical and mental health.
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