Sustainable Communities for a Healthy Planet: Relational approaches to cultivating planetary health in a post-growth future

Presented by the Collaborative Centre for Climate Health & Sustainable Care…

Collaborative Centre for Climate Health & Sustainable Care Critical Conversations Series:

Sustainable Communities for a Healthy Planet: Relational approaches to cultivating planetary health in a post-growth future

This conversation will consider how relational approaches to cultivating planetary health can help health systems adapt in the difficult transition to a post-growth future. Relational approaches tend to be found on the margins of health systems and do not necessarily align with the mindsets or goals of mainstream health and sustainability discourses. Instead, they may disrupt dominant ideas and practices related to mental health, chronic illness, and professionalized care, embodying more inclusive ways of strengthening wellbeing within communities and ecosystems. In prioritizing relationships, promising initiatives focus not only on the health of individual humans, but on the health of internal and external ecologies, human and nonhuman communities, and the planet as a whole. Drawing on examples such as care farming, community care for mental illness, and gardening for planetary health, this discussion will demonstrate how relational approaches can address the core challenges facing health in the Anthropocene.

Speaker Bio

Katharine Zywert is author of Sustainable Communities for a Healthy Planet (2024) and lead editor of Health in the Anthropocene: Living Well on a Finite Planet (2020). She has a PhD in Social and Ecological Sustainability from the University of Waterloo, where her work focused on community-based approaches to planetary health and the transition to a sustainable health system, with an emphasis on gardening for health and wellbeing. She also holds a Graduate Diploma in Social Innovation (University of Waterloo) and a Master’s degree in Medical Anthropology (University of Oxford).  Zywert lives in Waterloo, Ontario, where she grows a home garden designed to cultivate planetary health