Conserving Global Health

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Conserving Global Health: Biodiversity Protection and the Prehistory of Planetary Health’ will explore the historical entanglements, collaborations and frictions between conservation theories and practices and international, global, and planetary health in the long twentieth century. In so doing, it will provide a prehistory of Planetary Health. 

Conservation is becoming a global health strategy. There is a growing scientific consensus that protecting species and landscapes acts as a prophylactic against the emergence of new pandemics or the acceleration of climate change through the loss of carbon sinks. But is this only a recent development? How did conservation gain prominence as a measure of protecting health? How were controversies over ecological crises addressed in the past and can they help navigate the future? And how has conservation shaped the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems on local and global scales? Focusing on southern, east, and central Africa in a global perspective, this project will provide the first major investigation of how species, landscape, and biodiversity conservation became global health strategies, and their consequences for humans, animals, plants, and microbes in the 1890s-2020s. To do so, it will uncover the connections among conservation and zoonotic disease emergence, climate change, and the health of Indigenous communities across three work packages:

WP1: History of Conservation and Human Health (Dr Jules Skotnes-Brown).

WP1 will examine how conservation became a strategy of zoonotic disease prevention, and how conservation shaped the formulation of a new medical reasoning: that “wild” areas were sites of innumerable undetected pathogens that should be left undisturbed by human activities for the sake of global biosecurity.

WP2: History of Conservation and Animal Health (Dr Perseverence Madhuku)

WP2 will investigate the history of domestic animal diseases and their connections with species conservation. WP2 will examine how the creation of protected areas in specific regions impacted the health of Indigenous communities and their animals. They will also explore how animal disease research conducted within these regions shaped conservation and health priorities in international health, conservation, and development organisations.

WP3: History of Conservation and Earth Systems’ Health (Dr Katherine Arnold)

WP3 will examine the history of conservation and climate change, focusing particularly on the scientific history of the idea of ecosystems, plants, and forests as “carbon sinks” that store carbon and cleanse the earth of anthropogenic activities. Through focusing on the scientific history of the concept of a “carbon sink”, as well as the environmental history of specific carbon sinks, WP3 will explore how landscape preservation became a prophylactic against climate change, and its social, political, and economic impacts from local to global scales.