More than 60 years ago, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, using the impacts of DDT to awaken the world to the fact that the lives of people, animals, and the planet are interdependent.

Her challenge of the assumption that humans and the natural world are separate inspired an environmental revolution.

In this essay, published in Harvard Public Health Magazine, Dr. Hope Ferdowsian uses the example of how Carson inspired a revolution around ecological health to highlight the need for a new revolution focused on centering prevention, justice, and the connections between humans, other animals, and our shared environment.

As the author notes:

Our approach to public health has historically been too anthropocentric and failed to pay attention to ethics and inter-species justice. For example, in pandemic prevention and response, we’ve paid much more attention to catching and monitoring emerging diseases in captive and wild animals that pose threats to humans, than to addressing the root causes of pandemics: habitat destruction, animal farming, and wild animal trade—all issues that would require us to re-think the way we treat animals.

Read the essay.