"One Nature": A New Vocabulary and Frame for Governance Innovation in Post-COVID-19 Planetary Health.

ABSTRACT

Health futures are not preordained, nor are they entirely predictable by extrapolation from the past. This is particularly relevant in an era of unprecedented uncertainties converging from the COVID-19 pandemic, multiple zoonotic outbreaks for the past two decades, and the climate crisis currently unfolding. Moreover, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services cautioned in 2019 that around one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. Human existence and medical innovations are closely intertwined with preservation and sustainability of biodiversity. COVID-19 is a "dry run" for future ecological crises in the 21st century. We need new frames and ways of conceptualizing planetary health, biodiversity futures, and their principled governance post-COVID-19. In this article, I propose "One Nature" as a critically informed planetary health governance frame, and outline its key conceptual pillars. One Nature aims to transcend the socially constructed binaries between humans versus nature, humans versus nonhuman animals or inanimate objects in nature, among other false binaries, and thus, envisions nature as an overlapping, interdependent, and co-constitutive continuum among life forms and ecosystems. One Nature also recognizes animal sentience and agency of nonhuman animals. In doing so, the One Nature governance frame places a firm emphasis on the internal levers of social change and the human values essential to cultivate collective action to curb unchecked extraction of nature that placed human societies in harm's way for future health crises. One Nature is a governance frame and reflexive value system that can be transformative to correct the astigmatism we have long suffered, from the ways in which we have conceived, enacted on, and extracted the natural systems over the centuries. All in all, One Nature supports planetary health and biodiversity through a new vocabulary and post-anthropocentric critical governance lens, and shall help formulate progressive policies to prevent zoonotic outbreaks and future ecological crises.