Planetary Health, Human Ecology, and Environmental Justice

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering planetary health, human ecology, climate attribution, environmental justice, foodways, ecocriticism, and political dimensions of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene.

Pratītyasamutpāda

A foundational Buddhist philosophical principle of dependent origination asserting that all phenomena, principles, and things arise strictly in dependence upon other things.

Planetary Health

A solutions-oriented, transdisciplinary field and social movement defined by the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission (2015) as the health of human civilization and the state of the natural systems on which it depends.

Anthropocene

The proposed geological epoch denoting the period during which human activities became the dominant force shaping Earth's climate, biophysical systems, and stratigraphy, succeeding the Holocene.

Golden Spike

A formal global boundary stratotype section and point (GSSP) marking a geological epoch transition; for the proposed Anthropocene, scientists selected Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, due to undisturbed sediment layers containing 1950s nuclear bomb radionuclides.

Planetary Boundaries

A scientific framework proposed in 2009 by Johan Rockström and colleagues identifying nine Earth system processes that define a safe operating space for humanity relative to the planet's biophysical life-support systems.

Planetary Health Pathways

A conceptual framework demonstrating how underlying socio-cultural and technological drivers produce environmental changes, which trigger proximate causes that, filtered through modifying factors, generate human health impacts.

Capitalocene

A critical framework articulated by Jason W. Moore that replaces the abstract concept of human species guilt with capitalism as a historical system of organizing nature, power, and production over centuries.

Ecomodernism

An optimistic perspective proposing that intensifying modern technological innovation, economic growth, and decoupling will allow human prosperity while sparing and protecting the natural environment.

Decoupling

The theoretical separation of economic growth from environmental resource consumption and ecological degradation, central to the ecomodernist argument.

Cheap Nature

Jason W. Moore's concept describing capitalism's imperative to reduce the cost and ethico-political status of labor, food, energy, and raw materials so their real ecological reproduction costs are excluded from accounts.

Externality

An uncompensated economic cost generated by a company's production processes—such as discharging toxic waste into a river—that is shifted onto society and ecosystems rather than recorded on the firm's balance sheet.

World-Ecology

A theoretical approach joining economic systems, social power, and ecological processes into a single analytical matrix, rejecting the Cartesian dualism between society and nature.

Climate Attribution Science

A scientific discipline evaluating and quantifying the exact degree to which anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions have altered the likelihood, intensity, or magnitude of climate trends and specific extreme weather events.

Trend Attribution

The branch of attribution science determining whether observed, multi-decadal long-term shifts in global or regional climate parameters are driven by human activities.

Event Attribution

The branch of attribution science determining how much anthropogenic climate change modified the probability or severity of a specific, bounded weather disaster.

Source Attribution

The practice of identifying and calculating the specific proportions of greenhouse-gas emissions and warming contributed by distinct corporations, entities, or industrial sectors.

Impact Attribution

Attribution research estimating the human, socioeconomic, and ecological damages—such as excess heatwave mortalities or wildfire acreage burned—caused directly by climate change.

Fraction of Attributable Risk (FAR)

A statistical metric calculated as $1 - \frac{P_0}{P_1}$, expressing the share of the total risk of an extreme climate event that can be directly attributed to anthropogenic warming.

Falsifiability

Karl Popper's philosophical criterion of demarcation stating that a scientific theory must forbid certain observable outcomes and remain capable in principle of being disproven by empirical evidence.

Capability Approach

An evaluative framework assessing human development and wellbeing in terms of individuals' real opportunities and substantive freedoms (capabilities) to achieve states of being and doing (functionings) they value.

Refugee

A legally defined category under the 1951 Refugee Convention designating a person unable or unwilling to return to their country of nationality owing to a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.

Asylum Seeker

An individual who has left their home country seeking international protection and formal recognition as a refugee under law, but whose claim has not yet been definitively adjudicated.

Climate Migration

The forced internal or cross-border movement of individuals or populations primarily driven by sudden weather disasters or slow-onset environmental changes like sea-level rise and desertification.

Solastalgia

A term coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht denoting the existential and emotional distress felt by people when their home environment undergoes unwelcome and destructive transformation while they remain living in it.

Ecocriticism

An interdisciplinary critical approach originating in the 1990s that investigates the representation and dynamic relationship between human culture, literature, and the physical environment.

First-Wave Ecocriticism

The initial phase of ecocriticism (1980s–1990s) focused on wilderness protection, 19th-century nature writing, and viewing pristine nature as separate from human civilization.

Second-Wave Ecocriticism

The ecocritical phase (late 1990s–2000s) expanding the definition of environment to include cities, toxic sites, and factories while examining environmental justice and social inequalities.

Third-Wave Ecocriticism

The ecocritical phase (2000s–2010s) emphasizing global, postcolonial, and eco-cosmopolitan perspectives that analyze transboundary crises, indigenous rights, and transnational capitalism.

Fourth-Wave Ecocriticism

The contemporary phase of ecocriticism emphasizing material agency, blurring boundaries between humans, non-humans, and inanimate matter, and confronting the Anthropocene through speculative media and science writing.

Hyperobjects

Objects and phenomena—such as global warming, radiation, or all manufactured plastic—so vast in temporal and spatial scale that human cognition cannot grasp them as bounded physical objects.

Foodmap (Food Mapping)

A visual, narrative, and ethnographic methodology developed by Lidia Marte that traces personal, gendered, and translocal boundaries of home, labor, and survival across space and time.

Metabolic Intimacy

The cellular, ecological, and bodily entanglement forged through eating, implicating human bodies in dynamic exchanges with microorganisms, soils, non-human species, and agricultural labor.

Art of Noticing

Anna Tsing's concept of developing deliberate attentiveness to hidden collaborative interactions, multispecies relations, and vernacular histories that survive in damaged landscapes.

Individual Healthism

A consumerist and moralizing paradigm that frames health and fermented foods as individual pursuits of bodily purity and wellness, ignoring cultural, labor, and ecological entanglements.

Human Ecology

The interdisciplinary study of dynamic, reciprocal interactions between human social systems and ecological systems across both natural and built settings.

Ecosystem People

A concept developed by Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha describing communities whose livelihoods and survival depend directly on gathering resources from their immediate local ecosystems.

Accumulation by Dispossession

David Harvey's concept detailing how contemporary capitalism expands by privatizing commons, seizing land, and enclosing communal assets to generate new avenues of profit.

Expulsions

Saskia Sassen's term for the systematic socioeconomic and legal mechanisms that eject populations, smallholder farmers, and entire habitats from normal social protections, rendering them surplus to global capital.

Ghost Acres

Externalized lands and territorial zones outside a country's visible borders used to supply resources or absorb toxic pollution and industrial debris on behalf of metropolitan economies.

Material and Symbolic Extraction

A critical framework formulated by the African Observatory for Environmental Humanities asserting that extraction encompasses not just raw resources, but also the appropriation of labor, land, data, and cultural narratives.

Pro-Environmental Behaviour

Actions undertaken by individuals or organized groups that deliberately seek to diminish negative environmental impacts or protect and regenerate ecosystems across private, public, and collective spheres.

Degrowth

An economic and political framework advocating the deliberate, equitable downscaling of production and consumption to reduce ecological burdens while prioritizing wellbeing, ecological health, and democratic cooperation over GDP growth.

Cognitive Dissonance

The psychological discomfort arising when an individual's daily consumption practices directly contradict their internalized environmental values, often managed through rationalization.

Psychological Distance

A cognitive barrier whereby people perceive environmental threats and climate impacts as geographically remote, temporally distant, or irrelevant to their immediate social circle.

Climate Anxiety (Eco-Anxiety)

Persistent and sometimes uncontrollable emotional distress, apprehension, and cognitive preoccupation regarding climate change, ecological degradation, and their future consequences.

WEIRD Bias

A systemic sampling bias in psychological research that over-represents Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic populations, producing tools that may pathologize collective or relational responses to environmental loss.

Emotion-Focused Coping

A psychological coping strategy that aims to alleviate the emotional distress caused by a stressor without directly confronting or changing the underlying external cause.

Meaning-Focused Coping

A coping approach drawing upon core values, collective purpose, and agency to sustain positive hope and long-term action in the face of ongoing existential crises.

Climate Vulnerability

The degree to which a system, community, or individual is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, the adverse impacts of climate hazards, determined by exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity.

Intersectional Vulnerability

The compounding of climate susceptibility produced when overlapping social structures of inequality—such as gender, caste, race, poverty, and disability—interact prior to any disaster event.

Distributive Justice

A dimension of climate justice concerned with the fair and equitable allocation of ecological benefits and environmental burdens across different populations.

Procedural Justice

The principle requiring fair, transparent, and meaningful inclusion of frontline communities and marginalized groups in environmental governance and planning decisions.

Recognition Justice

The dimension of environmental justice demanding respect for, and legitimization of, the distinct social identities, histories, and indigenous knowledge systems of marginalized communities.

Climate Gentrification

The process by which urban climate adaptation investments, green infrastructure, or high-elevation protections raise local property values, displacing vulnerable, lower-income residents.

Ecological Reflexivity

The capacity of political and social institutions to scrutinize their own commitments, listen to biophysical signals from the Earth system, and adapt their core structures to avoid ecological collapse.

Pathological Path Dependency

The institutional failure described by Dryzek and Pickering where governance systems maintain feedback loops that systematically suppress environmental signals, reproducing destructive practices.

Formative Agency

The capacity of discourse entrepreneurs, civil society, marginalized populations, and non-human entities to shape the practical meaning and implementation of sustainability and justice.

Living Frameworks

Adaptive governance institutions designed to remain flexible enough to incorporate public deliberation and changing ecological conditions while maintaining stable collective action.

Popular Anthropocene

A universalizing public discourse criticized for depicting environmental destruction as an innate trait of the human species, masking corporate, petrochemical, and imperial culpability.

Nature/Society Divide

A foundational ideological construct of capitalism that categorizes elite human civilization as separate from 'Nature,' thereby treating marginalized humans and ecosystems as exploitable objects.

Great Acceleration

The post-1945 period characterized by exponential surges in socioeconomic activity and global Earth system disruptions, frequently identified as the stratigraphic start of the Anthropocene.

Thermocene

A historical framing of the Anthropocene by Bonneuil and Fressoz focusing on the political economy of fossil fuels, steam engines, and the carbonification of the terrestrial atmosphere.

Thanatocene

The historical analysis within Anthropocene studies highlighting the dominant role of warfare, military technology, and geopolitical aggression in driving planetary destruction.

Phagocene

The historical perspective examining the systematic design and proliferation of consumer capitalism, mass commodification, and excess resource consumption.

Phronocene

The historical thread documenting continuous human environmental prudence, ecological knowledge, and early warnings against industrial and ecological devastation.

Agnotocene

The historical analysis of the institutionalized, deliberate manufacture of ignorance and climate denial by industries and states to marginalize environmental warnings.

Polemocene

The history of grassroots social struggles, peasant resistances, and direct environmental activism contesting industrial expansion and environmental degradation.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

The United Nations scientific body established in 1988 by WMO and UNEP that synthesizes and assesses existing global research on climate science, vulnerability, and mitigation.

IPCC Assessment Reports (ARs)

Comprehensive multi-volume evaluations of global climate knowledge published in cycles by the IPCC's three working groups, informing international climate treaties.

La Bandera

The iconic Dominican staple meal of rice, beans, and meat (or pasta substitutes), which functions in food studies as a gendered site of domestic labor, survival, and national identity.

Convivencia Diaria

The daily, routine cross-cultural interactions, mutual care, and food sharing among working-class migrant women across pan-ethnic lines in shared neighborhood and domestic spaces.

Microbiopolitics

Heather Paxson's concept examining how social, legal, and political disputes over governing microorganisms reflect deeper disagreements over how human societies should organize themselves.

Post-Pasteurianism

A philosophy and foodway practice that moves beyond sterile microbicidal eradication to cultivate deliberate, safe, and collaborative multispecies relationships with microorganisms.

Holobiont

An ecological host organism together with all of its persistent symbiotic microbial communities, demonstrating that multi-lineage cooperation, rather than autonomous individuality, constitutes life.

Gastrofeminism

A critical feminist framework that re-conceptualizes culinary practices and food work as sites of power negotiation, everyday resistance, and subversion of patriarchal and colonial structures.

Feminist Political Ecology

A subfield analyzing gender as an intersecting variable with class, caste, and race in controlling access to resources, shaping ecological change, and directing community sustainability.

Emerging Pollutants

Chemical, physical, or biological agents that have long persisted in the biosphere but are newly identified as serious public health and ecological hazards due to advances in analytical detection.

PFAS (Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances)

Synthetic fluorinated 'forever chemicals' possessing robust carbon-fluorine bonds that resist natural degradation and bioaccumulate in water systems and human tissues globally.

Toxic Geographies

Spatial landscapes where hazardous waste, industrial effluents, and pollutants concentrate, structurally produced by systemic disparities in poverty, political power, and state policy.

Sacrifice Zone

A geographic area designated as permanently expendable and contaminated to enable resource extraction or waste disposal for wealthier metropolitan populations.

Waste Colonialism

The systemic export of toxic hazardous waste, municipal refuse, and scrap electronics from high-income nations to developing countries lacking disposal infrastructure.

Slow Violence

Rob Nixon's concept of delayed, dispersed environmental destruction that occurs gradually and out of sight, lacking sensational news coverage while degrading vulnerable populations over time.