Advisory Committee
Pastor Alika Galloway
Justice, Community activist
Northside Healing Space and Liberty Community Church, North Minneapolis
Makeda Zulu-Gillespie
Justice, UMN Executive Director of University of Minnesota Robert J. Jones Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center (UROC)
Dr. Brooke Cunningham
Minnesota Health Department, Commissioner
Brenna Doheny
Health Professions for a Healthy Climate, U of M Medical School Duluth
Laurie Fink
Community Science, Science Museum of Minnesota
Marie Studer
Planetary Health Alliance, John Hopkins University,
Program Director of the Planetary Health Alliance
Cathy Jordan
Environmental Education, UMN, Associate Director for Leadership and Education at the Institute on the
Environment
Paul West
Community climate organization, Senior Scientist Ecosystems and Agriculture, Project Drawdown
Shanda Demorest
Community climate organization, Associate Director, Climate Engagement and Education at Health Care Without Harm
Heidi Roop
Extension and national climate scientists, UMN Extension climatologist and Director of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership (MCAP)
Katie Huffling
Global nurses Executive Director, Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments (ANHE)
Kristen Raab
Department of Health, HIA and Climate Change Project Director at Minnesota Department of Health
Center for Planetary Health and Environmental Justice
Health
Health is embracing the interconnection within nature and living in ways that permit all life to
flourish now and for future generations.
Mission
The Center for Planetary Health at the School of Nursing will educate future planetary health
leaders, promote planetary health practice, advance innovative research that includes both
mitigation and adaptation, design and teach sustainable and equitable health care practices,
and provide the thought leadership and transdisciplinary partnerships to restore planetary
health.
Additional benefit of the center
Maximize research funding to advance research and best practices related to climate
adaptation, decarbonization, and environmental justice.
- Core values
- Interconnection within nature
- Humility and commitment to restoring the Earth’s natural systems damaged by human
behaviors - Transdisciplinarity
- Systems thinking and complexity
- Diversity, equity, inclusivity, and justice
- Decisions based on the well-being of future generations
- Partnership
- Solidarity
- Solution and action oriented
Where are we now?
- We have broken the strands of the web or life, the ecosystem that sustains all life on
this planet. Our current path leads to extinction of the human species and many other
forms of life.
The causes of this break are many, but among them are hierarchies of domination that
have led to ranking:- Thinking over sensing
- Humans over other life forms
- External over internal
- Present over future
- Academic “brick and mortar” learning over learning in nature
- Human ranking including male over female, white over BIPOC, adults over
children, youth over elders, rich over poor, etc.
- We have plenty of science defining the problems and impacts but very little emphasis on
solutions.
We need to pivot. We need a new narrative. We need to break through (evolve) before we
break down (become extinct).
What do we need to pivot?
- Shared commitment to reweaving the web of life
- Involvement of everyone and every community
- Education about partnership to unlearn domination.
- Decolonize our minds and Indigenize our thinking, teaching, and research
- Invest in the science of transdisciplinary solutions
- Promote engaged storytelling to the public
- Build non-hierarchical networks of community and academic members to help people
survive what’s coming even as we mend the web