Biodiversity loss and the ecology of infectious disease

As a new discipline, the field of planetary health could follow one of two obvious pathways. In the first, practitioners of planetary health would develop a catalogue of the myriad ways in which human health is affected by anthropogenic changes to the environment. Although such an exercise might be valuable, it would not be novel, and the information by itself might not lead to solutions to the critical problems being documented. In the second pathway, planetary health practitioners would use the many adverse health consequences of anthropogenic environmental change as grounds to advocate for better environmental protections.