Babet de Groot
Babet de Groot is a lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the University of Wollongong, where she teaches Australian politics, environmental politics, political power and human rights. Her research examines global environmental governance, with a particular focus on the global plastics crisis and the institutions, norms and power relations that shape international responses. She is a Steering Committee member of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty and has contributed to global plastics governance through youth and policy advisory roles, including as an Independent Youth Advisor to the Australian Delegation and as a founding member of the Youth Plastics Action Network.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6185-8719
Saving the World »
Overcoming the Consumptogenic System and Improving Planetary Health Equity
Publication date: 2027
It can be very easy to succumb to despair. The world today presents us with an almost overwhelming catalogue of suffering. Planetary systems are pushed beyond safe limits, preventable diseases and decline in wellbeing are widespread, and wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few while billions of people scrape by.
And yet despair, however understandable, is not the only story. This book begins from the premise that the harmful consumptogenic system producing these outcomes is not fixed nor universal. It can change. Both history and the present are full of moments when collective imagination conjures a different future, where entrenched power is challenged, and where organised human effort bends the arc of events toward justice. The question is not whether change is possible, but how to make it happen.
This unique collection of writing reaches beyond the usual boundaries — drawing on public health, environmental and social science, non‑Western and Indigenous knowledge systems, and the insight of practitioners working inside governments and communities worldwide.
Scientific, creative, poignant and compelling, the chapters offer new ways of valuing, knowing, being and imagining — ways that point toward planetary health equity: a world where everyone, everywhere, can enjoy good health in a stable Earth system.
From governments daring to lead to economies, businesses and financial systems being reimagined and civil society acting with courage and clarity — this book is proof that a better way of being in the world isn’t just possible, it is underway.
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