Sharon Friel
Sharon Friel is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor of Health Equity in the School of Regulation and Global Governance. She is Director of the Planetary Health Equity Hothouse and Australian Research Centre for Health Equity at The Australian National University, and co-director of the NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in Shaping Markets for Health Equity. Between 2005 and 2008, Sharon was the Head of the Scientific Secretariat, University College London, for the WHO Global Commission on Social Determinants of Health. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8345-5435
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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