Thoughts About Environment

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to discuss what is meant by the external environment within our discipline. The essay includes an overview of attention to environment that began when human beings first inhabited the planet and has continued to contemporary times within the context of nursing conceptual models. The finally recognized need for attention to global environmental conditions that include climate and climate change is cited. The essay concludes with a call for decolonizing the disciplinary meanings of environment.

More Thoughts About Environment

“…The previous essay (Fawcett, 2022) focused on external environment. The focus of this essay is the internal environment.…”

“…The purpose of this essay is to present additional thoughts about environment, as a follow up to a previous essay about environment (Fawcett, 2022). The central thesis of these two essays is that nurses’ traditional concern with environment has, in recent years, expanded to include not only the immediate surroundings and significant others of persons, but also to the entire world, so that the emphasis now is on the global environment.…”

Just‐relations and responsibility for planetary health: The global nurse agenda for climate justice

“…In Robin's exemplar, he could look for upstream determinants of injustice in the political domain, and also look to mitigate risk factors for health occurring for these incarcerated migrants (Principles #23 and #32, Table 2). Nursing education must be interrogated for ways in which our institutions continue to propagate the colonial project (Fawcett, 2022;McGibbon et al, 2014) (Mathison, 2022;Timko Olson et al, 2020). This will be necessary to assure the Just Transition to a regenerative future.…”

“…Nurses writing during the time of Jessica's experiences had done little to describe strategies to advance climate justice (Lilienfeld et al, 2018), despite increasing calls for climate action in nursing (Anderko et al, 2016; Butterfield et al, 2021; Nicholas & Breakey, 2017; Thorne, 2021; Travers et al, 2019). Others have suggested that the lack of articulation of nursing actions in environmental and climate justice might be because the nursing metaparadigm of nursing‐health‐environment remains tethered to individualized, rather than more expansive conceptions of the environment (Fawcett, 2022; Kalogirou et al, 2020).…”

“…Entering the third decade of this new century, nurses are now expanding and decolonizing the nursing conception of the environment (Fawcett, 2022), considering ecoliteracy in nurse education (Morin et al, 2022; Orostegui Santander, 2020), and moving toward conceptualizations of Planetary Health in transdisciplinary partnerships with others (Fawcett, 2023; Guzmán et al, 2021; LeClair et al, 2022). Planetary Health practice analyzes and addresses “the impacts of human disruptions to Earth's natural systems on human health and all life on Earth” (Planetary Health Alliance, n.d.).…”