Work and Nature: Collective Health Challenges Towards the Sustainable Development Goals After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Work is a central concept to understand social metabolism. Human work is the process that getting the social metabolism that creates those goods necessary for to life. The industrial revolution laid the foundation for an insurmountable contradiction between capitalism and environmental sustainability. The advance of market power over the use of natural resources to sustain globalized lifestyles is responsible for various manifestations of the ecological crisis. As in the rest of the world, in Latin America this type of economic growth has a negative impact on ecosystems in general and on biodiversity in particular. A productive structure that is extractive and intensive of natural resources that not only show its unsustainability, but also its incapability to produce development and well-being. The current COVID-19 pandemic highlights the economic system's vulnerabilities on an unsuspected scale. The SDG issued in 2015, acknowledges the ecological crisis and recognition the impossibility of finding global governance mechanisms with regulatory capacity. The COVID-19 pandemic called into question the economic paradigm perspective on which some of the SDG are based: economic growth and globalization. It is the field of health where the impact of COVID-19 pushes SDG further away. The public health response is limited in the face of the impacts of an epidemic that strikes at the SDG's multiple dimensions. The crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is profound. The SDG are not exempt from that perspective, if they manage to prove themselves as guiding principles for global governance. We argue that the opportunity to find structural solutions with long-term horizons will rise from radical changes in the ways we produce, distribute and consume. Collective health could contribute to the redefinition of the SDG if it faces the challenge of a public health that takes up ecosocial approaches by redefining the social uses of work and nature. The first condition to initiate those structural changes is a progressive de-commodification of life. The second fundamental condition for sustainable welfare is the democratization of social life. Finally, collective health can contribute to redefine the SDG if faces the challenge of a public health that takes up eco-social approaches.