Listen now (35 mins) | Listen Now Last year Island Press published Planetary Health, Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves, considered the first textbook for the field of planetary health. As the title suggests, the work provides an overview of our planet's health under the Anthropocene era. As the work notes, per work by the Global Footprint Network we have been increasingly living beyond our environmental means, or beyond the earth's carrying capacity, since 1970. Of nine planetary boundaries, including climate change and ocean acidification, we have crossed two and two more are considered to be in a zone of uncertainty. This is due to the fact no country today meets the needs of its population at a globally sustainable level of resource use - and this is due in turn to a global economic system that assumes natural resources are inexhaustible, or that no amount of resource use would reduce the quantity or quality for future generations. As the coeditors write in afterword concerning COVID-19 the pandemic, the current state of planetary health “reflects a rupture of the human relationship with the natural world," i.e., as Charles Yu as stated, we live under the fiction or shared illusion "that we are separate from nature."