My name is Eliana Castro-Navarro. I am a Health Promotion professional, graduated from the University of Costa Rica, and currently a Planetary Health Trainee at EcoCitizen.
On this World Health Day, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on a deeper truth that often goes unnoticed: there is no health without a healthy planet. Every year, this day invites us to reflect on what it means to be healthy. We speak of progress, we name challenges, we renew our commitment to improving lives.
And yet, beneath these conversations, there is a question that lingers quietly, one we rarely allow ourselves to fully face: can we truly speak of “health” in a world where the systems that sustain life are under unprecedented strain? In a rapidly changing world, rethinking wellbeing is no longer optional, it is essential.
For a long time, I understood health the way many of us were taught to. As an individual condition, something that could be shaped through discipline, informed choices, and access to care: “…eat well, move your body, rest, manage stress, seek help when needed…”
All this still matters. And yet, somewhere along the way, I began to sense that something essential was missing.
Health does not begin with individual behavior, nor does it end in clinical settings. It is shaped, deeply and continuously, by the environments we inhabit, the systems we depend on, and the ecological boundaries we are part of whether we acknowledge them…or not.
The illusion of individual health
We live in a moment where wellness has become a personal project. We are told, in subtle and explicit ways, that health is something we can optimize. That with enough knowledge, effort, and intention, we can take control of it.
And yet, this narrative leaves something unresolved.
What does it really mean to eat “healthy” in a food system driven by industrial agriculture, where nutritional “abundance” coexists with ecological degradation? What does it mean to exercise in cities where the air we breathe compromises our lungs? What does it mean to “manage stress” in a world shaped by uncertainty, war, inequality, and a growing sense of ecological fragility?
These are not just rhetorical questions. They point to a deeper tension.
We have learned to treat health as a matter of lifestyle, while quietly ignoring the conditions that make healthy lives possible.
And in doing so, we place a weight on individuals that they were never meant to carry alone.
There is no better way to build community and health that through food! This image shows a traditional Costa Rican breakfast: gallo pinto with ripe plantains, scrambled eggs, aged cheese, chorizo, white bread “baguette”, sour cream “natilla”, and bizcocho. Part of the meal was cooked over a wood fire “fogón”, and the plantains and bizcocho are wrapped in banana leaves, a traditional way to carry and preserve food.
Health as a systemic outcome
My understanding of health began to shift when I stopped seeing it as something to be achieved and began to understand it as a social product: the result of the conditions in which we live, the systems that surround us, and the collective decisions that shape our realities.
Health is not produced in isolation. It emerges from the interplay of systems that surround us and sustain us. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the places we live, the policies that shape our realities, the ecosystems that quietly support life in ways we often take for granted.
Healthcare systems matter; they are essential. But they meet us at the point where many of the conditions affecting our health have already been set in motion, sometimes years or even generations before.
Health is not maintained in hospitals; it is cultivated in soils, cities, policies, cultures….in the everyday spaces where life unfolds.
Seeing health this way changes something fundamental. It expands responsibility, but it also opens possibility.
A planetary perspective
It is within this place that the idea of planetary health begins to resonate more deeply with me.
At its core, it is a simple recognition. Human health cannot be separated from the health of Mother Earth.
The stability of our climate, the integrity of ecosystems, the richness of biodiversity are not distant environmental concerns. They are the very foundation upon which our wellbeing rests.
When these systems begin to unravel, we feel it. Not always immediately, not always in ways that are easy to trace, but inevitably. In the patterns of disease that begin to shift. In the insecurity of the food we depend on. In the growing exposure to environmental risks that we can no longer ignore.
There is a quiet but undeniable truth here.
We cannot promote health in environments that systematically undermine it.
Fresh fruit, just picked from the tree! These images, from left to right, show yuplones (Spondias dulcis), cacao (Theobroma cacao), and mamón chino or rambután (Nephelium lappaceum), a taste of Costa Rica’s land and traditions, where food is shared straight from nature.
Rethinking health, reimagining responsibility
World Health Day, for me, is no longer only a moment to celebrate progress. It is an invitation to rethink what we mean when we speak of health.
Health is not simply about optimizing the self. It is about learning how to live within the systems that sustain us, and how to care for them in return.
To promote health today is to engage with the broader conditions that make life possible. it is to recognize that wellbeing is not something we can isolate from the world around us.
There is no health without Mother Earth.
And perhaps, the most meaningful step forward is not just to improve health within the definitions we have inherited, but to gently, and courageously, redefine it.
To see health not as a fixed state, but as a relationship. One that is interconnected, interdependent, and profoundly fragile. One that calls for care, not only for ourselves, but for the systems that hold us all.
Author
ENGLISH 
DEUTSCH 
FRANCAIS 
ESPANOL 
ITALIANO 
PORTUGUESE