Grassroots Activism and Planetary Health: Redefining "Life Support"

In late 2015, two seemingly very different statements were published: a landmark Lancet report on planetary health, and an obscure legal grievance filed on behalf of sugarcane plantation workers in Nicaragua suffering from an epidemic of chronic kidney disease (CKD) that they believed was linked to environmental damage caused by sugarcane production. This talk begins by comparing how these two documents frame questions of human-environment relations, economic growth, and grassroots action. It then develops a key concept from the Lancet report, “life support,” as an analytic for thinking specifically about CKD-related activism in Nicaragua’s sugarcane zone and for theorizing generally about grassroots action in planetary health. Empirically, the talk discusses how residents of the sugarcane zone navigated six “life support systems”: a transnational grievance mechanism operated by the World Bank; corporate occupational health programs; water and irrigation systems; agrochemical regimes; state social security; and dialysis treatment.

About Alexander Nading

Dr. Alex Nading is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. He is a medical and environmental anthropologist, and editor of Medical Anthropology Quarterly. He is the author of The Kidney and the Cane: Planetary Health and Plantation Labor in Nicaragua (Duke University Press 2025), and Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement (University of California Press 2014).

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