IN A NUTSHELL
Author's Note
The recent U.S. military invasion of Venezuela is not an isolated episode, but a stark expression of a broader global dynamic in which geopolitical power, fossil fuels, militarism, and speculative finance converge. As with Ukraine and the Middle East, the language of “security” masks interventions that protect strategic resources and economic interests while eroding international law, peace, and human dignity. Beyond immediate destruction, these dynamics carry a deeper and less visible cost: the progressive erosion of healthy life expectancy for present and future generations
By Juan Garay
Co-Chair of the Sustainable Health Equity Movement (SHEM)
Professor/Researcher of Health Equity, Ethics and Metrics (Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil)
Founder of Valyter Ecovillage (valyter.es)
By the same Author on PEAH: see HERE
Health, Hope, and Resistance in an Age of War, Inequity, and Ecological Breakdown
Climate change, driven largely by fossil fuel dependency and reinforced by militarised economies, is not only an environmental crisis but a massive health crisis. Analyses published in PEAH (war with no guns 2018) estimate that the cumulative impact of climate change could result in over 200 million excess deaths during the 21st century, with mortality accelerating in the second half of the century due to heat stress, food insecurity, infectious diseases, displacement, and ecosystem collapse. Crucially, this excess mortality will disproportionately affect populations living in low-emission countries, which have contributed least to global warming yet bear its most severe health consequences. Wars over oil and geopolitical dominance directly intensify this injustice by increasing emissions, destroying ecosystems, and diverting resources away from adaptation and public health.
At the same time, a parallel and equally lethal process is unfolding. The progressive hoarding of income and assets by a shrinking fraction of the world’s population is driving extreme economic inequity. Today, around half of humanity lives below a dignity threshold, effectively dispossessed of their right to health, adequate nutrition, housing, and social protection. This structural injustice results in more than 16 million excess deaths every year, not from unavoidable causes, but from poverty, exclusion, and preventable conditions, as documented in PEAH (WISE paradigm 2023). If current trends continue, this share could rise to two-thirds of the global population over the course of the century, further shortening lives and deepening despair.
For younger generations, these realities are profoundly corrosive. They face a future shaped by climate instability, permanent conflict, precarious livelihoods, and political systems increasingly captured by financial interests. Trust in institutions erodes not out of apathy, but from the perception — often justified — that democratic processes are distorted by media manipulation, speculative capital, and geopolitical coercion. Hope itself becomes a casualty when people feel stripped of both agency and voice.
It is in this context that the Sustainable Health Equity Movement (SHEM) situates its work — not as a grand solution or centralized authority, but in deliberately humble terms. SHEM seeks to gather concerned citizens, activists, scientists, and health and social workers who are willing to analyse these harmful dynamics honestly and to act upon them. The movement recognises that many of today’s dominant economic and political structures are not merely inefficient, but actively destructive to health, equity, peace, and the living world.
SHEM therefore calls for conscious disobedience to these “evil dynamics” — not through violence, but through ethical refusal and constructive alternatives. This includes resisting over-consumption, rejecting complicity in extractive production and trade, and withdrawing — as far as possible — from speculative financial systems that profit from instability, war, and inequality. Central to this vision is the gradual emergence of networks of local, sovereign communities, grounded in low-consumption lifestyles, shared knowledge, economic justice, and harmony with nature.
A key enabling tool for this transition is the development and use of open-source software and digital commons. Open software allows global collaborative networks to emerge outside corporate control, supporting shared knowledge, transparent metrics, participatory governance, and the co-creation of global public goods in health, education, ecology, and social organisation. When aligned with ethical values, such tools can counteract the manipulative effects of proprietary platforms on media, politics, and consumption, while strengthening horizontal cooperation across cultures and regions.
Such communities are not escapist enclaves. They are living laboratories of resilience, restoring food sovereignty, mutual care, participatory decision-making, and ecological regeneration. They also offer young people something increasingly rare: a tangible sense that their actions matter, that health and dignity can be defended collectively, and that another way of living is possible.
These ideas will be articulated and debated at the upcoming SHEM Assembly, where participants will present a strategy rooted in health equity, grassroots autonomy, open knowledge, and global solidarity without domination. The aim is not to replace existing institutions overnight, but to rebuild hope and health from the ground up, patiently and courageously, as the foundations of a more just and livable future.
In an age where war, inequity, and ecological collapse are treated as normal, choosing care, restraint, and community is no longer optional. It is an ethical imperative — and perhaps the most realistic path left to preserve life, health, and meaning in the century ahead.
