First there is the problem of its abuse. Health is a term that is almost ubiquitous in our consumer culture—it’s promised on everything from cereal boxes to self-help books. We are delivered health from our gyms and hospitals. Healthcare, we are told, is on the minds of voters and politicians. And yet health seems to be strangely absent from all of these places. We have a healthcare system that is not systematic. The focus is usually on the disease or the individual rather than on the system as a whole. A healthcare system would require as many ecologists on staff as doctors, as many organic farmers as nurses.

I think the idea of health requires two essential elements: wholeness and flourishing. We might make an attempt at defining health by saying that it is the flourishing of the whole. 

Wholeness is the idea, essential to ecology, that all things are connected. What I do on my farm is connected not only to the animals I raise or the vegetables I grow, but also to the land, the water, the watershed, the ecosystem, and the atmosphere. If anything good can come out of all of the talk about global warming, I think it is the idea that what we do—at our homes, in our cars, and through our purchases—affects the entire world. As Wendell Berry once wrote, “The health of the oceans depends on the health of rivers; the health of rivers depends on the health of small streams; the health of small streams depends on the health of their watersheds. The health of the water is exactly the same as the health of the land; the health of small places is exactly the same as the health of large places. As we know, disease is hard to confine. Because natural law is in force everywhere, infections move.”

For that whole to flourish, each part must be able to grow to its potential within the whole. It is important that we don’t leave these two aspects apart. Growth without limits is not health. Humanity can flourish, at least for a time, and achieve potential far beyond the whole. But that growth is cancerous, it is at the expense of the larger organism. For health to be achieved, we must have growth within balance.

People and pigs can grow in size far beyond their limits, but after a certain point that growth is unhealthy. It’s just fat, and it overwhelms the system. Our societies are no different. Suburbs are the rolls of fat of our world, our clogged interstates are our clogged arteries. It is time to draw back and draw down—to return to our limits. We need health, which anyone will tell you begins with diet and exercise. So cut the fat, the excess, the imbalance—shed a little weight from the world.