The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a page on its website titled “One Health Basics.” There it defines “One Health” as “a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach—working at the local, regional, national, and global levels—with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing”—and here’s the crux—“the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.”

On that page the CDC writes about the risk of disease transfer from animals to people, which it offers as one justification for its embrace of the “One Health Plan of Action,” which is being pursued by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Environment Program, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and the World Organization for Animal Health. Here’s one step in its argument:

“Human populations are growing and expanding into new geographic areas. As a result, more people live in close contact with wild and domestic animals, both livestock and pets.”

Now, it’s true that human population is growing. However, for the most part people are doing the opposite of “expanding into new geographic areas.” Instead, they are urbanizing.

Through most of human history until the Industrial Revolution, well over 90 percent of people lived in rural farm settings, where they were in constant contact with livestock and frequent contact with wild animals, which they often hunted. From the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1700s onward, though, as mechanization enabled fewer and fewer people to grow all the food necessary for the entire population, people have increasingly moved from rural to urban settings.

Click the play button on the graph at https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization and you’ll see the amazing shift,

• from 2:1 (66.7% to 33.3%) rural over urban in 1960,
• to 2.7:1.7 (61.4% to 38.6%) rural over urban in 1980,
• to 3.3:2.9 (53.2% to 46.8%) rural over urban in 2000,
• to—note the reversal—4.4:3.4 (56.4% to 43.7%) urban over rural in 2020.

Today, 57% of the world’s people live in urban settings, and only 43.3% in rural settings.

Urbanization takes people away from settings where they’re most likely to encounter wild or domesticated animals other than household pets and, less frequently, zoo animals. Those two categories of animals are the least likely to carry diseases that could transfer to humans. Yet the CDC, under its “One Health” commitment, thinks the simple growth in total population puts more people at risk of zoonotic diseases (diseases passed from animals to people).

Whether or not people are increasingly at risk of zoonotic diseases is a question I won’t address in this program, other than to say I think the opposite is quite likely the case precisely because of our increasing urbanization. What I can say is that if that little bit of argument on the CDC’s “One Health” page is any indication, the thinking behind “One Health” needs considerable improvement. And that’s important, because “One Health” has at its foundation some seriously unbiblical ideas.

As the authors of the article “One Health: A call for ecological equity,” put it in The Lancet, a venerable peer-reviewed British medical journal, “One Health places us in an interconnected and interdependent relationship with non-human animals and the environment. The consequences of this thinking entail a subtle but quite revolutionary shift of perspective: all life is equal, and of equal concern.”

Let me quote that last sentence again: “The consequences of this thinking entail a subtle but quite revolutionary shift of perspective: all life is equal, and of equal concern.” Did you get that? “All life is equal, and of equal concern.”

Your mother is life. Your poodle is life. Your goldfish is life. If you have one, your pet tarantula is life. So is the cockroach you tried to smash before it skittered under the shoe mold. And the lion, and the amoeba, and the tree, and the blade of crabgrass, and the poisonous mushroom, and the e coli bacterium that can kill you.

But according to “One Health,” “all life is equal, and of equal concern.”

That’s the thinking of the Deep Ecology movement, something I discussed in an article titled “The Competing Worldviews of Environmentalism and Christianity.” Deep ecology, with its biological egalitarianism, is fundamentally, diametrically anti-Biblical and anti-Christian. For Scripture says that man alone, male and female, is the image of God. God gives to man alone, male and female, the mandate to fill, subdue, and rule the Earth. And while Biblical law requires that if someone kills his neighbor’s ox, he must make restitution, it does not require that he forfeits his own life—which it does if he murders his neighbor. With that thinking at its foundation, “One Health” deserves careful scrutiny. And you might inform your members of Congress that you don’t want the CDC or any other U.S. agency embracing it.

Photo credit: U.S. Centers for Disease Control.