Planetary health and movement building for times of change

^{AnnMarie Walton, associate professor at Duke University School of Nursing, delivered the keynote The Cancer-Climate Connection: Environmental Drivers of Cancer in the Climate Era at the seventh annual Planetary Health Guest Lecture.}

At a time of immense and historic challenge, the Center for Planetary Health and Environmental Justice is guided by what is emerging from the ground up. Across Minneapolis and Minnesota, communities are responding to adversity not only with grief, but with courage, rooting themselves in place, tending relationships and cultivating new possibilities. This is where planetary health is being renewed: in local soil, shared responsibility and collective care.

This spring, a campus-wide guest lecture, The Cancer–Climate Connection, brought together partners across nursing, medicine, cancer care, exposomics, veterinary medicine, climate adaptation, and sustainability to examine how environmental exposures, social conditions, and ecological change influence cancer risk and health outcomes. This work reflects a growing recognition that health is produced not only in clinical settings, but through the air we breathe, the water and land we protect, the food systems we steward, the relationships we nurture, and the values we uphold.

This work continues alongside an important leadership transition. As we honor the retirement of Clinical Professor Teddie Potter, PhD, RN, FAAN, FNAP, we celebrate her foundational role in establishing planetary health as a moral and professional imperative for nursing. Under the leadership of Clinical Assistant Professor Angelica Walton, DNP, RN, the center is carrying this legacy forward through a regenerative vision grounded in healing justice, restoration, community partnership and the cultivation of future nurse leaders.

Movement-building remains central to this next chapter. Through collaboration with the Planetary Health Alliance North American Council, monthly gatherings connect leaders, clinicians, researchers, educators, and organizers across the U.S. and Canada region with hubs around the world strengthening planetary health as a justice-centered global movement.

At the neighborhood level, this vision is alive in multiple forms. In North Minneapolis, the center partners with the Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and the Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership to build civic capacity for air-quality monitoring and support residents as civic scientists. In East Phillips, collaboration with Change Narrative uplifts community-led climate storytelling and arts-based organizing advancing a vision for the Roof Depot as a space for healing, food sovereignty and resilience.

In a time when many feel overwhelmed or disconnected, community-led work reminds us: the future is being shaped now. Hope, as one community leader shared, is a cactus — sharp, resilient and continuously growing in the hardest conditions.