Bearing Witness to the Anthropocene: A Contemplative Interbeing Framework for Planetary Health and Nursing Ethics

Abstract

While spirituality and contemplative practices are increasingly invoked in response to environmental crisis, the specific mechanisms by which they may mediate professional ethical action remain underdeveloped. This is particularly evident regarding nuclear harm, an existential planetary threat often siloed from health scholarship. This paper investigates the mediating mechanism of contemplative formation as the analytical link between spiritual ethics and planetary health. By centering this link, we demonstrate how professional nursing identity can be restructured to address existential threats like nuclear harm, which are currently under-integrated in health scholarship. We employed a convergent, integrative design combining a scoping review of the literature published in 2015–2025 with a contemplative autoethnography. The scoping review (n = 39) maps the scholarly evidence of spiritual–ecological constructs, while the autoethnography provides a situated, analytical account of the first author’s professional and spiritual formation. Integration was achieved through a four-step thematic synthesis that explicitly identifies where first-person lived experience and third-person scholarly evidence converge to illuminate the process of ethical integration. Four convergent themes describe the pathways linking contemplative practice to planetary health: (1) embodied practice (somatic resilience); (2) narrative meaning-making (transforming grief into purpose); (3) interconnected ethics (reframing remote harms as proximate responsibilities); and (4) reflective integration (the reflexive weaving of clinical and spiritual identities). The findings reveal that while contemplative traditions offer robust resources for systems thinking and equity, nuclear harm and nursing perspectives remain significantly under-integrated in the current planetary health literature. Contemplative formation functions as the mediating mechanism that turns planetary threats into sustained professional advocacy. The Interbeing Planetary Health Framework provides a pragmatic guide for nursing ethics under existential risks.