The COVID-19 pandemic has awakened the world in new ways to who we are as humans and how we think about the issues that are important. Deprived of our closeness to loved ones, forced to work in new ways to keep trying to flatten the curve of infection rates, monitoring the news for ways to understand what was happening to us, and coming to grips with a universe in which the control we thought we were entitled to over choices in our everyday lives has slipped away, we have also started to pay attention to the larger issues that had been with us all the time but were for the most part obscured by the ‘noise.’ And in the silent spaces that have allowed us to listen in a new way, we have found a path toward collective recognition that racism is systemic and structural, inequities are baked into more aspects of our human cultural consciousness than we can ever hope to understand or unravel in a lifetime, and—perhaps most importantly—that climate change is real.

For most nurses, planetary health has not been top of mind as an issue of concern about which our profession has a significant role to play (Kalogirou, Dahlke, et al., 2020). Over recent decades, we have embraced social determinants of health as something that is fundamentally important in health care, and it is apparent from our reflections on and theorizing about nursing, including in the pages of this journal, that the way in which we socially construct factors that become barriers or facilitators to the resources for health is an issue about which nursing represents important expertize, and for which the manner in which we educate our young, organize our care systems, and orient our policy advocacy can bring an informed and skilled perspective to a shared vision of a better future for all. Furthermore, as we trace our professional history and disciplinary epistemological development, we see that attention to the social world that surrounds the persons in our care, including understanding how that contributes to health and illness, recovery and disability, has always been lurking somewhere in the backdrop of what our profession stands for.

Despite the footprints of this wider thinking, we have clung to the deep and abiding tradition of individualized or person-centered care as fundamental to nursing's unique angle of vision and distinctive contribution to health (Kalogirou, Olson, et al., 2020). In some respects, we have been the ultimate humanists (McCaffrey, 2018), resisting policy changes that override the individual expression of need, standing up for the particularities of the patients in our care so that their circumstances feature in shaping the experiences we provide for them. And now, in this posthumanist world consciousness (Andrews & Duff, 2019), when we are all beginning to appreciate the collective impact of our fixation on and allegiance to the human component of our planet at the expense of its other fundamental elements, the climate emergency is unquestionably upon us. Primed by how disruptive a pandemic can be to our world order as well as our everyday realities, we have been shaken up into paying attention to that which has been calling out to us all along. And instead of considering planetary health as a minor ‘specialty’ interest of concern to a tiny fraction of activist nurses, we are going to have to figure out how to embed that wider perspective into the ways we teach, practice and study this profession of ours (Leffers et al., 2017; Nicholas & Breakey, 2017).

The unusual step of a collective and simultaneous editorial—Call for Emergency Action to Limit Global Temperature increases, restore biodiversity, and protect health—signals a shared appreciation that we have crossed a threshold in our collective awareness, undoubtedly accelerated by the realities of a pandemic of global proportion, that we are all in this together, and that this issue affects every one of us. It offers a beginning consideration of the multiple strategic targets that we who believe in a healthier world must integrate into our practices and our policy advocacy. Let us not miss the opportunity that the crisis thrust upon us by the pandemic has awakened to turn what has for far too many of us been just an unsettled feeling that something is not quite right with the planet into a truly coherent and strategic direction for nursing, for health care, and for our world.

I know that, in the coming years, Nursing Inquiry will welcome increasing numbers of thoughtful manuscripts on what constitutes a nursing response to the climate crisis. As a journal committed to critical reflection on the ideas that shape our profession, and health care writ large, we have a part to play in what must quickly become a shared global commitment.