The Anthropocene conveys the impossible demands the human species has made upon our planet, and it, in turn makes unprecedented demands on our academic disciplines and on forms of governance, law, and popular culture. One response to these demands is the emergence of the trans-disciplinary field of planetary health from public health, planetary science, and ecological thinking. In the new field the ‘public’ becomes a planetary citizenship, residing upon a newly imagined and definitively vulnerable planet. The field is built upon a temporal narrative in which the mounting environmental costs of progress in human health have led to an ailing planet; human health is resituated within its natural systems. To achieve this transformation, planetary health reworks conventional scales and temporalities, drawing upon the deep past and immanent future to focus policy responses in the present, and makes new connections between local ecologies and planetary systems. This paper explores the historical narratives embedded within planetary health and its different uses of history.