Kriti Sharma

This article examines how the emerging framework of “Planetary Health” challenges us to reconsider the role and boundaries of global health law, for example by engaging with systems thinking, eco-centric perspectives, Indigenous knowledge, and newly emerging human rights. How does planetary health inspire novel thinking or new approaches around the conceptualization, design, implementation and/or interpretation of global health law and health-related rights, aiming to protect vital ecological foundations or determinants of health?

We argue that relational ontology reconfigures agency as consciousness of and responsibility for the worlds people bring forth collectively; virtue as primarily a property of collectives; and politics as ontological multi-scalar transformation. The relational self is both more and less responsible than the atomized self: less responsible (as individuals, and to a lesser extent as collectives) for the worlds we currently inhabit, yet more responsible (as collectives, and to a lesser extent as individuals) for the worlds we bring forth. We frame the movement for prison abolition as an actually existing example of how relational ontologies refigure agency, ethics, and politics.

This paper outlines some flaws of the faddist social forestry movement that is currently sweeping Canada's volunteer NGOs. Typically, these include: Canadian NGOs' ignorance of tropical ecology; their inability to adequately communicate with the Third World clientel because of the socio-cultural barriers; a propensity to undertake numerous development projects and thus seek to bloat their organizations so as to claim federal government grants; and most of all, complaints of alleged racism against NGOs by Canada's ethnic minorities who are kept out of the development field. Impacts on the Third World development of each of these flaws are briefly noted. The paper concludes by offering some recommendations for improving Canadian volunteer NGOs' performance in social forestry in the Third World