Languaging as a Planetary Health Ethic: Toward Linguistic Justice in Global Ecological Governance

Dreisbach, Jeconiah ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3761-9267 (2026) Languaging as a Planetary Health Ethic: Toward Linguistic Justice in Global Ecological Governance. Challenges: Journal of Planetary Health, 17 (3): 32. MDPI . ISSN 2078-1547 Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/challe17030032

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Abstract

Planetary health scholarship increasingly recognizes the ecological, social, and health consequences of a degraded and warming planet, yet language remains a marginal concern, typically treated as a matter of communication rather than of justice. This article develops languaging, a dynamic and relational process of meaning-making rather than a fixed communicative code, as an original ethical framework for planetary health. Building on the author’s earlier conceptual work on emergency language services and memory studies in public health, the article argues that the exclusion of minoritized and Indigenous languages from global health and environmental governance is not a logistical gap but a colonial structure that produces epistemic injustice, understood here through Fricker’s concept of hermeneutical injustice, with tangible consequences for disaster preparedness, ecological knowledge transmission, and climate governance in the Global South. The article advances this framework through three original movements: (1) an account of how planetary health governance is structured by monolingual epistemology; (2) a theorization of the ethical temporalities of languaging as a practice bridging epistemic justice, memory, and future thinking; and (3) applied implications for multilingual disaster risk reduction and Indigenous knowledge integration in Southeast Asia. The article concludes that linguistic justice is inseparable from planetary health justice and proposes languaging as a conceptual bridge between sociolinguistics and planetary health that merits sustained empirical development.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Planetary health | Linguistic justice | Global South | Disaster risk reduction | Indigenous knowledge | Epistemic injustice
Subjects: Physical, Life and Health Sciences > Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
Physical, Life and Health Sciences > Environmental Science, Policy and Law
Vol/Issue no. published date: September 2026
Depositing User: Mr. Syed Anas Ali
Date Deposited: 22 Sep 2026 05:51
Last Modified: 24 Sep 2026 05:49
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/challe17030032
URI: https://pure.jgu.edu.in/id/eprint/12640

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