Just treatment on a damaged planet: Can we crip one health? And should we?

Disability justice (DJ) and One Health (OH) are two approaches to jointly addressing human, animal, and environmental health that emerged around the same time in overlapping geographies but twenty years later, remain largely separate. Here I first highlight how DJ movements have long operated across human, animal, and environmental health. I then introduce OH as a movement rooted in the organizing of scientists, healthcare practitioners, and policymakers seeking bridge health governance and care across human, animal, and environmental domains. Its tendency to reproduce colonial, anthropocentric, and ableist power structures in the present emerges from its origins in tropical medicine, disease ecology, and veterinary pathology practiced at sites like zoos and colonial/settler colonial research stations. Given this, I then ask: what would it mean to try to ‘crip’ science and health care currently operating within OH towards the political aims of DJ? In conversation with other critical OH interventions, I raise preliminary concerns emerging from the resonances and tensions between questions of what DJ and OH each want. I argue that considering OH and DJ together this way offers important insights for what constitutes just treatment on a damaged planet as well as the possibilities, dangers, and limitations of different approaches to treating injured more-than-human collectives. Throughout, I draw on digitally archived media and primary source materials, expert interviews with OH practitioners, and broader critical scholarship.