Planetary health from below: Multispecies health collectives in the environmental aesthetics of contagion and chemical solutions

As ecological tipping points are rapidly being surpassed, planetary health is a new paradigm that connects the impacts of planetary change to questions of health, with a specific focus on human health. This essay argues that Michel Nieva’s climate fiction, Dengue Boy, employs a tropicalised environmental aesthetic that can challenge the human-centred perspective of the planetary health paradigm by highlighting a multispecies health collective amid global warming and the situated context of chemical poisoning. By drawing on ‘decolonial ecology’, I link the novel’s portrayal of unhealthy proximity between humans and dengue mosquitoes to current health disparities and chemical colonialism, i.e., the persistent use of pesticides from South America to the Caribbean. This interdisciplinary analysis of Nieva’s novel challenges key assumptions in planetary health discussions, instead envisioning a health approach from below that confronts the geopolitics of chemicals, the marketisation of health and the inequalities it perpetuates, thereby advancing a decolonial planetary health paradigm. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .