Planetary becoming and ecological flourishing

The concept of flourishing cannot be limited to the human. The ecological crisis is, in part, a crisis of a philosophy that drew too sharp a line between the flourishing of human beings and that of the natural world. Ubuntu's relational ontology offers a different starting point: one in which the becoming of persons is understood as entangled with the becoming of the ecosystems, waterways, soils, and atmospheric systems on which all life depends. This research strand develops the ecological dimensions of ubuntu philosophy and explores their implications for environmental law, climate justice, and the governance of natural resources. The climate crisis makes the stakes inescapable. It is the clearest case in our time of flourishing denied across both distance and generations: the regions that did least to cause the warming bear its sharpest edge, and the becoming of those not yet born is foreclosed by decisions taken now. South Africa already lives this. The drought that brought Cape Town to the edge of "Day Zero", and the 2022 floods that killed more than four hundred people in KwaZulu-Natal, are not weather; they are the uneven distribution of a habitable future. Climate justice, on the ubuntu account, is not charity from the high-emitting world to the low-emitting one but the repair of a relational web, atmospheric, ecological, and intergenerational, on which all becoming depends.