I felt as though the world around me—the birds, the flowers, the newly cut green grass—was all a soothing balm. (hooks Reference hooks1993, 7)
Can we begin to entertain the hypothesis that the world of nature around us may have many of the intelligent and creative powers the splitters hive off to the designer? (Plumwood Reference Plumwood and Harvey2014, 124)
When I was a child, my mother often told me about her grandmother and how much she cared about her plants. She had lots of them; they were beautiful and healthy, and in the neighborhood, everyone wondered at this garden full of life and beauty. People in her surroundings speculated that the secret of this astonishing garden consisted in her talking to her plants multiple hours every day. As a child, I was both delighted with and skeptical of this story; how could people think that talking to plants was a way of caring for them? Plants don't even notice, do they? Trying to make sense of this practice and why my great-grandmother persisted in it for many years, I ended up concluding that the plants benefitted from an extra load of carbon dioxide, which encouraged photosynthesis and boosted their growth—a growth that encouraged my great-grandmother (who I assumed to be naive) to continue talking to them.
Years later, armed with my readings in the environmental humanities about animist cosmovisions, I can now identify my childhood thinking as uncompromising Cartesianism—a dualist mode of thinking partly responsible for the Western disdain for other earthlings. But from my current point of view there is something else I was mistaken about. What if I had missed, during that time, half of the story of this interspecies care? What if the story was not about my great-grandmother taking fabulous care of her plants, but rather about the plants providing her with emotional support and receptive attention—support that was all the more crucial because it was not provided in her relationship with my grandfather or by her neighbors? Obviously, she cared for her plants. But what I had missed, despite its obviousness, is that the plants also cared for her.
In what follows, I take at the hypothesis that we receive care from other earthlings seriously, and explore its potential consequences. Since their first conceptualizations, care ethics seem to have been open to taking the more-than-humanFootnote 1 world into consideration. Caregiving, Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto (Reference Fisher, Tronto, Abel and Nelson1990) wrote in their seminal work, occurs for “our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (40). In her later work, Tronto (Reference Tronto1993) even deemed it useful to specify that care was “not restricted to human interaction with others” (101). As a matter of fact, in drawing attention to vulnerability as a central aspect of human life, the feminist approach to care creates pathways for sensitivity to the vulnerability around us in general, be it animal or human (Laugier Reference Laugier2015). As some have noted, the ethics of care have “an intuitive appeal from the standpoint of ecological ethics. Whether or not non-human animals have rights, we certainly can and do care for them” (Curtin Reference Curtin1991).
While rarely mentioned by feminist theory or environmental humanities, eco-feminists in the early 1990s laid down solid foundations for an interspecies ethics of care. They drew upon the grammar of care and nurture, highlighting the importance of personal lived experiences of interconnectedness to a reconceptualization of our moral ties to non-humans (Warren Reference Warren1990; King Reference King1991, 86; Plumwood Reference Plumwood1991; Merchant Reference Merchant1995; Donovan and Adams Reference Donovan and Adams1996, Reference Donovan and Adams2007). Contrary to animal rights and deep ecology approaches, they highlighted the importance of emotional attachments to animals, forests, places, and landscapes, framing them as moral realities to be illuminated, made visible, and conceptualized by environmental ethics.
However, the anthropocentrism of care theories is still flagrant, whether implicit or explicit. Notably, the possibility that non-humans are “providers of care” has often been ignored or dismissed out of hand. Indeed, Fisher and Tronto describe care as a “species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Fisher and Tronto Reference Fisher, Tronto, Abel and Nelson1990, 40, emphasis added).” Similarly, it is obvious for Nel Noddings that “animals cannot be ones-caring in relation to human beings” (Noddings [Reference Noddings1984] 2013) even though they “can in some sense be genuine cared-fors,” and she is even more assertive regarding plants.Footnote 2 While early theorizations of care are open to considering “the possibility that caring occurs for objects and for the Environment” (Tronto Reference Tronto1993, 101 emphasis added), they very often remain silent about the caregiving that we receive from the environment. However, as Maria Puig de la Casa, who offers one of the few attempts to think about more than human care, puts it, this implies “disrupt[ing] the subjective collective behind the ‘we’” of this definition, acknowledging that care entails everything that is done to maintain, continue and repair ‘the world’ so that all can live in it as well as possible” (Puig de la Bellacasa Reference Puig de la Bellacasa2017, 161).
If the ethics of care are about seeing what we do not want to see—and asking why it is invisible—they could provide a helpful tool to theorize the more-than-human webs of care humans find themselves in. I suggest that ecological justice requires that we consider ourselves not only as ecological caregivers, but also as care receivers from more-than-human earthlings. As this essay aims to show, extending considerations of care to more-than-human entities is not merely a matter of taxonomy, it also allows fundamental questions to be raised about how earthlings’ contributions to human existence can be acknowledged without naturalizing them, commodifying them, or romanticizing the often-unjust situations in which they take place.
Feminist theories of care and social reproductionFootnote 3 offer key insights to critically examine human dependency on and exploitation of other species. This first section of the essay accounts for the diverse forms of care that humans receive from other earthlings. I then turn to feminist and eco-Marxist thought to denaturalize this care, highlighting how capitalist economies put other earthlings to work and appropriate their efforts for free. However, I underline the pitfalls of conceptualizing other earthlings’ care exclusively as work. Throughout the article, the political tensions at work in practices and conceptions of care outlined by feminist and indigenous thinking are used as a means to engage more critically with environmental issues.
Who maintains the world? Acknowledging more-than-human care
Take these three situations:
Sitting alone on his couch on a Monday evening, Peter talks to his cat Ayka, who lies calmly and quietly next to him.
Peyo, a former competition horse, has accompanied 1,000 people in the palliative care section of the hospital in Calais, France.
200,000 trees in Parisian streets, green spaces, and municipal facilities absorb 14,000 kg of CO2 every day, preventing the city's air from becoming totally unbreathable.
If care is, as Fisher and Tronto suggest, about “maintaining, continuing, and repairing our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible,” how can we not consider Ayka, Peyo, and the Parisian trees to be essential caregivers in our communities? How can care, defined as “the process by which life is sustained” (Tronto Reference Tronto1993), exclude animals and plants? Doesn't the invitation of feminist thinkers to pay attention to what makes our lives possible, but is deliberately neglected, lead directly to attention to the unacknowledged care of animals and plants?
As has been rightly observed, animals can first and foremost be considered caregivers to the extent that they regularly engage in care work towards their offspring and other animals close to them. This work is not only conceptually rendered invisible, but also “constrained or prohibited, particularly when the animals are to be physically consumed as commodities,” as Kendra Coulter (Reference Coulter2016b, 209) argues. For example, think of calves taken from their mothers.
Animals also engage in interspecies care, notably towards humans—efforts which are widely unacknowledged and undertheorized. The example that comes most quickly to mind is that of pets. They offer daily company and emotional support, relieving their owners’ stress. The image of elderly, homeless, or lonely people with cats and dogs as comrades does not come from just anywhere: intuitively, we associate pets with a caring function towards vulnerable humans, and pets are, in fact, often essential to precisely those humans who are not cared for enough by humans or their institutions. Humans have long chosen animals to be domesticated not only based on their ability to carry out basic tasks for them (such as transportation or surveillance), but also based on their ability to develop caring attitudes. It is no coincidence that dogs and horses, for example, who are among the most popular pets, are also increasingly enrolled in health and elderly care, be it for palliative care (Lempin Reference Lempin2021) or pet therapy for people with autism spectrum disorder (Siewertsen et al. Reference Siewertsen, French and Teramoto2015). As Donna Haraway vividly reminds us, dogs are already largely put to work in the caring economy for the “warning of epileptic seizures, detecting cancer, guiding the blind, serving as aides for the hearing impaired and the wheelchair-bound and as psychotherapeutic aides for traumatized children and adults, visiting the aged, aiding in rescues in extreme environments, and more” (Haraway Reference Haraway2007, 46). Initiatives such as “farming for health” or “care farming,” which use farming as a form of therapy, attest that animals caring for humans is already a fact (Hassink et al. Reference Hassink, Hulsink and Grin2014). More broadly, the growing trend of animal-assisted therapy for sick and/or elderly people, and even drug addicts, shows that humans did not wait for a (yet to occur) “non-human turn” (Grusin Reference Grusin2015) in care ethics to benefit from the physical, psychological, and emotional care work of animals. The same could be said about plants: beyond the fact that they allow us to breathe, and without even mentioning the healing capacities of medicinal plants, the growing interest in sylvotherapy or eco-therapy attests to the caring capacities of trees and other plants towards humans, be it for short-term recovery from stress or the acceleration of physical recovery from illness (Stigsdotter et al. Reference Stigsdotter, Palsdottir, Burls, Chermaz, Ferrini, Grahn, Nilsson, Sangster, Gallis, Hartig, de Vries, Seeland and Schipperijn2011). While these healing capacities are apparently not tangible enough for a vast majority of philosophers, corporate interests have long identified and exploited them as such. I will return later to the constrained and oppressive nature of much of more-than-human care.
On a less inter-individual level, it is obvious that the effort of maintaining the world is largely carried out by non-humans. Pollination by bees is one of the most telling examples as it serves humans directly. However, many species, even though they are not directly enrolled in human activities, contribute to maintaining the world through daily efforts to sustain their species and the ecosystems they play a role in. I thus follow Coulter in affirming that animals, and especially wild animals, engage in “eco-social reproduction,” namely, “subsistence and caring work [that] is necessary for the reproduction of ecosystems” (Coulter Reference Coulter2016a). Given the crucial role plants play in ecosystems, they could easily be integrated in this framework and be conceived as pillars of eco-social reproduction. As Giovanna Di Chiro explains (drawing on the work of environmental justice movements), environmental issues must be analyzed as reproductive issues:
Efforts to protect the health and integrity of natural systems—water, air, soil, biodiversity—are struggles to sustain the ecosystems that make all life possible and enable the production and reproduction processes upon which all communities (human and non-human) depend. In other words, environmental struggles are about fighting for and ensuring social reproduction. (Di Chiro 2008, 285).
Assigning the language of “caring for” to more-than-human livings, however, immediately brings out a double skepticism: don't these good conceptual intentions carry, in a barely veiled way, either anthropomorphist or anthropocentric biases?
First, one could easily accuse this kind of thinking of naively attributing human characteristics, feelings, and thoughts to other-than-humans. However, the fear of anthropomorphism when it comes to conceptualizing care work from other species might lead to another bias that is not necessarily preferable, namely, anthropodenial. I borrow the term from ethologist Frans de Waal, who coined it to describe “the a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals when in fact they may exist … a blindness to the human-like characteristics of animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves” (de Waal Reference Waal1999, 258). This blindness, he argues, is omnipresent among ethologists and other scientists concerned with animals. Their tendency to interpret animals’ behavior as if they were machinelike actors without emotions or agency, has already prevented them from understanding numerous phenomena in animal life, such as animal play, for example (Graeber Reference Graeber2014). I will return to the ethical value of recognizing human faculties in other-than-humans later. However, it can already be noted that, just as rationality has been defined as the characteristic of white bourgeois men, as opposed to BIPOC and white women (Lloyd Reference Lloyd1984; Jaggar Reference Jaggar1989), mainstream definitions of intentionality in ethics or philosophy are grounded in the exclusion of other beings from the moral and political sphere. One might want to recall that many indigenous cultures have animated, agentic and intentional views of the natural world (Plumwood Reference Plumwood and Harvey2014; Kimmerer Reference Kimmerer2015; Simpson Reference Simpson2017).
Second, it could be argued that construing actions undertaken by more than humans for themselves (that happen to benefit humans) as efforts to care for humans reinforces the view that all beings are “here for us.”Footnote 4 The question of whether the language of “caring for” reinforces anthropocentric biases is a challenging one: while one can easily conceive that many other-than-humans care for humans, it is harder to claim they care about humans. This is all the more true on the level of ecosystems or for non-domesticated animals. As Myra Hird vividly points out, while humans “are utterly dependent upon the teeming assemblages of dynamic microbes that make up and maintain both our corporeality and our biosphere,” in the end, “bacteria are largely indifferent to our thriving” (Hird Reference Hird, Martin, Mincyte and Münster2013, 69; quoted in Tsing Reference Tsing and Hastrup2013, 33). However, this objection seems only to highlight the limitations of a conception of care that depends on narrowly defined forms of moral intention and thus overlooks the many situations in which care is actually given. One could argue that care can be given without “caring about.” When Hooks (Reference hooks1993, 7) for example writes that “the birds, the flowers, the newly cut green grass” are experienced by her as a “soothing balm,” it is very likely that the flowers and the birds don't care about her. However, the effects of these more-than-human undertakings are undeniably of the order of emotional appeasement, and she feels cared for—something worth celebrating and acknowledging. It seems to me that when something or someone meets a caring need, then a caring relationship is initiated. In this sense, the relevance of a more pragmatic conception of care, which places the effects of caring practices at its center should be emphasized: even without extending the mainstream conceptions of intentionality, it can be argued that when care is received, then care is given, and should be recognized as such.
This essay is an invitation to pay attention, politically and conceptually, to the care humans receive from more-than-human networks, even if it goes against preconceived ideas about nature. Be it the socio-ecological reproduction carried by wild animals and ecosystems or the interpersonal caring attitudes of pets, human existences depend largely on the care they receive from other earthlings. The purpose here is not to engage in technical ethological disputes about other earthlings’ intentionality and consciousness, but rather to offer a critical feminist tool to environmental thought. Indeed, applying a care approach to other-than-humans allows to look at them in a different way: It invites to the analysis of the unjust conditions in which this care is appropriated (is it for example fair to keep cats in small apartments or cat cafés?) as well as to the question of who primarily benefits from more-than-human care (which communities have better accessibility to green space, for example?). In short, who is doing unacknowledged care work and who is being cared for? Thinking about human relations to other-than-humans with feminist theories of care and social reproduction holds the promise of both bringing into view the often-ignored care that humans receive from plants and animals, and of questioning the conditions in which this care is provided: it allows for its visibilization, denaturalization, and politicization.
Denaturalizing more-than-human care
Provided one inherits feminists’ questions attached to the concept of care, and their desire to “use this concept to reveal relationships of power” (Tronto Reference Tronto1993, 172), considering more-than-human care enables its denaturalization. Indeed, thinking of other species’ behavior in terms of “care” allows to nourish a skepticism with regard to the assertion that it is “in the nature” of pets to act as they act, and of trees to keep the polluted air of cities breathable. Care theories have indeed highlighted that the naturalization of women's and BIPOCs’ caring roles has always been a key vector of their domination: “All women are mothers or [they are labeled] unnatural women, people of color are ‘naturally’ servants” (Tronto Reference Tronto1993). The logic of naturalization, which is at work in oppressions such as sexism or racism, means that subjects or groups are presupposed to be internally organized to do what they do as it is “in their nature” (Guillaumin Reference Guillaumin1995). Their work is subsequently taken for granted on an economic level: as opposed to the labor of white male workers, which is mediated by a wage contract and can be exploited, the unwaged labor of “chattel slaves, indentured servants, colonized subjects, ‘native’ members of ‘domestic dependent nations,’ debt peons, felons, and ‘covered’ beings, such as wives and children” can be expropriatedFootnote 5 (Fraser Reference Fraser2016a, 165).
The boundaries between exploitation and expropriation—and between fully humans and less-than-humans—are heavily racialized and gendered. They also depend on definitions of what belongs to “nature” and what does not, as Marxist eco-feminists in the 1970s made clear. “From the standpoint of the rulers,” Claudia von Werlhof explained, nature is “everything that should be free” (Von Werlhof Reference Von Werlhof, Werlhof, Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies1988, 98). Internationalist Marxist eco-feminists from the Bielefeld School indeed argued that the capitalist exploitation of labor power depends on the free or cheap appropriation of “women, nature, and colonies.” As Maria Mies notes:
[i]n the course of the last four or five centuries women, nature and colonies were externalized, declared to be outside civilized society, pushed down, and thus made invisible as the underwater part of an iceberg that is invisible, yet constitute the base of the whole. (Mies Reference Mies2014b, 77)
In capitalist economies, the (re)productivity of racialized and feminized bodies is appropriated as though it were a natural resource (Floro Reference Floro2012; Mies Reference Mies2014b; Bauhardt Reference Bauhardt, Bauhardt and Harcourt2018). Starting from this observation, Marxist feminist strategies of emancipation have then often consisted in denaturalizing women's supposedly natural skills and contributions to society. They notably showed the extent to which most of the tasks they had to perform were coercively assigned to them in a context of social domination, highlighting the agency of women and their ability to be and do otherwise.
This begs the question of whether one should not denaturalize nature's care. In fact, the care provided by many species is a social construction. More-than-human earthlings are put to work in a very specific economic setting: globalized capitalism. They participate in a human project that is radically external to them, to an extent that it can even undermine their ability to reproduce themselves as a species. This is even more blatant with domestic animals. Consider dogs, which are selected and specifically bred to enhance their readiness to learn and perform specific kind of skills and attitudes. Moreover, if one pays enough attention, it is possible to identify numerous forms of work refusal and agency among domestic and wild animals (Hribal Reference Hribal2003; Porcher and Schmitt Reference Porcher and Schmitt2010; Balaud and Chopot Reference Balaud and Chopot2021). As such, Marxist feminist insights and strategies regarding reproductive labor might prove helpful when it comes to politicize more-than-human care.
Calling in a new group of laborers?
The question of how to make earthlings’ care less likely to be freely or cheaply appropriated by capitalist production is a tricky one. A path that is increasingly chosen by critical thinkers of environmental degradation is to travel the same road as white feminist thinkers of social reproduction by framing the care that is considered “natural” as labor. Indeed, if we take a closer look at feminist strategies of emancipation, and especially the claims of social reproduction feminists, the recognition of their activities as work has been central. White autonomist Marxist feminists in the 1970s notably pushed for the recognition of domestic and reproductive labor in the “Wages for Housework” campaign (Dalla Costa and James Reference Dalla Costa and James1975). It was an efficient way to highlight all of the free invisible work upon which capitalist economies relied, and the “existence of a large area of exploitation until then unrecognized by all revolutionary theorists” (Federici Reference Federici2019, 55). Irreducible to reformist demands to incorporate women's labor into the capitalist system, this demand—which is impossible for capitalism to meet—was intended to lead to a reconfiguration of the distribution of social wealth.
If we now intertwine the problems raised by eco-feminists—capitalism relies on the free appropriation of natural resources—with the answers offered by social reproduction theorists—strategically label the processes capitalism is free-riding on as labor to denaturalize them—the following question arises: should we talk about nature's (reproductive) labor in order to revalue a set of activities which is essential to the economy but exploited and taken for granted? Until now, Marxist eco-feminists have shed light on the similarities of capitalist appropriation of nature, women, and colonies, but the “meta-industrial labor class” (Salleh Reference Salleh2009), or “forces of reproduction” (Barca Reference Barca2020) remained exclusively human, “made up of those less-than-humanized (racialized, feminized, dispossessed) subjects who reproduce humanity by taking care of the biophysical environment that makes life itself possible” (Barca Reference Barca2020). Elaborating upon (eco) feminist economic analyses, eco-Marxist thinker Jason Moore, among others,Footnote 6 has followed the path of referring to more-than-human laborers in his theory. As with eco-feminists, he identifies two modes of “putting to work”: paid exploitation and cheap, or even free appropriation. However, he also includes other-than-humans in the pool of livings put to work by the capitalist economy.
The rise of capitalism gave us the idea not only that society was relatively independent of the web of life but also that most women, Indigenous Peoples, slaves, and colonized peoples everywhere were not fully human and thus not full members of society. These were people who were not—or were only barely—human. They were part of Nature, treated as social outcasts—they were cheapened. … Capitalism's practices of cheap nature would define whose lives and whose work mattered—and whose did not. Its dominant ideas Nature and Society (in uppercase because of their mythic and bloody power) would determine whose work was valued and whose work—care for young and old, for the sick and those with special needs, agricultural work, and the work of extra-human natures (animals, soils, forests, fuels)-was rendered largely invisible. (Patel and Moore Reference Patel and Moore2017, 35–36)
In continuity with care theorists and theorists of social reproduction, Moore shows that most of the work done to support our societies does not in fact register as valuable in the orbit of capitalism: in particular, the work of most white women and BIPOC, but also the work performed by other-than-humans. Supported by feminist political and ecological economics, he argues:
The quantitative reckonings for unpaid human work—overwhelmingly delivered by women—vary between 70 and 80 percent of world GDP; for “ecosystem services,” between 70 and 250 percent of GDP. The relations between these two moments are rarely grasped, and their role in long waves of accumulation rarely discussed. For capitalism is not merely a system of unpaid costs (“externalities”). It is a system of unpaid work (“invisibilities”). (Moore Reference Moore2015, 72)
Thus, contrary to what its name seems to indicate, it is not only as a working class that the living are put to work by capitalist economies. To refer to a common experience shared by humans and more than humans, namely, the experience of being put to work, is interesting to the extent it calls for new anti-capitalist, interspecific alliances.Footnote 7 As Alyssa Battistoni, who is also one of the rare thinkers who vividly argue for a better conceptualization of nature's “hybrid labor,” brilliantly puts it: “labor conjures a subject rather than a stock. Recognizing hybrid labor is not merely a matter of adjusting economic taxonomy to reflect structural similarities; it also functions as a political declaration of collective belonging” (Battistoni Reference Battistoni2017, 21).
While his theory successfully highlights the multi-species violence inflicted by capitalist economies, some degree of skepticism is called for concerning the economic framework and vision on which it overly relies. In the case of BIPOC and white women, the marketization of everyday life is not a move from non-work to work, but is rather a move from unpaid to paid work, and as such it can be seen as a partial step towards greater freedom—even if it contains its share of ambiguities (Simonet Reference Simonet, Naulin and Jourdain2020, 270). However, this possibility does not exist for other-than-humans. Battistoni, who argues in favor of acknowledging animals’ work, evidently admits the impossibility of paying a traditional wage to non-humans. She evades it in a very fine manner by arguing that it is precisely this impossibility that pushes us “to consider what kinds of other relationships might be possible” (Battistoni Reference Battistoni2017, 23). However, the question of why she puts so much emphasis on work when she wants to imagine other relationships remains open. Is the concept of labor not too one-sided to be scaled up to other livings and to our relations to them? In what follows, I would like to express my doubts about the ability of a concept that refers to a contractual and monetized relationship between subjects of rights to account for human dependence on more-than-human care. As Puig de la Bellacasa notes, “interdependency is not a contract but a condition” (2012, 198). While the concept of labor adequately captures capitalist exploitation of nature, I want to argue it does not sufficiently account for the regenerative, affective dimension of human relations to other earthlings and the networks of constitutive interdependence that bind us to them.
Incommensurable care
In the foregoing sections, I have defended two assertions. First, humans receive care from other earthlings on a daily basis. Secondly, this care should not be considered as a given. I then considered a possible pathway to denaturalize more-than-human care, namely, conceptualizing it as reproductive labor, just as white autonomous feminist Marxists have relabeled their care as labor in order to denaturalize it. This section is concerned with the limitations of such a taxonomy. Drawing on feminist thinkers on “the crisis of care,” I begin by raising concerns regarding the monetization and quantification of earthlings’ care work. I then turn to the political risks and epistemic stakes of thinking about more-than-human care and eco-social reproduction using the framework of waged labor. The risks of merely expanding the notion of labor to call in a new group of laborers are underlined. I argue that talking about care, in addition to the consideration of earthlings’ work, energy, or reproductive labor, is more likely to highlight and foster the subjective motivations, emotional needs, and interdependencies necessary to reinvent interspecies politics. At once a moral disposition, an epistemic stance, an affect, and a labor, but not reducible to any of these things, care is a “thick” concept (Puig de la Bellacasa Reference Puig de la Bellacasa2012). This “thickness” could be useful for acknowledging the simultaneous importance of the affective, cultural, and economic dimensions of eco-political change.
Thinking within the framework of waged labor might be too closely related to an epistemology of quantification and monetization. The problem, as is highlighted and framed by Marxist eco-feminist approaches, is that just as it naturally takes the work of women for granted, capital extracts, appropriates, and deteriorates the natural world as a set of infinite free material resources without compensation. Capitalism is “free-riding on the life-world” (Fraser Reference Fraser2016b, 101)—“unpaid work” and “unpaid costs” in Moore's words. However, the question arises as to whether conceptualizing the problem in terms of “paying bills” (Oksala Reference Oksala2018, 223) is the most valuable approach to take. Of course, strategies like “wages for housework” did not have in mind reformist demands for more money nor a commodification agenda. However, in a context where more and more domains of human and non-human life-worlds are commodified, the subversive and strategical use of monetization to render visible disregarded processes appears even more ambiguous. Did not capitalist markets integrate this critique and strategy a long time ago?
In fact, there are currently multiple attempts to integrate the unpaid environmental costs and natural services within the capitalist economy. Admittedly, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) “make nature's value visible” (according to their own description). However, what is left behind by this monetary “visibility”? As the example of payment for ecosystem services has shown, this kind of visibility contains the risk of accelerating the monetization and commodification of nature (Kosoy and Corbera Reference Kosoy and Corbera2010; Maris Reference Maris2014). I follow Ariel Salleh when she writes that “the typical capitalist process of monetary valuation of nature as such, reinforces an epistemologically reductive reading of complex relational processes, by attempting to measure weblike metabolic relations of matter and energy along a single linear index” (Salleh Reference Salleh2009, 2). The visibility provided by monetization is one-dimensional. Beyond the difficult compartmentalization of certain elements or functions of ecosystems, commodification is based on the attribution of an exchange value, postulating the possibility of substituting goods or services of equivalent value. Indeed, “markets don't only allocate goods; they also express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged”—through reification and exchangeability (Sandel Reference Sandel2013). As such, the propagation of the idea that all interspecies interactions could be measurable and quantifiable risks undermining our capacity to engage in ethical relationships (Maris Reference Maris2014).
Putting feminists’ insights about care in the context of interspecies justice provides a vocabulary and framework in which to think about how to value our natural surroundings. As black feminists have noted, black women have been doing waged reproductive work in white homes for a long time, and this did not contribute to any revalorization of their work (Davis Reference Davis and Davis1981; hooks Reference hooks2014). Submitting an activity for exchange as a commodity, measurable by units of time in return for wages, does not necessarily lead to its revaluing, and we might wish to remember that “we care for things not because they produce value, but because they already have value” (Mattern Reference Mattern2018). In fact, feminist theorists of reproductive work have exposed the limits inherent in the commodification of this activity and the resulting “crisis of care.” As Johanna Oksala puts it:
It is important to recognize that ethical problems such as dignity and personal worth cannot be remedied with better wages because they are essentially caused by the monetized nature of the exchange and therefore challenge philosophically what kinds of things can be given monetary value. (Oksala Reference Oksala2019, 900)
For Alys Weinbaum, the racializing process through which both labor and products of human reproduction are rendered alienable and sellable constitutes slavery's reproductive afterlife and is only made possible through what she calls the “slave episteme.” As she argues, slave breeding in the context of Atlantic slavery is the intellectual template to conceive commodifying and extracting women's reproductive labor and their “biological fruits” in contemporary bio-capitalism (Weinbaum Reference Weinbaum2019). Considering this, anti-racists, feminists, and ecologists share “the urgent project of questioning how the line between the processes of market internalization and externalization … is politically negotiated” (Oksala Reference Oksala2018), often suggesting that markets and commodification should be limited. The idea of economically compensating for activities is dangerously close to labeling such activities as being for sale, alienable, and substitutable on a market. Yet, as numerous care theories have made clear, ethical bonds are developed towards beings and places which are particular and unique to us. This raises the question of whether, instead of extending dominant processes of valorization to new activities and agents, we should prioritize struggles and practices aimed at undoing these processes themselves and proposing different ones. After all, as feminists of social reproduction have noted themselves, the exclusion of women, BIPOC, and nature from the definition of labor is not accidental, but constitutive of its definition as “male-coded; transcendent agency actively shaping the world by giving it value” (Barca Reference Barca2020, 29).
Beyond the question of monetization, we can then wonder to what extent naming various forms of human and non-human activity as “labor” is a necessary homogenization and reduction of human relations towards other-than-humans. This can be seen as a symptom of the injunction made to modern science and theory to be scalable, at the expense of more diverse and/or vernacular ways of knowing and describing. As Anna Tsing notes: “The ability to make one's research framework apply to greater scales without budging the frame” is one of the main requirements of modern science. However, this implies that “only data of the same sort can be added to the research without messing up the frame,” potentially undermining “our ability to notice the heterogeneity of the world.” Indeed, “by its design, scalability allows us to see only uniform blocks, ready for further expansion” (Tsing Reference Tsing2012, 505). From this perspective, it might obfuscate the diversity of our ethical and non-ethical relations of interdependence to label the numerous ways in which extra humans participate in our multispecies communities as “work.” The question is all the more important as it is not just any concept, but the concept of “labor” that is here scaled up. Yet, as Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, “labor is one of the key categories in the imagination of capitalism itself. In the same way that we think of capitalism as coming into being in all sorts of contexts, we also imagine the modern category ‘work’ or ‘labor’ as emerging in all kinds of histories” (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2000, 76). Even without talking about wages or financial compensation, applying the concept of labor to other livings to enrich Marxist frameworks of thinking might entail a risk of economic reductionism. Describing activities as modified versions of the structure of work makes it difficult to take value-oriented behavior into account (Heller Reference Heller1981). It might especially reduce the room and visibility for the emotional, intimate, and sometimes spiritual dimensions of these relations.
Indeed, if we come back to the case of feminist strategies, the “wages against housework” campaigns were often praised for showing that domestic labor “is not something to celebrate or revere (after all, it is only work)” (Weeks Reference Weeks2017). Affirming “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work” was an efficient way to counter various modes of naturalization and romanticization that had shielded heterosexist forms of love and the nuclear family from critical judgment. While the critique of the ideological function of the rhetoric of love and happiness to mask capitalist exploitation is more relevant than ever, I would like to stress the importance of complementing such strategies. What are we missing when we say that love is only “unwaged work”? While I follow the feminist materialists in their critique of capitalism and exploitation, I also want to highlight care's ability to highlight interdependency and vulnerability as central dimensions of interspecies coexistence. Framing care and its attached dispositions merely as work and as a set of coping strategies for dealing with oppression does not account for the fact that subjugated communities might already have access to specific social potentials and ethical dispositions that the privileged are missing (Loick Reference Loick2021). Dismissing these dispositions and potential runs the risk of replicating the contempt of the dominant. The advantage of the notion of care is that it is not a total renouncement of the conceptual framework of work—indeed, care is work—but it is also more. Second, the concept of care has always been a locus of ambiguity, allowing (of course not always successfully) the avoidance of the pitfalls of both romanticization and contempt. It acknowledges that people who are in dominated positions develop ethical dispositions and practices which are valuable and generative, despite the undesirability of their situation. The challenge posed by the concept of care has always been to value caretaking without idealizing the oppressive contexts in which it takes place.
De facto, across time, space, cultures, and periods, ecological modes of living have often gone hand in hand with the acknowledgment of earthlings’ care. The idea of care coming from nature can, for example, be found in Andean thinkers’ descriptions of the Earth's generative powers as “Pachamama” (Pacari Reference Pacari, Acosta and Martinez2009), nowadays reclaimed by diverse indigenous social movements in Bolivia and Ecuador (Tola Reference Tola2018). The identification of nature, and especially the Earth, with a nurturing beneficent mother figure who provides for the needs of humankind was even prevalent in Europe before the scientific revolution (Merchant Reference Merchant1990, 2). As Carolyn Merchant shows, this association has historically worked as a cultural and normative constraint, restricting the types of socially and morally sanctioned actions permitted with respect to the Earth. “As long as the earth was considered to be alive and sensitive,” she notes, “it could be considered a breach of human ethical behavior to carry out destructive acts against it” (Merchant Reference Merchant1990, 3).
Following Merchant, it might be relevant to pay more attention to political implications of descriptive statements about nature. To a certain extent, descriptions of the beings around us always contain undeclared normative stances that shape perceptions and behavior towards them. My concern regarding the vocabulary of non-human labor stems from an attention to “the affective conditions for social critique” (Butler Reference Butler2009): an attention to the affects carried or inhibited by different ways of describing our lived worlds, especially to the ways these affects shape our collective responsibilities and political responsiveness to certain situations and events. The depiction of more-than-human beings as mere agents put to work in global capitalist economies might foster modernity's mortifying “disenchantment tale” (Bennett Reference Bennett2001), which describes non-human nature in mechanistic ways. In this case, it seems to me that seeing other earthlings as caregivers might nurture a sense of common vulnerability, interdependency, gratitude, and reciprocity in a way that the concept of labor cannot. Unlike the payment of a wage, which conjures the fiction of atomized creatures engaging in contracts with a beginning and an end, caring takes place within—and enacts—a web of relationships. “To care about something, or for somebody, is inevitably to create relation” (Puig de la Bellacasa Reference Puig de la Bellacasa2012). My proposal can thus be seen as part of the “renarrativization” Val Plumwood was calling for, arguing that the stories and words we use to describe and conceptualize the world and our places within it actively (re)shape the multiple ways in which we interact with it daily. The goal is not to invent “fairies at the bottom of the garden. It is a matter of being open to experiences of nature as powerful, agentic and creative, making space in our culture for an animating sensibility and vocabulary” (Plumwood Reference Plumwood and Harvey2014, 451). In this perspective, talking about trees or sheep in terms of work or energy put to work by capitalism is certainly a good idea when it comes to drawing attention to exploitation that has been ignored, but it fails to nourish new moral attachments and modes of cohabitation with more-than-human beings.
That being said, we nonetheless find ourselves confronted with the feminist dilemma of seeking to revalue care without building an essentializing linkage between the feminine and certain nurturing dispositions (Alaimo Reference Alaimo1994). Looking at how the translation of Pachamama by state actors and colonial powers into “Mother Earth” has often taken place within a rigid gender binary diametrically opposed to the cosmovisions of indigenous activists (Tola Reference Tola2018; Feminismo Comunitario 2010), some precautions are indeed required. The ambition must be to acknowledge more-than-human care without falling into the trap of the nostalgic and totalizing figure of “Mother Earth.” “Earth” might be too big as a concept, positing a wholeness that might erase specific attachments to particular livings, producing new forms of concealment. A multiplication of accounts, stories, and conceptualizations of animals’ and plants’ care participates in actualizing a sense of human embeddedness in and dependency on nature that is fundamental to eco-politics, without assuming a totalizing figure of a nurturing Mother Earth.
Caring back
We prefer restitution to wages and gratitude. (Simone and Giardini Reference Simone and Giardini2015)
It is part of our responsibility [to be] looking after our country. If you don't look after country, country won't look after you. (April Bright in Rose Reference Rose1996, 49)
Previously, I have tried to highlight the pitfalls of conceiving earthlings’ contribution to our biological and social reproduction as mere work, drawing on feminist thought to highlight the epistemological and political dangers of economic reductionism. However, the question of how to reciprocate other earthlings’ care if it's not conceptualized as labor or as natural capital which can be monetarily valued and compensated remains more open than ever: What political claims can emerge from the acknowledgment of other earthlings’ care, and what role can it have within a larger web of tactics to counter its capitalistic appropriation or commodification?
In her plea for the recognition of nature's hybrid labor, Battistoni evokes the need “to think beyond monetized forms of reciprocation and imagine what Federica Giardini and Anna Simone call ‘circuits of restitution’” (2017, 24). Unfortunately, she does not elaborate upon the concrete implications of restitution as political paradigm. Giardini and Simone do not elaborate much either, but they define restitution as “giving back,” namely, “a material-symbolic circuit, a reproductive circuit of a worthy life, which cannot be exhausted in the possibility of paying for what is necessary to survive. Being part of a circuit of restitution means accessing, using, and multiplying the conditions of living” (Simone and Giardini Reference Simone and Giardini2015). This conceptual shift is not merely anecdotal: While the payment for a service or a commodity frequently marks the end of a transaction, restitution refers to an exchange which puts two parties in a relation of reciprocity. I want to use and extend this paradigm to think about how we can render more-than-human care visible, valuable, and fairly organized.
Caring back for other earthlings is not some kind of abstract ideal. In many indigenous communities, the sacred and obligatory character of material or symbolic counter-gifts to more-than-human care plays a key role in the preservation and renewal of ecosystems. As Justo Oxa, who lives in Peru and self-identifies as indigenous, frames it: “Pachamama nurtures us, the Apus nurture us, they care for us. We nurture our kids and they will nurture us when we get old. We nurture the seeds, the animals and plants, and they also nurture us.” (Oxa Reference Oxa and Pinilla2005, 239, quoted in de la Cadena Reference Cadena2010, 354). A similar reciprocity can be found in the way Wet'suwet’en people in Canada relate to their land. As Freda Huson, Unist'ot’en Hereditary Spokesperson, puts it: “The land sustains us. And if we don't take care of her, she won't be able to sustain us” (Unist'ot’en Campaign 2018, quoted in Simpson Reference Simpson2021, 56). To put it bluntly, acknowledging more than human care and assuming that it is not something you can just pay for forces one to think about ways of “caring back” within never-ending webs of relationships. This notion has a disturbing simplicity. However, it is far from Western capitalist ways of living and relating. In particular, it highlights the limits of Western environmental concepts such as sustainability, which insidiously reproduce the question of “what more can we take from the Earth.” According to Robin Wall Kimmerer, the true question that should lie at the center of eco-politics—and that she has inherited from Potawatomi ancestors—is “what does the Earth ask of us?” (Kimmerer Reference Kimmerer2014, 18). According to her, gratitude, ceremony, acts of practical reverence and land stewardship are all ways to endorse the “covenant of reciprocity” which underlies many indigenous interspecies practices (Kimmerer Reference Kimmerer2014, 23).
To put more-than-human care and eco-social reproduction at the center of political thinking implies, first and foremost, envisioning modes of living and satisfaction of needs that rely less on taking. Reciprocity in inter-human and interspecies interactions implies that the question of human needs has to be addressed insistently and meticulously, and that a thorough analysis of power-laden discursive arenas in which the interpretation of needs takes place has to be engaged in (Fraser Reference Fraser1989). Such a process would necessarily lead to political and collective reevaluations of what types of more-than-human care are considered essential and what are not, depending on the contexts and situations. One important criterion is that the capacity of species and ecosystems to sustain themselves must be assured before they are expected to contribute to human regeneration. As the 35,000 representatives of civil society, indigenous peoples, and various states (mainly from the Global South) gathered in Cochabamba asserted, eco-politics starts with an acknowledgment of “the right [of earth] to regenerate its bio-capacity and to continue its vital cycles and processes free from human disruptions; the right to maintain its identity and integrity as a distinct, self-regulating and interrelated being” (WPCCC 2010). Notions such as subsistence and eco-sufficiency, as put forward by materialist eco-feminists, are a good attempt to put agents of reproduction and regeneration at the center of our projects for better societal orders. Against the idea of sustainable development, thinking through the “subsistence perspective” (Mies et al. Reference Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen and Werlhof1999; Pruvost Reference Pruvost2021) highlights the importance of preserving and regenerating life rather than the standard of living of developed societies.
Subsistence production or life production encompasses all work performed during the creation and maintenance of immediate life, to the extent that such work is directed towards no other purpose. As such, the concept of subsistence production is diametrically opposed to that of commodity or surplus value production. The purpose of subsistence production is life. … This includes women's housework and the work of peasants in the nations of the Third World. But it also includes the productivity of nature in its entirety. (Mies Reference Mies, van der Linden and Roth2014a)
Subsistence is about a reappropriation of life and all that sustains it. It is not only a desirable horizon, but also an already existing set of practices. This kind of reciprocity which persists despite the galloping extension of commodification and privatization of life can, for example, be found in what Federici calls anti-capitalist commons, “both autonomous spaces from which to reclaim control over the conditions of our reproduction, and as bases from which to counter the processes of enclosure and increasingly disentangle our lives from the market and the state” (Caffentzis and Federici Reference Caffentzis and Federici2014). The governing principles of such commons are:
equal access, reciprocity between what is given and what is taken, collective decision-making, and power from the ground up, derived from tested abilities and continually shifting through different subjects depending on the tasks to be performed. (Caffentzis and Federici Reference Caffentzis and Federici2014)
However, the question of how to establish “reciprocity between what is given and what is taken” is still open.
The meaning of “caring back” needs to be examined more specifically and on a smaller scale if it is to have more value than a general but abstract principle. Here again, indigenous communities embody its concreteness. Plant gatherers, for example, “often leave a spiritual gift, but also a material gift, through the act of weeding, scattering seeds, helping the plants to move and flourish” (Kimmerer Reference Kimmerer and Hart2017, 379). Material and/or symbolic gifts in return for the care received from other living beings are frequently of a sacred and obligatory nature.
In the case of domestic animals, that have been genetically adapted over generations to live alongside humans, sometimes to assist and serve them, reciprocity might be more difficult to achieve. When there are no healthy relationships to return to, thinking, in the wake of Ben Almassi's work, in terms of moral repair might be more appropriate. Moral repair is about moving “relationships in the direction of becoming morally adequate, without assuming a morally adequate status quo ante” (Walker Reference Walker2006, 384 quoted in Almassi Reference Almassi2017, 27). As opposed to “stuff”-centered perspectives focused on compensation and achieving agreements about “how much” is appropriate, in restorative approaches “the harm done is only peripherally about ‘stuff’. Instead, the harm is understood in the relational realm”—the relationship itself needs to be overhauled from top to bottom (Ross Reference Ross2006, xvi–xvii, quoted in Almassi Reference Almassi2017, 23). On a practical level, this could, for example, include fair retirement options for assistance dogs, and a reconsideration of fallowing and rewilding as options for overexploited soils.
That said, the rush to establish general rules about what precisely it means to “care back” is bound to fail. Because more-than-human needs are necessarily contextual, situated, and, for the most part, not even known to humans, “caring back” means, first of all, inquiring precisely about the needs and experienced realities of other species. This echoes Haraway's definition of caring as “becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning” (Haraway Reference Haraway2007, 36). Feminist animal standpoint theory, which urges that we include animals’ standpoint in our ethical deliberations, has important insights to make here. Of course, animals are unable to share their critical views. As Josephine Donovan has noted: “While we may never fully understand what it feels like to be a bat, we can understand certain pertinent basics of his or her experience, sufficient for the formulation of an ethical response” (Donovan Reference Donovan2006, 321). There is much room for improvement when it comes to deciphering other species’ needs. A growing number of scholars in the environmental humanities have been working in this direction, putting forward the importance of “careful and critical attention to the specificity of other species’ lifeworlds,” and “immersive ways of knowing and being with others [that] involve careful attention to what matters to them” (van Dooren et al. Reference van, Thom and Ursula2016, 6). However, the environmental humanities’ multispecies “arts of attentiveness” would benefit from being enriched with care's political dimensions. A refined understanding of ecological care could help us to value not only the scientific practices of attentiveness (“caring about” in Tronto's typology) or the environmental NGOs’ political work (“taking care of”), but also the everyday ecological caring practices that aim to keep the world clean and healthy (“care giving”). Indeed, talking about care (rather than attentiveness, for example) enacts a displacement concerning the experts one ought to ask for advice. Whereas “attention” is often tied to the scientific practices of naturalists and the openness of the philosophical eye to its surroundings, care is the domain of marginalized communities and oppressed people. Applying these epistemological insights of care to eco-politics means shifting the focus of scholars in the environmental humanities from the phenomenological accounts of interspecies encounters to the everyday work of “earthcare” carried out by marginalized communities. As the proponents of the “red deal” correctly note, “indigenous people, for example, are already working ‘green jobs,’ they're just not getting paid or enjoying the protections employment offers for land, water, and treaty defense” (The Red Nation 2021). This also translates in the grammars and strategies of struggle: in many places, “Indigenous peoples and their allies have rearticulated their positions as protectors rather than protesters, emphasizing the importance of caring for and being good stewards of the earth” (Hobart and Kneese Reference Hobart and Kneese2020). To but it briefly, thinking in terms of “caring back” makes clear that caring about the environment is less a matter of a grandiose rescue of other species than preserving and healing the webs of caregiving that sustain our own lives on this planet—a practice many indigenous people are perfectly familiar with.
However, before ending this essay by brandishing indigenous ecologies as the solution to all our ills, we must keep in mind the important questions raised by feminist thinkers concerning whom we expect to care and why, and be wary of the homogenizing idealization and reification of indigenous caregiving. Indeed, in the past, the rights of indigenous communities to stay at their living places have been denied, precisely because of implicit expectations that they ought to care for the environment in order to legitimately exist—an expectation Western people have never had to face (Guha Reference Guha and Attfield2008). As feminists have long been arguing, the approach of care, if it is not politicized, may be turned against feminist objectives and used to privatize and naturalize the moral dispositions of caregivers and stigmatize those who do not fulfill caring expectations. Just as an uncritical celebration of women's different voices risks affirming sexist notions about women's place in society, celebrating indigenous “earthcare” risks exoticizing and homogenizing indigenous lives and stigmatizing those not fitting the mold. If we do not want ecology to become just another domestic chore assigned to BIPOC and women, we must inherit feminists’ desire to critically address oppressive assignations and power dynamics at play in caring. The approach of more-than-human care I've outlined has the potential to blend environmental humanities’ emphasis on affective dispositions and attachments toward the more-than-human with materialist ambitions to highlight exploitation and invisible labor. It offers the critical feminist stance sometimes lacking in environmental humanities,Footnote 8 while questioning the overly economic epistemology of Marxist eco-feminists.
Conclusion
“The first step … is for each person to admit human vulnerability. We are care receivers, all” (Tronto Reference Tronto2013, 146, emphasis added)—but in relation to whom? In Western capitalist societies, essential activities of caring conducted by BIPOC and white women are neither well regarded nor sufficiently theorized, let alone respected. Furthermore, the essential role of more-than-human earthlings in the sustaining of our lives is flatly denied.
What happens when humans see themselves as care receivers from a myriad of more than-human beings? And how can earthlings’ contributions to human existence be acknowledged and valued without commodifying them or romanticizing the often-unjust situations in which they take place? Rather than proposing definitive answers to these questions, I have outlined an approach for acknowledging more-than-human care. In the long run, doing justice to this care might require us to be more precise, specifying the homogenizing category of the “more-than-human,” delving more deeply into the differences between domesticated animals, non-domesticated animals, and plants, multiplying accounts of the diverse ways in which other beings are involved in the maintenance and repair of human worlds. However, feminist theories of care and social reproduction have long been at the forefront of efforts to draw attention to a set of activities deemed “natural,” and as this paper shows, the conceptual work needed to critically interrogate interspecific relations, as heterogenous as they might be, has much to gain from this body of theory. As I have argued, the concepts and images we use to talk about our natural surroundings have direct normative and political implications. This is in line with the epistemological and political objectives of feminist thinkers of care to “highlight the link between neglected realities and the lack of theorization (or, more directly, the rejection of theorization) of these invisibilized social realities (Laugier Reference Laugier2009).
Now, the assumption that we will end climate chaos by merely viewing extra humans differently and developing more ethical relationships towards them seems questionable. Hence the importance of placing care and “caring back” at the center of politics, through the paradigms of subsistence and restitution, which cannot be done without establishing an agonistic balance of power against those corporations and states that want to exploit to the bone all those beings they label as less than human. In a context where the capacity of so many living beings to sustain themselves is severely undermined by capitalist economies, there is a real urgency to stop considering it as a given; something one can appropriate for free or very cheaply. As Ariel Salleh puts it: “What is needed right now is a movement coalition mature enough to acknowledge this; one ready to organize social life around the logic of regeneration” (Salleh Reference Salleh2010, 199)—social regeneration and ecological regeneration.
Acknowledgments
For helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper, I thank Camille Collin, Lila Braunschweig, Lucile Richard, Brigitte Bargetz, and Astrid von Busekist, as well as the two anonymous reviewers of Hypatia. Shortcomings are my own. I would also like to thank the members and comrades of the Terrestres.org editorial team for stimulating and nurturing many of my reflections in the field of political ecology.
Léna Silberzahn holds a Ph.D. in political theory from Sciences Po and currently works as a teaching and research fellow in environmental politics at Université Paris 8. Her thesis is at the crossroads of environmental humanities, feminist theory, and affect studies, focusing on political fear and desensitization in times of ecological disaster.
