Care

Carolin Slickers

Related terms: affective ecologies, ecofeminism, exploitation, extraction, interspecies relationships, more-than-human, planetary health, posthumanism

Care can mean many things: a meal prepared and enjoyed together, a tidy and well-maintained programming code, grooming, or the water and nutrients transported from one part of the forest to where they are needed more. We consider care something vital, a necessity, and yet we perceive the act of care-giving as a gift, a willingness to give.

Care can be defined, in the words of Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto, 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.” This process of maintenance, continuation, and repair includes, according to them, “our body, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex life-sustaining web” (Tronto and Fisher 1990, 40). When Fisher and Tronto say “we” and “ours,” they had humans in mind. If we transfer this perspective to human environments, the pronoun is omitted: in environments where more-than-human actors are entangled, the shared nature of these environments is their fundamental condition. The idea of interconnectedness expressed here might already indicate why the concept of care could be of vital interest for the environmental humanities: it sheds light on how we live and dwell together, as a society, as a species, as an ecosystem.

Resistance. Caring for Oneself, Caring for Others

Audre Lorde has coined the idea of self-care as a political act, a radical act of resistance (Lorde and Sanchez 2017). The capitalisation of self-care has gone full circle – even Forbes is speaking of “Radical Self Care” as a way to protect yourself against the detriment of mental health caused by corporate greed (Robinson 2022), and discourses of self-care are already producing self-satirical accounts (Stein 2020). Yet, the care for oneself is deeply rooted in (Western) philosophy. To care for oneself, not least, means, according to Gerald Posselt, to speak the truth (Posselt 2021). Yet, it is also true that we often seem to become silent when caring for others. Care can often be quiet and intangible matters: its lack is what speaks to us and makes us act silently.

The question of thinking of ourselves and others as co-defined and antagonised has shaped our perspective on society, just as it shapes the way we (humans) think and write about ourselves and others in terms of destructiveness. Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others and, before this, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others bear this idea in their titles and texts. Even earlier, indigenous knowledge and ethics have shed a light on how to think our relationships to others in necessarily different ways: affirming that humans become human only by way of others, as the concept of “Ubuntu” illustrates (Holemans et al. 2022, 37).

Care is ambivalent. It can be as effective as systemic. It can be misused in contexts of oppression, and it can be a powerful recognition, helping to question oppressive systems. From a feminist perspective, caring for others has often led to dependencies. Those who care are, in the matrix of capitalism, either unpaid or poorly paid, and they are often (migrant) women. More and more, as Chatzidakis et al. claim, the current organisation of care as a gig economy makes caregivers “more numerous but also hugely overstretched, vulnerable and thus less able to care” (Chatzidakis et al. 2000, 2). Figuring politics of tenderness as a way of coming together differently (Kurt 2021) and conceptualising caring communities (Brennan et al. 2023) must therefore also face up to the challenge of not perpetuating old patterns under a new label. Everybody needs and provides care. If it is recognised that human existence is a form of interdependence, the social consequence might well be valuing care as the foundational principle of human and overall ecological sociability – and of finding dignity in dependence (Sergeant 2025).

Caring can be resistant to ideas about the monetary value of inter-human and interspecies relationships, to the politics of extraction and exploitation, and to thinking of ourselves as independent from others. Care is central to our current debates: The Anthropocene poses the question of how we can and will go on, and there will be no way beyond the question of care.

Roots. Care as a Radical Form of Living

Consulting the dictionary (or the roots of the word), it appears that a particular dimension of care has become obsolete in our modern consideration of the term. Inherited from the Germanic karôjan (which means to mourn), earlier historical denotations have vanished: sorrow and grief, mourning and lament (“Care, V. | Oxford English Dictionary 2025), being troubled, concerned, and anxious (“Care, N.¹ | Oxford English Dictionary” 2025). Care, as the provision and protection of conditions needed for others to sustain their livelihood and even thrive, seems at odds with the etymology of sorrow – so it seems at first. Yet, some Germanic languages still bear the same history, as the German Fürsorge is a composite of Sorge (sorrow) and für (for somebody).

Care appears as a multidirectional principle. As a form of precaution (Vorsorge), care becomes effective on a temporal axis: winter preparations of plants and animals speak to this sense of provision. The term Aftercare not only reflects a new perspective on sexual intercourse. It also puts into perspective that care is not only a form of preparing resilience (before) but also repairing harm (afterwards). Especially in this second regard, the root of grief becomes activated as a strain of meaning: when care is offered as a form of repair, a form of grieving is involved. We might figure this out, from our human perspective, when appreciating that Pyrophytes are blooming after wildfires, and when being moved by finding Matsutake Mushrooms growing in the ruins of Chernobyl (Tsing).

In the multidirectional grammar of ‘care,’ it also becomes recognisable that the term is a transitive verb. It is only functional if it is accompanied by connectors which bind it to an object, grammatically speaking. We care for somebody/something. It is a facet of thinking of humans as entangled with our environment that prompts this sense of contact through care, or, as María Puig de la Bellacasa puts it, “the fact of being touched by what we touch, puts the question of reciprocity at the heart of thinking and living with care” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 20). Für-sorge makes it evident: Language, as much as care, entangles us with one another.

Care appears as radical, both in the sense of unthinkable upheavals and in the sense of originality (roots). Even when the COVID-19 Pandemic has highlighted “the frontlines of care”, it did not do so as a means of sustaining and supporting livelihoods or criticising the status quo of care infrastructures, but strengthened ideas of capitalism, patriarchy, and nationalism under the idea of a “war” against COVID, as Krasny argues (Krasny 2023, 12). It seems politically radical to acknowledge these infrastructures of care and to demand that they shape our society, if not invisibly, then ostensibly. In times when we reckon with the Anthropocene and the multiple levels of its implications, the idea that planetary and biodiverse well-being is connected to the well-being of human societies still seems appalling to some. Many deem it easier to imagine an end to care (and planetary systems) than an end to capitalism – while only the latter flourishes on the former.

Interdependence. Care in the more-than-human world

Thinking care from a dual perspective of ecofeminism (the critique of social oppression based on notions such as gender or race intertwined with ecological destruction) and posthumanism (the questioning of traditional notions of ‘being human’ and its distinction from its environment) might shed light on how the concept of care is vital to thinking about hegemonic systems. Care can be a lens through which Eurocentrism, Androcentrism, and Anthrocentrism become recognised in more nuance, including how they make use of exploitation.

Central ideas in the Enlightenment legacy ignore the fact of interdependence and shared livelihood: Smith’s invisible hand, Descartes’ inanimate object environment, and Darwin’s biological competition over exceptionalism. Markets, in which all pursue their own self-interests, do not function without (invisible) care (Tronto and Fisher 1990). The way we have turned nature into an object of exploitation has also exposed ourselves to exploitation (Plumwood 2003; Merchant 2001). Knowledge of cooperative environments, such as the Wood Wide Web or Mycorrhiza (fungi networks), testifies that human individualism is an ecological impossibility. The very microbes inside our bodies are proof that humans cannot separate themselves from nature, that we are also a network of biological functions made up of the smallest actors.

It is thus impossible to differentiate strictly between human and non-human care relationships, as our form of living originates in this relationality (Holemans et al. 2022, 66). As Mará Puig de la Bellacasa puts it: “Care is a human trouble, but this does not make of care a human-only matter” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 2). The works of Robin Wall Kimmerer depict how care entangles human and more-than-human environments like braids of sweetgrass, and how it facilitates a co-creation of knowledge with ecologies rather than a control of ecologies by knowledge (Kimmerer).

Care has much to do with making a home and tending the earth, as it is a home. An ecofeminist lens offers a critical understanding of masculine enterprises in nature, understood as a ‘world out there,’ and as distinguished from the domestic sphere, which has been the foundation for thinking certain parts of the world as an extractive zone (Gómez-Barris 2017, 37). Such a lens also permits a description of the grasp for the world as a literal war on nature (Carson 2021).

The groundwork done by ecofeminism, according to Rosi Braidotti, concerns “making a compelling case for mutual interconnectedness.” This is central to what posthumanists think of as the “heterogeneous alliances” in which posthuman subjects exist (Braidotti 2022, 78). These notions contribute to an understanding of the practice of care as something that makes us kin and which cannot be left behind, but can only be perverted by capitalism in the sense of an exploitative twisting of it.

Thinking ‘care’ from a posthuman perspective means thinking in entanglements, thinking of social ties within and among more-than-human subjects (Tsing 2015). One of the possibilities to be (re)discovered is that of becoming related, of making kin (Haraway 2016), with each other. This means becoming in relation which what has always been considered ‘the other’ in the history of science (Gruen and Adams 2021): the non-male, non-white, non-human… The entanglement of nature-culture and the hybridity of existing with our technological environments make a new groundwork for care necessary.

Thinking care through the lens of the Environmental Humanities thus offers multiple possibilities of engaging with the relationality of ecologies from integrative angles that have so far been undervalued. Caring is integral to forms of life: the more ‘we’ engage with care, the more ‘we’ recognise that ‘we’ cannot refrain from caring.

References

“Care, N.¹ | Oxford English Dictionary.” 2025. Accessed March 20, 2025.

“Care, V. | Oxford English Dictionary.” 2025. Accessed March 20, 2025.

Braidotti, Rosi. 2022. Posthuman Feminism. Cambridge, Medford, MA: Polity.

Brennan, Mark A., Rhonda Phillips, and Norman Walzer, eds. 2023. Community Development for Times of Crisis: Creating Caring Communities. New York: Routledge.

Carson, Rachel. 2021. Man's War Against Nature. London: Penguin.

Chatzidakis, Andreas, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal. 2020. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso.

Gómez-Barris, Macarena. 2017. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gruen, Lori, and Carol J. Adams, eds. 2021. Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth. London: Bloomsbury.

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. New York: Milkweed Editions.

Krasny, Elke. 2023. Living with an Infected Planet: COVID-19, Feminism, and the Global Frontline of Care. Bielefeld: transcript.

Kurt, Şeyda. 2021. Radikale Zärtlichkeit: Warum Liebe politisch ist. Hamburg: Harper Collins.

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