Earthcare

Wendy Harcourt

Related terms: care, ecological reparations, environmental justice, extraction, lifeworlds

‘Earthcare’ is a term that is emerging in environmental humanities from feminist and indigenous research and practice that aims to capture the historical relations of care between humans and nature. By bringing together the terms ‘earth’ and ‘care,’ ’Earthcare’ refers to the life-making and life-sustaining activities that maintain humans and more-than-humans in their lifeworlds. I use the term ‘care’ to mean the social, political, ecological, and embodied processes necessary to nurture relationships, responsibilities, and accountabilities for flourishing lifeworlds. I use the term ‘Earth’ to refer to all aspects of life on the planet. Caring for the Earth, or ‘Earthcare,’ is for humans to be aware of and take responsibility for devastating human impacts on the rivers, seas, forests, soils, and the animals on a shared planet. The term ‘Earthcare’ challenges capitalocentric narratives of nature as an economic source to be exploited.  ‘Earthcare’ is not a grand narrative; rather, it is grounded in context and shaped by the myriad of everyday stories of survival due to care. In my exploration of the term ’Earthcare’, I engage with recent feminist and indigenous understandings as a contribution to environmental humanities interest in how humans can and should relate to the environment by accepting their co-existence with more-than-human others (Suchet-Pearson et. al. 2013).

My survey is partial, as in this short entry, it is not possible to refer adequately to the rich and growing feminist and indigenous literature on care (see also Carolin Slickers, “Care” in this Glossary). My entry builds on: feminist theorists of care such as Joan Tronto and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa who give us the ethical basis of why care matters;  the work of Elke Krasny which reflects on care during the Covid crisis; and the care manifestos that emerged during Covid (Chatzidakis, et al. 2020; Krasny 2023; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Tronto and Fisher 1990). Others writing on care include feminist degrowth and feminist technoscience scholars as well as ecofeminists who put care at the centre of political transformations (Gruen and Adams 2021; Haraway 2016; Merchant 2001; Tsing 2015). There are studies of indigenous cosmologies, particularly from Latin America, where living well with care is deeply embedded in world views where Earthcare labour is part of the web of dependencies or forces of reproduction that keep people going in the face of capitalist extractivism (Barca 2020; Ojeda et al 2022; Solera 2023). 

I contribute to this growing literature with reflections based on my own context and experience as a white settler Australian who has worked internationally on gender and environmental justice. My entry aims to present ‘Earthcare’ as a strategic concept that can offer possibilities of transformation by countering critical and dystopic views of the future of this Earth. This is not an easy context with which to engage. White settler Australia has a complex and difficult history, which has been blind, destructive, exploitative, and arrogant about Earthcare, ignoring the deep and millennial-long cultural knowledges of Country (territory, lifeworlds) by indigenous peoples (Harcourt 2021). What I argue here is that while aware of such ontological frictions, we can heed the invitation of feminists and indigenous thinkers to explore’ Earthcare,’ learning from multiple worlds which are partially connected but still radically different as part of a process of ecological reparations (Papadopoulos et al, 2023; Bird Rose, 2024).

I begin with ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s term “Earthothers,” which underlines how humans need to engage in reciprocal relations with the other beings that inhabit the Earth and lifeworlds. Her term helps us to understand how animals and plants can be seen being persons and that our human lives are lived in relationship with these other persons (Plumwood 2003). In her writings (and life), Plumwood shows us how to build new forms of ethical practices amongst human and more-than-human beings over time (past, present, and future), where Earthcare is positioned as core to future flourishing. Along with her conceptual insights, the stories she tells about living with a wild wombat and surviving being rolled by a crocodile help us to consider how to redress multi-species relations, decentring the human and learning how to care for others with whom we share our environment and on which we are dependent. Caring for others is not straightforward, as Plumwood’s stories about surviving the clutches of a crocodile and the unreliability of relationships with Earthothers, such as wombats who chose when to come and go, indicate (Plumwood 2008).  Being open to seeing humans as part of reciprocal entangled relations of care is important, particularly in the context of Australia today, as climate change brings floods, heatwaves, fires, coral bleachings, extinctions, and diseases which impact all beings sharing the territory.

Environmental humanities scholar Deborah Bird Rose’s inspiring writings on humanity’s reciprocal relations with Earthothers also help shape meanings of ‘Earthcare.’ Her work exposes the effects of human actions on the nonhuman world, learning from Indigenous Australians’ (with whom she lived and worked) sense of ecology as one of connectivity and mutual benefit. Bird Rose describes what she learnt from Indigenous teachers about the importance of responsible relations – that human beings should not be ”in an extractive relation to ‘resources’ but have a responsibility to ensure the abundance of all other life into the future” (Bird Rose 2024, 24). Aware of the ontological frictions of practice and beliefs between Indigenous and Western views, she uses what she calls “firestick wisdom” to ask that humans take responsibility for a flourishing multispecies world in the face of growing destruction (Bird Rose 2024). In her book Shimmering, Bird Rose explores the “matrix of power, desire, and lures” across several species and cultures to draw our attention to “the brilliant shimmer of the biosphere and the terrible wreckage of life in this era that we are coming to refer to as the Anthropocene” (Bird Rose 2013, 51).

Taking up responsibilities through more reciprocal relations with the environment challenges traditional Western understandings of ’environment’, where nature and culture are separated. An important article that respectfully opens up a deeper understanding of ’Earthcare’ is by Suchet-Pearson et al. (2013), authored by Country Bawaka along with white settler and indigenous Australian researchers. They explain how ‘Caring as Country’ refers to the connection among human and more-than-human communities sharing a territory or place across time, and where humans live with and nourish, spiritually and physically, the beings that are part of Country. ‘Care as Country’ means more than looking after animals, plants on a specific land or territory: it incorporates living with and acknowledging the relations and sharings of all living beings existing together. Indigenous Australians’ way of being with Country is founded in an “ethics of collaboration and care, based on recognition of human and non-human agency … one that would nurture relationships, responsibilities, and accountabilities within and beyond the false dichotomies of researcher–researched, manager–managed” (Suchet-Pearson et al, 2013, 196).

Learning from indigenous understandings of Country challenges the separation between human and nature as well as human-centredness and control over nature. Instead, such learning points to a mutuality and connectedness of becoming-together. Rather than conserve, develop, extract, or own land, we must pay attention to the constitutive connections that bind humanity to a multitude of other sentient beings or Earthothers: “…all humans and non-humans, actors, actants, everything material, affective, all processes and relationships are not things, are not even isolated beings, but are entangled becomings, creative and vital and always in the process of becoming through their connections” (Suchet-Pearson et. al. 2013, 187). In a beautiful passage, the authors reflect on indigenous Yolŋu ontology by describing the emotion and affect of the changing colours of the sunset:

The light changes colour; the reds, oranges, yellows, whites infuse our being, enable our becoming. The light is part of Country; it has its own agency, its own creativity and vitality, its own song, language, Law and knowledge …Agency is not just the remit of humans … The sunset is ephemeral: it is constantly changing, from moment to moment, night to night (Suchet-Pearson et. al. 2013, 195).

As this example illustrates so movingly, attention to Earthcare opens a “space for recognizing, envisioning, and making life-affirming ecologies rather than extractive systems of destruction” so that we are “capable of protecting and defending life and living worlds” (Ojeda et. al. 2022, 150).  Earthcare helps us to recognise how ‘solidarity’ can extend to the more-than-human, and how we are connected “to ecologies, to Country” and in this way “usher in new forms of belonging” (Gibson Graham 2011, 17).  As we learn to care about our increasingly damaged environment, Earthcare becomes part of ecological restoration so that “as we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us” (Kimmerer 2013, 340).

We are invited in these visions of Earthcare to consider how to survive the anthropocene/capitalocene with hope and possibility, even joy.  Yet embracing Earthcare does not mean we can ignore the existential and political limits, the conflicts and negativity due to the materially destructive impact of humanity on the planet. Earthcare is also about learning to live with mourning and loss. Caring relations involving living systems mean there is also death, waste, and entropy in ecological biopolitical relations that govern humans and more-than-human forms of life. Human bodies are intimately entangled with other bodies in a world of waste and toxicants full of loss and death. Such toxic realities require us to practice “an ethics of care and sensitivity that extends far from humans’ own borders” (Chen 2012, 237).

The concept of ‘Earthcare’ takes us away from human exceptionalism and invites us to consider otherwise politics, knowledge, and ways of living that are interconnected and co-constituted with Earthothers. It is a concept that continues to evolve in an intercultural exchange among feminists and indigenous activist scholars as they search for ways to understand and practice multispecies belonging so that human lives become compatible with a flourishing rather than a destructive future for our lifeworlds. While I acknowledge it is a complex and contested process to reflect on indigenous world views in western academic debates around care, with the risks of appropriation, lack of respect or humility, in this entry I have tried to show how a concept such as ’Earthcare’ can be part of generative research practices in the environmental humanities’ search for ways to repair our Earth.

Acknowledgements

This entry is drawn from my forthcoming book Conundrums of Care: Feminist Entanglements in Critical Development Studies to be published Open Access by Bloomsbury Academic in early 2026.

References

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