A Caring Earth?

WE WILL RETURN to this understanding of the earth as generative, patterning, providing, (de)composing, and gathering. However, we should note that the diversity of earth’s patterning and the earlier critique of Darwin’s ameliorative arguments might initially seem to make any case for a caring earth harder to sustain (though it in no way undercuts Darwin’s celebration of the wonder to be found in considering the earth’s ecology and evolution). Indeed, someone might say, is it not enough that the earth has done and does all this: that in all of “its” unfathomable creativity, it has given rise to, provided for, and still continues to provision the existence of so many diverse forms in all their interrelations? Should we really require the earth to care too? Perhaps we should just accept that there is no possibility of this being the case and hence no solace to be found in such a notion, that care is a form of relation exemplified and reaching its zenith in human interrelations, and that even here, it is something of a scarce “commodity” only manufactured in certain social circumstances?

We might also question whether this notion of a caring earth is even helpful to environmentalists. To be sure, an earth duly certified “caring” could at least avoid being mistaken for just an object or a resource. That said, we can also see that being caring in our current materio-semiotic imaginary provides no guarantee whatsoever of not being subjected to the most callous and destructive treatment. Capitalism really doesn’t care who or what it exploits, and it can ignore or even quite readily manipulate and profit from care, for example, by manipulating you to buy the right “green” detergent. It also demands that many, in the “service” industries and beyond, especially women, must continually provide emotional labor in the form of having to appear to care (Hochschild 1983). “Have a nice day!” Similarly, in so many respects, capitalism frames nature as something that serves to provide emotional respite from labor, a holiday destination, a green space for leisure, and so on, even as it is being exploited.

So caring is not enough, unless we can also trace paths to very different materio-semiotic imaginaries, and here the claim is that envisaging or experiencing the earth as caring (or as weird, wondrous, inspiring, magical, and so on) might actually be inceptively important, that is, engendering a provisional openness that potentially informs future manners of worldly appropriation (see later). Even just trying to think a caring earth allows us to see a stark tension between the earth’s modes of patterning and gathering and capitalism’s world-forming technological globalization (Nancy 2007). Thinking about why, from within modernity, it is so impossible to consider the earth as caring also allows us to see how far capitalism, as an instantiation of the progressive imaginary, has taken us away from patterns of materio-semiotic interactions grounded in, or at least informed by, care—indeed, how care, like the earth in all its manifestations, has become merely something to exploit.

As we previously recognized, in John Ray’s historical, cultural, and ecological circumstances, nature’s provision could only be framed in theological terms as purposeful, as a gift from a caring God, but this was clearly something that invoked both wonder and gratitude. It did not just provide a license to exploit and export an anthropocentric worldview. Care for more than human beings was deemed immanent in the natural world. Ray, though, as we have seen, was well aware that in this latter respect, he differed from “generally received Opinion” (Ray 1691, 127; see also earlier discussion), and this difference arose through a life spent trying to articulate (not yet “scientific”) ways of addressing the more-than-just-human world, its plants, birds, airs, and waters. As progress rather than providence increasingly came to inform and dominate the Western imaginary, caring provision was replaced by a sense of earth as standing reserve for colonizing projects. Breaking from these historical legacies will be difficult and never complete, because both Providence and Progress are obviously globally formative; that is, they have now irredeemably affected the patterning of the earth, including the ways so many of us act and think, shape and are shaped by our materio-semiotic mode of existence.

In reimagining a provisional ecological alternative, we clearly need to avoid reverting to earlier forms of theological providentialism, which means not simply replacing God with a hypostasized Nature, despite some of us feeling a genuine and deep sense of awe concerning earth’s immense creativity. Lovelock is again a useful reference point here. He offers no prayers to Gaia but says he understands those who do. He fully understands why a more respectful orientation and a sense of gratitude for the gifts earth bestows are entirely appropriate. He seems to regret that “progress” destroyed the idea of a quasi-providential earth and has made us forget how we are cared for and provisioned by Gaia, though he rightly sees no room for this understanding within Earth systems science or systems theory (but see Young 2020). He is, for example, often nostalgic for certain aspects of earlier modes of relating to nature, writing of our growing disconnection from nature when he states that the

concept of Gaia or of the world of nature has never appealed to town-dwellers, except as entertainment. We lost contact with the Earth when our food and sustenance was no longer immediately and obviously dependent on the weather. (Lovelock 2009, 148, emphasis added)

Here, as so often in Gaian texts, the earth’s indifference to our fate is portrayed as the mirror image (and a consequence) of the historically inflected indifference toward nature characterizing modern societies. Lovelock seems to suggest that we cannot appeal to nature, to earth, or to Gaia (note the complete interchangeability of the terms in Lovelock’s own usage) because nature ceased to appeal to us when, at some historical time (as we became urbanized), we lost touch with the earth. It is this process that for Lovelock, paradigmatically, has had such “destabilizing” (if one dares use a term so intimately related to ideals of a balance of nature) climatic consequences.

This raises so many questions. Is this a quid pro quo? If we become indifferent to nature, then will nature express its indifference to us—and if so, how? With a virus, with a hurricane, or perhaps just in the way we fail to notice the natural wonders that appear before us? What “language” will Gaia use to express itself, and how should/could we interpret this natural expression given the materio-semiotic constraints and affordances of different imaginaries? Is it a matter of just letting you know that your fate is of no further concern (the earth, like a previously rejected lover, is now done with you too) or, alternatively, a matter of our now being awakened to the very impossibility of the idea that nature ever could have been concerned with us in any way whatsoever that could possibly have constituted “care”? As we have seen, Lovelock flits back and forth between these very different approaches.

This difficulty in expressing how the earth might (or might cease to) care, this communicative impasse, reveals both the inadequacy of our language and why this question is potentially generative for opening different approaches. Any solution we might find will have to express the important differences between providence, progress, and provid(a)nce. The typically modern answer would be to uphold a distinction between human subjects (capable of care) and inert or mindless objects (ontologically incapable of care) placing the earth, qua the planet, firmly in the latter category. A different but no less anthropocentric and humanist distinction might be made between human organisms (capable of care) and the earth as a (quasi) living organism, “a single physiological system” (Lovelock 2000, 11) or “superorganism” (Lovelock 2009, 133) that never had any capacity to “care” for its progeny, except though the accident of human existence. That is to say, as Hutton himself says, we are the earth’s unique heart and mind. This, so far as we can tell, is close to Lovelock’s current position. However, both these solutions obviously depend on a typically modern form of human exceptionalism, something that the very idea of Gaia should surely challenge.

The modern reluctance to refer to the earth as provisional and caring, rather than entirely indifferent, obviously circulates precisely because we consider care as something only exercised with intent and purpose, as exemplified by certain ethical forms of “subjective” or sentient human behavior, for example, in idealized parent–child relations or in the care we sometimes bestow on our pets or, for some, on their automobiles. We provide the pet or child with food, we polish and service the car, although we might not consider such services indicative of (ethical) care if it was largely self-serving, for example, increasing the vehicle’s future financial value. Care, in this ethical sense, also needs to be other-directed with little or no concern for personal profit or return.1 In Kantian terms, ethical care is a manner of addressing and providing for an Other as an end in itself, not as an instrumental means to our own ends. But of course, as we have already seen, the earth does not fit within a Kantian system; rather, it exemplifies the ways all provisions are only temporary and imperfect and never provide for us only as ends in ourselves, because nothing ever is an end in itself or, for that matter, simply a means to an end—everything is always ecologically complicated/implicated.

Such complications actually apply to human care too: it is always temporary (although in some instances, it might last a lifetime) and imperfect and always involves the relational interdependence of others’ materiality, meanings, lives, and deaths, as varieties of feminist ethics of care exemplify (see Gilligan 1982; Larrabee 1993; Curtin 1996). Feminist care ethics also explicitly recognizes the importance of caring as an emotional involvement in specific circumstances and the vital importance of feelings of being cared for as something quite distinct from, and not subsumed under, the abstract or “objective” apportioning of ethical standing, as, for example, in Kantian rights. It was a sense of “being cared for” that mattered to those seeking solace from ameliorative Darwinism. A feminist ethics of care is always already (ecologically/socially) entangled and contextual; it recognizes incompatible, indeed incommensurable, requirements that continually challenge and potentially dissolve any categorical imperatives. An ecological ethics, where provision for one often requires deprivation, even death, for other beings, and where “perpetual peace” (ecologically speaking) is never going to be an option, might well take something like this “form.”

It is not accidental, then, that notions of Gaia/Nature/Earth as provisioning were vitally important in early developments in ecofeminism (e.g., Spretnak 1986).2 Radical ecologists, such as Merchant (2006, xvii), have continued to envisage a feminist “ethic of earthcare that views both nature and people as real, live, active entities” appealing directly to those “weary of seeing nature as a vast machine that can be fixed by engineers and technicians.” Just regarding the earth as provisional, lively, and manifesting care fundamentally challenges this machine metaphor. This is only one of the many ways that ecofeminism has tended to be more sensitive to the unspoken limits of dominant modern philosophical frameworks; as Sandilands (1999, 24) argues, ecofeminism genuinely attempts to come to terms with its “Western centric limitations . . . and the role of global capital.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the question of care recurs constantly in ecofeminism. There are also explicit attempts to argue why a feminist ethics of care is a more appropriate ethical framework for environmentalism than other ethical theories or frameworks, such as deep ecology (e.g., Cheney 1987). That said, even here, the question of whether and how the earth cares often becomes sidelined as attention focuses on the gender implications of how to care for the earth. There are, for example, many intricate and crucially important discussions of the complexities and limitations of gendered metaphors of mothering and of the obvious implication that, in current circumstances, women are likely to be expected to take on the additional inequities of caring for (mothering) the earth (MacGregor 2006). However, whether and how the earth cares is rarely questioned, although it is certainly assumed that “she” does in those feminist discourses/practices willing to be overtly critical of the progressive imaginary, as, for example, in work focused on neo-pagan religious models of a Goddess who “is immanent in nature” (Starhawk 1999, 35). Unfortunately, many such approaches are liable to elicit claims from “progressive humanists” that they are outrageously anthropomorphic, wackily spiritual, politically retrograde, and hence potentially divisive for feminism and environmentalism as political movements. This is specifically alluded to by Spretnak (1986, 22) when she recalls being told how “talk of spiritual values and the feelings of reverence for Nature which had been prevalent in the [German] Green’s first [electoral] campaigns” were squelched by progressivist arguments.3

Still, the question of how the earth cares and of spiritual values is obviously explicit in forms of ecofeminism emerging from, or respectfully engaging with, Indigenous traditions that have retained a sense of the earth’s creative and caring capacities despite the ravages of colonialism and globalization. Many such accounts directly challenge modern Western presumptions of “environmental insentience” and of a human monopoly on ethics and care (e.g., Povinelli 1995, 516; see also Povinelli 2016). Cruikshank (2005, 3), for example, relates Athapascan and Tlingit oral traditions where

glaciers take action and respond to their surroundings. They are sensitive to smells and they listen. They make moral judgements and they punish infractions. Some elders who know them well describe them as both animate (endowed with life) and as animating (giving life to) landscapes they inhabit.

The cosmologies of many Indigenous North American cultures are quite literally grounded in the ways that the earth cares and actively provides for human beings, but by no means just for human beings, and explicitly suggest that the only appropriate response is gratitude for these gifts. Kimmerer (2013, 107), for example, describes how an Onondaga school day

begins not with the Pledge of Allegiance, but with the Thanksgiving Address, a river of words as old as the people themselves, known more accurately in the Onondaga language as The Words That Came Before All Else. This ancient order of protocol sets gratitude as the highest priority. The gratitude is directed straight to the ones who share their gifts with the world . . . “beginning where our feet first touch the earth, we send greetings and thanks to all members of the natural world.”

The Thanksgiving Address provides a way of addressing the earth that ensures that it is neither articulated as an object nor simply reduced to a resource or consumer goods:

Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction: it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. (Kimmerer 2013, 111)

Again, from within the progressivist imaginary, any such talk of the earth’s provisions constituting “care” and a “gift” is likely to be considered unjustifiably anthropomorphic, but why? If we recognize that the earth precedes us, then perhaps human gifts are only recognized as such because gift giving follows certain preexisting and more inclusive patterns of earthly provision. Certainly our very ability to care and our sentience are gifts from the earth, but so are very many carelike encounters with more-than-human aspects of the earth. If the earth, undeniably and in reality, provides (however temporarily) for all those who live, if the earth has quite literally created and given us all our lives and (for a time and to differing degrees) the affordances that can sustain them, and yet expects nothing at all in return, then is the earth, through these activities, not actually as near as one can possibly get to being an expression of both gifting and ethics? The earth is, after all, and literally, quite self-less in this respect!

Indeed, perhaps, the earth’s care is much closer to being a gift than any human form of giving where, as Derrida (1992) suggests, there is always a suspicion of there being a “self-ish” (in both senses—greedy and indeterminately associated with a self) return, whether conscious, subconscious, or through diffuse affects that permeate and compromise the boundaries of that self (see also Marion 2002; Smith 2005; Manolopoulos 2009). And whereas gratitude in the Western tradition is something that when received might be thought to compromise the ethical selflessness of the giver, a Thanksgiving Address, or gratitude in general for nature’s gifts, can in no way compromise the selfless activities of the earth. It can, however, radically challenge, change, and affect the ways we relate to/with the earth.4

That modernity balks at describing the earth as caring is indeed a reflection, indeed a key instance of, its technological framing of the world. Yet why, if it is not odd to say that the deer’s tail provides warning to its companions, that the spring grass provides sustenance for deer, or even that the earth provides for us all, should it seem so strange to say that the earth cares for us? Of course, as these examples make plain, it doesn’t just provide for us (humans), or even provide for us all, all of the time, in just the way we expect or might desire it too. It does not provide a never-ending “cornucopia” of delights, although that very term stems from experiences of earth’s bounty through its harvested gifts, experiences from which many of us are now, as Lovelock suggests, so very far removed. However, as we have already noted, earth does provide our very existence, and of course, as mortal and ecologically unexceptional beings who partake in the earth, we, too, will eventually find ourselves providing for other beings, whether or not we care to do so.5

Interestingly, some forms of feminist “posthumanism” are also now making careful arguments for recognizing the animacy of the earth in ways that highlight its involvement in creating matters of concern, and its involvement in any ethics of caring. For example, Bellacasa (2017, 191–92) focuses on the care generated by and in certain agricultural relations to soil:

Relational approaches to the cycles of soil life in themselves can be regarded as disruptions to productivist linear time. . . . Caring for soil communities involves making a speculative effort toward the acknowledgement that the (human) carer also depends upon the soil’s capacity to “take care” of a number of processes [sic] that are vital to more than her existence. . . . Foodwebs are a good example to think about the vibrant ethicality in webs of interdependency, the a-subjective but necessary ethos of care circulating through these agencies that are taking care on one another’s needs in more than human relations.

Although Bellacasa certainly focuses on soil relations involving the generation of human care, she here suggests that care is something that percolates through earth whether or not humans are present.

Taking all of this into account there does seem to be a deceptively simple way in which we might say the earth is care-full, just as we previously suggested it was purpose-full. Specifically, when we look at the earth as being full of purposes, some of those purposes are clearly matters of caring for others. Humans are not the only beings that care for their young, they are not the only beings to direct their activities toward the provision of others or even to give their very lives to ensure such provision. Now this might only seem to provide a vicarious answer to the question of whether the earth cares by providing instances of care between specific organisms in certain times and places. There is also, as we have seen, an important difference between recognizing an earth full of varied purposes and thinking of the earth itself as purposeful in an overarching teleological sense. Something similar might be said for care. However, in both a Gaian and a provisional ecological approach, these organisms do not just live upon the surface of but actually, in part, constitute the earth, and so it seems, to that extent, that care in all its varied forms is also constitutive of the patterning of the earth, its ecology. In other words, it is simply not possible to say that the earth is necessarily, inherently, objectively, or wholly indifferent to every life or concern, just that it may not care “as a whole”—care is present only when and where care becomes manifest. The answer cannot be a simple yes, the earth does care, or no, the earth does not care, but a recognition that caring is one (of very many) registers in which the earth provisionally manifests or worlds.

The modern presumption is that the earth is uncaringly indifferent, but how can this be so if it is partly constituted by care and, albeit imperfectly and temporarily, provides so well for beings, including humans, that an entire imaginary was previously grounded on the idea that this provision could only be explained by reference to a caring God? It provides no kind of resolution simply to say that because the natural world sometimes appears as harmful, sometimes as caring, it must, in reality, be neither. Rather, the earth is never just harmful, caring, or indifferent. Indeed, the earth is never just there, like an object waiting to be explained. Rather, it is always creatively present in and as it continually manifests, as it worlds in all its complexity, a complexity of which we are now, and for a little while, an integral part. The ideas both of Gaia and of provisional ecology require that the earth be addressed not as something (an object) that stands over and against us (subjects) but as something that is our home and to which we are party. So if we say the earth cares, we are not just making a claim that nonhuman nature provides and cares for humans, as we might have a vision of an external God sitting back and resting while his well-designed and well-oiled machine works away providentially. We are speaking of how care appears and disappears in the more-than-just-human world. A provisional/providential ecology is not all about “us,” but whether we recognize certain occurrences as manifesting care is a matter (and a semiotics) of how we address the earth and the more-than-human earth addresses us. It is a matter of interpretation and ontology together, not one or the other.

A reticence to regard the earth as caring also persists because we tend to think of care as something given continually, protectively, and irrevocably, whether directed at an individual or expressed as a more general attitude toward others. In other words, care has an indelibly ethical connotation, and so many of the things that happen “on earth” seem entirely incompatible with the notion of care or ethics. As John Stuart Mill (1885, 28–29) pointed out, nature hardly seems to be a perfect moral exemplar:

In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s everyday performances. . . . Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones . . . starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold.

Indeed it does. Many, perhaps most, aspects of the earth’s manifestations cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be deemed caring. But the earth is also present in everything that does care, in every instance of human and nonhuman love for others, in every act of kindness, every moment of wonder, every aspect of provision for every living thing. Of course, it can also appear, as Macfarlane’s description of the iceberg demonstrates, as starkly indifferent, as weird and alienating, as terrifying, entrancing, nauseating, magical, and so on. Indeed, the earth appears in so very many ways at different times and places and to so very many different beings with immensely different interests and concerns.

Here again, though, these patterns are found in human care too; a caring relationship with another person does not mean that the carer always is, or for that matter ever appears as, caring to that person all the time and in every circumstance, still less that they care for everyone else in a similar manner. It does not mean that care for one may not have negative consequences for another or that caring is in any sense reciprocal. Care can be provided without love and thereby be almost indistinguishable from mere provision, or it can be intense and heartfelt and sustain and nurture in ways that comfort the recipient. We do not have to know we are giving care to provide it or to know that we receive care to be provided for, though both may be important. Of course, aspects of care may appear in human relations that rarely if ever appear in any other cases, but these are not consistent across all cases, and aspects of care might appear in other species that do not appear in human relations. Caring, again, is a matter of ontology and interpretation, which is not at all to say that we can interpret its presence or absence as we choose.

Not every provisional relation is going to be described as caring, but many that are do not necessarily require the constant intentional giving over of one’s own concerns to serve those of another being. Think of the “ecological” complexities of how the provision of human care does and does not fit this pattern: the sleep-deprived parent continuing to begrudgingly and automatically respond to the child’s insistent calls to be fed at all hours of the night; telling someone something that he really does not want to hear or keeping something hurtful from him; the hospital charged with an institutional failure of care despite the best intentions and exertions of its nursing staff; the last rites performed by a priest who has lost his faith; letting someone die or never letting go because we love her so very much; caring deeply who wins the election or last night’s football game; lying about Santa Claus—or telling the truth; having no care in the world; caring for a toy; feeding a pet who regularly eats the local wildlife; caring whether your child passed her exams; caring what the neighbors think. Now think of the cases we might come across in a rotten log. The female wood louse keeping its young, so vulnerable to desiccation, in a specially created brood pouch under her shuffling body; ants attending to eggs and larvae, or perhaps to the aphids some species capture, feed, and “milk”; the logs becoming a tree “nursery” protecting the seedlings’ roots and supplying nutrients; the mouse that protects then evicts each successive brood of its young every few weeks.

Care is circumstantial, relational, provisional—not something injected into a situation but an involvement of various patterns arising in the ecology of lives. There is nothing essential about care; it is not a singular kind of relation but a word we use in so very many different circumstances to try to express something of situations where we find overlapping patternings of provision that are not self-directed and concerned. Care appears as expressions and configurations of relational patternings of existence that for a while, whether intentionally or not, touch upon and serve to sustain or succor particular beings’ and things’ all too brief existence in the face of forces that would otherwise dissipate or damage them sooner rather than later.

How, then, are we to answer the question whether the earth cares? Should we try to solve this question like a difficult mathematical equation—the earth is, on average, 7.24 percent caring, 11.2 percent vengeful, 30 percent indifferent, and so on? Should we suggest a future dialectical synthesis to these unruly contradictions or perhaps return to thinking of the world in Manichean terms? Should we, perhaps, posit an ecological equivalent of a theodicy that seeks to transform every apparent evil into a prospective good? This, at least, seems initially possible, but surely only, as noted earlier, at the risk of hypostasizing Nature in God’s place. It is also unnecessary. By presuming a perfectly good and caring God, theological providentialism had to generate a theodicy just as so-called natural theology required the supernatural to provide its ultimate meaning. A theodicy’s purpose is to provide justification for appalling and unjustifiable happenings, often as an ultimate resolution of all suffering, in a final end that reveals God’s designs and how, despite appearances, “he” really cares for us all (or maybe just for a privileged few believers), if not here and now, then at the completion of our earthly lives and/or the end of time. But this is precisely why this resolution is so other-worldly, because a provisional (temporary and nonteleological) earth could hardly play that role and so, at its theological best, is just temporarily accommodating rather than providentially directed.

If we decouple ecological provision from theological providence, we are no longer faced with trying to produce a theodicy of the earth, to prove that God’s caring (but all so often hidden) intentions are best expressed in the earth’s current ecological form. Nor need we be focused on “accentuating the positive” and “eliminating the negative” in our account of the earth’s provisionality. We are not involved in some overarching Panglossian argument about this world being the best of all possible worlds nor engaged in the equivalent of a utilitarian calculus, weighing equable climate against dreadful storms, natural health against plague and pandemic (although, as Covid-19 demonstrates, these are so often “anthropogenically” and artificially enabled and transmitted, as unintended consequences of a technological enframing). We do not need to argue that all places on the earth are suited to human well-being or to teaching us valuable life lessons, nor even seek to belatedly justify some lost natural form of the earth as a golden age or paradisiacal place over and against modernity.

None of this means that our sustaining a sense of a caring earth is unimportant. If we recognize, experience, and respond to the ways that the earth provides and cares for us in fundamentally important ways, then we might address the earth very differently, resisting its being enframed theologically or technologically as something at our service. This relationship is not so simple as Lovelock’s quid pro quo; the earth does not just become indifferent in a fit of pique if we are indifferent to it nor send down fire and brimstone like some vengeful god if we disrespect it. However, if we do, however unintentionally, address the earth as an object, as resource, property, commodity, or our birthright, this is indeed disrespectful to that which gave us birth, and it does indeed have materio-semiotic/ecological consequences, some of them potentially dire, certainly for many other Terrans, but for humans too. To regard the earth as, among other things, a source of provision and care, rather than a resource, might mean we stop leaving so very many other constituents of the earth to drown in our shit, although, of course, there are no final guarantees and no eternal reckoning. It might also provide some solace and hope against cold “realism” and/or alienated despair in the face of ecological disaster.