Care
This note is about the notion of care as a way to understand interactions between living beings.
Definitions
Cf.
- symbiosis
- mutualistic networks 1
- parental care (including in plants)
- eusociality
- positive interactions
- facilitation (facilitation networks), intraspecific, other
- recruitment (recruitment networks)
- mutualistic networks, constructive networks (cf. Niche Construction), see see Losapio below
- nurse plants
Care is activities of maintaining and repairing the world to enable good life.
Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge, 1993.
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a doing (caring for)
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an emotion (caring about)
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care work is necessary to human and nonhuman societies
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care movements challenge neoliberalism that is antithetical to care
Evans, Erin M. ‘Care Movement, Climate Crisis, and Multi-Species Refugees’. In Like an Animal: Critical Animal Studies Approaches to Borders, Displacement, and Othering, edited by Natalie Khazaal and Núria Almiron, 161–81. Leiden: Brill, 2021.
Care is an action with shared benefits that comes at a cost to the carer (what is the difference between care and design: define).
Care contributes to health, welfare, maintenance, and protection.
In communities, care relates to relationships.
Common understandings of care are anthropocentric in their reliance of human-specific aspects such as emotions, ethics, and responsibility. In our definition, care does not have to committed to consciously. For example, acacia trees providing shelter to ants and ants protecting the tree against herbivores and competing plants exhibit mutual care.
The point of extending the concept of care (rather than resource trading, competition for survival, or other metaphors) to all life is to emphasise practices and opportunities of mutual support.
For example, parental care is an evolved response that occurs in many animals apart from humans and in plants or fungi too.
Formation of caring/mutualistic relationships is a continuously performed and shifting process. An agent's Capabilities for care can apply to new relationships, gradually or suddenly (e.g., when a dog defends for a kitten, or a plant provides shade to a human baby).
An expectation for an ethical commitment as the basis for care can be resolved via an understanding of morality as cooperation: morality is a set of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation and conflict. 2
Benefits
Care (facilitation, etc.) can broaden the Ecological Niche for lifeforms.
Bulleri, Fabio, John F. Bruno, Brian R. Silliman, and John J. Stachowicz. ‘Facilitation and the Niche: Implications for Coexistence, Range Shifts and Ecosystem Functioning’. Functional Ecology 30, no. 1 (2016): 70–78. https://doi.org/10/f764v9.
Koffel, Thomas, Tanguy Daufresne, and Christopher A. Klausmeier. ‘From Competition to Facilitation and Mutualism: A General Theory of the Niche’. Ecological Monographs 91, no. 3 (2021): e01458. https://doi.org/10/gjwg4k.
This applies for restoring or modifying the niche volume in response to the anthropogenic change and in novel/degraded ecosystems.
Complications
Care is complicated given the misaligned needs and preferences of interdependent existences.
Cf. the notion of 'violent care' as discussed by van Dooren (violent-care of captive life, culling, feeding less valuable to more valuable, displacement, forced reproduction, survival in confinement, etc.). One example is when the care for a species results in suffering and denigration of individuals.
Thom Van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction, Critical Perspectives on Animals. Theory, Culture, Science, and Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
The need for an ongoing critical assessment of the goals and practices of care.
Thom Van Dooren, “Care,” Environmental Humanities 5, no. 1 (2014): 291–94, https://doi.org/10/gfzf62.
Radical care.
Care relates to systemic inequality. Therefore, it can result in surveillance and unpaid labour, to make up for institutional neglect or to provide essential services, especially in application to many nonhuman beings. It can some groups against others, determining who is worthy of care and who is not, again something that is acute in application to nonhuman beings.
For the human background, see:
Hobart, Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani, and Tamara Kneese. ‘Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times’. Social Text 38, no. 1 (142) (2020): 1–16. https://doi.org/10/gkcggr.
Landscapes of Care
Site of care a varied and distributed. Participants continuously perform and co-constitute place and care as networks of relationships.
Ivanova, Dara, Iris Wallenburg, and Roland Bal. ‘Care in Place: A Case Study of Assembling a Carescape’. Sociology of Health & Illness 38, no. 8 (2016): 1336–49. https://doi.org/10/f9bjpv.
In application to predominantly human places, 'landscape' is more metaphorical, in application to predominantly nonhuman living communities, 'care' is.
More-than-Human Care
Bellacasa, María Puig de la, ed. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Doubts that connection to nonhumans is enough (which one can read as the need for self-determination and Autonomy).
Pitt, Hannah. ‘Questioning Care Cultivated Through Connecting with More-Than-Human Communities’. Social & Cultural Geography 19, no. 2 (2018): 253–74. https://doi.org/10/ggbrtg.
Gesing, Friederike. ‘Towards a More-Than-Human Political Ecology of Coastal Protection: Coast Care Practices in Aotearoa New Zealand’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4, no. 2 (2021): 208–29. https://doi.org/10/grp3mp.
Animals
Donovan, Josephine. ‘Feminism and the Treatment of Animals: From Care to Dialogue’. In The Animal Ethics Reader, edited by Susan J. Armstrong and Richard George Botzler, 3rd ed. 2003. Reprint, New York: Routledge, 2017.
Tallberg, Linda, José-Carlos García-Rosell, and Minni Haanpää. ‘Human–Animal Relations in Business and Society: Advancing the Feminist Interpretation of Stakeholder Theory’. Journal of Business Ethics, 2021. https://doi.org/10/gm6gpg.
Plants
Trees provide self-care, care for relatives and others, mother and support all forms of life (here mothering is not only human and not only female).
Therefore, humans need to approach tree/forest stewardship with understanding and respect for the interconnectedness and interdependence of all organisms.
Trees are not isolated individuals but rather part of a larger community, and that their wellbeing relates to the wellbeing of other organisms such as fungi, bacteria, insects, and animals.
Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Knopf, 2021.
Barnett, Joshua. ‘Imagining More-Than-Human Care: From Multispecies Mothering to Caring Relations in Finding the Mother Tree’. Journal of Ecohumanism 2, no. 1 (2023): 9–20. https://doi.org/10/gr7z5n.
On gardening as the model practice of human care for plants.
Schörgenhumer, Maria. ‘Caring for Plants: Cultivating Relational Virtues’. In Plant Ethics: Concepts and Applications, edited by Angela Kallhoff, Marcello Di Paola, and Maria Schörgenhumer, 110–18. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.
Diana, Paolo, and Maria Carmela Catone. ‘Human-Plants Relationship: A Kaleidoscope of Values and Attitudes’. Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale, no. 118 (2019): 88–110. https://doi.org/10/ggw3xd.
Calls for the inclusion of plants into relationships of care:
Hall, Matthew. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.
Callaway, Ragan M. Positive Interactions and Interdependence in Plant Communities. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007.
On mutualistic/interrelated strategies in plants.
Scientists often see disturbances such as fire and herbivory as damaging. This is clear in the terminology of palatability, avoidance, resistance, susceptibility, and tolerance. However, plants do not need to avoid a defoliation event totally by being unpalatable or nonflammable. They can ‘resist’ a defoliation event by protecting sensitive plant parts or by tolerating it at individual, population and landscape levels.
Sally Archibald, Gareth P. Hempson, and Caroline Lehmann, “A Unified Framework for Plant Life‐History Strategies Shaped by Fire and Herbivory,” New Phytologist 224, no. 4 (2019): 1490–1503, https://doi.org/10/gn9kzd.
Facilitation and Requirement Networks
Botanical concepts have traditionally viewed the environment as a static box containing plants. In this box, plants compete with one another and act as passive resource consumers subjected to the environment in a top-down manner. This entails that plants have only negative effects on other plants and have no influence on the environment. By contrast, there is increasing evidence that plants have positive, bottom-up engineering effects and diversity effects on other plants and on the environment. Here, to overcome the limitations of top-down environmental control, antagonistic-only and pairwise interactions, I propose the concept of constructive networks. Constructive networks unify niche construction and network theory recognizing that (i) plants have manifold ecological functions and impacts on their neighbours, and (ii) the environment shapes and is shaped by diverse organisms, primarily plants.
Gianalberto Losapio, ‘Contextualizing the Ecology of Plant–Plant Interactions and Constructive Networks’, AoB PLANTS 15, no. 4 (2023): plad035, https://doi.org/10/gtcggw.
Examples
- warning through chemical signals
- sharing of resources
- helping each other grow
- parental care 3
"a plant world dominated by habits that promote cooperation and care among co-inhabitants", on cooperation between plants described as “High Andean sub-Antarctic Gardeners”
Manuela Méndez-Herranz, Guillermo Marini, and Ricardo Rozzi, ‘Sub-Antarctic High Andean “Gardeners”: Cultivating Caring Relationships’, in Field Environmental Philosophy: Education for Biocultural Conservation, ed. Ricardo Rozzi et al. (Cham: Springer, 2023), 71–86.
In Design
Design and engineering by plants can be seen as forms of care for themselves and for others.
Discusses care in design, including in application to nonhuman beings.
Wakkary, Ron. Things We Could Design: For More Than Human-Centered Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021.
Fitz, Angelika, Elke Krasny, and Architektur Zentrum Wien, eds. Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019.
Davis, Juliet. The Caring City: Ethics of Urban Design. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022.
Gabauer, Angelika, ed. Care and the City: Encounters with Urban Studies. New York: Routledge, 2022.
Examples
Use of shrubs as nurse plants.
Castro, Jorge, Regino Zamora, José A. Hódar, and José M. Gómez. ‘Use of Shrubs as Nurse Plants: A New Technique for Reforestation in Mediterranean Mountains’. Restoration Ecology 10, no. 2 (2002): 297–305. https://doi.org/10/dfg2xq.
Footnotes
Bascompte, Jordi, and Pedro Jordano. Mutualistic Networks. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.˄
Curry, Oliver Scott. ‘Morality as Cooperation: A Problem-Centred Approach’. In The Evolution of Morality, edited by Todd K. Shackelford and Ranald D. Hansen, 27–51. Evolutionary Psychology. Cham: Springer, 2016. See also: Curry, Oliver Scott, Mark Alfano, Mark J. Brandt, and Christine Pelican. ‘Moral Molecules: Morality as a Combinatorial System’. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13, no. 4 (2022): 1039–58. https://doi.org/10/gnb87h.˄
Wied, Anna, and Candace Galen. ‘Plant Parental Care: Conspecific Nurse Effects in Frasera speciosa and Cirsium scopulorum’. Ecology 79, no. 5 (1998): 1657–68. https://doi.org/10/dtq269.˄
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