The rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus reminds us, once more, of the porous boundaries between species, and the social and ecological disasters of growth-driven capitalism. Human dependence on diverse ways of life for collaborative survival is more obvious than ever in this time that some are calling the Sixth Extinction. In response to recent critical investigations of practices and labors of care, this collection of essays explores how attention to multispecies care contributes to recognizing the limits, dangers, and compromises of “care” practices in vulnerable ecological contexts. Taking the Sixth Extinction and its crises—of health, climate, agriculture, economy, democracy, and more—as a point of departure, the essays in this series gather diverse ethnographic stories of multispecies care to ask, How does care take form as, in, and through multispecies relations? What are the limitations and hazards of caring for nonhumans in contexts of loss and degradation? What is the potential of caring beyond the human for opening up (or disclosing) knowledge about other world-making practices and the possible ecological futures they may enable? Listening to these stories seems pertinent amid the chorus of other, often louder, voices that prophesize apocalypse and the doom of the world as we know it—or, conversely, that pronounce their unshakeable faith in solutions, in the “techno-fix” that will repair all damage through novel and ever advancing innovation.
Posts in This Series
Introduction: Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction
At the time of this writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has reached almost every part of the globe. The rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus reminds us, once more, o... More
They Grow and Die Lonely and Sad
In Indonesian West Papua, vast swathes of rainforest are being razed to develop monocrop oil palm plantations. Alongside rampant ecological destruction, a new b... More
(E)valuations of More-Than-Human Care
Smiling bashfully at the off-screen television reporter, the lady starts speaking calmly. He’s now three years old, she says brightly, cuddling A, a toddler-siz... More
Counting and Discounting Life in an Age of Extinction
The threat of species extinction unambiguously calls humans to care for the more-than-human. Yet, even as the realities of extinction arouse such care, some spe... More
Caring for Dying Canals
Nodi (pseudonym) is a place surrounded by water: the freshwater tributary river of the Ganges and a tidal brackish river originating from the Bay of Bengal. I... More
Bonsai Care in an Industrial Zone
Afu quietly trims a potted banyan in the corner of the bonsai garden that he shares with several neighbors. The tree’s leaves have all been cut off, and the bar... More
His Name Was Lucio
He joined Daniela’s milking herd as a gift from her friend Lucio, and Daniela named the bull after him. She expected Lucio to impregnate cows when artificial in... More
The Ontological Ethopolitics of Conservation
In contemporary wildlife conservation, it is not only animal bodies, populations, and genes that are at stake but also, importantly, their behavior, subjectivit... More
Pharmaceutical Care: Diclofenac, a Pharmacon of More-Than-Human Health
After Mr. Chandran committed suicide, the Indian government offered his wife Ramini a dairy cow and a calf. This gift was part of an income generating scheme fo... More
Marginal Domestications: Crop Wild Relatives and Caring for Genealogies
Over the past decade, the banking of wild seeds has converged with breeding science and agricultural practices, propelled by emerging concerns around the catalo... More
Ecologizing Honeybee Care: Multi-Species-Bodies and Trust in the Varroa Pandemic
One morning in August 2019, a colleague and I went to an old Platanus tree growing in Munich, southern Germany. High above us in an old woodpecker’s hole, a col... More
Caring for Falcons in a Time of Extinction
In a small town close to London, I visit Graham, a falconer and breeder of peregrine falcons. Peregrines, sharing their fate with many other bird species, were ... More
Coexisting with Mosquitoes
“Uno . . . Uno . . . ” Mariana’s voice announces mosquito release points as the van makes its way through Medellín’s neighborhoods. At every “uno,” Jairo uncove... More
Mourning as Care in the Snail Ark
We stood gathered around the workbench counting snails. The adults were easy enough to spot among the vegetation in front of us. The juveniles, however, were a ... More