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Caring for the Ecosphere

Aubrey Streit Krug

GLBW, 20 November 2019

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What is one word that names something you are carrying from yesterday into today?��Please share your touchstone with the person next to you.

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Caring for the Ecosphere

Aubrey Streit Krug

GLBW, 20 November 2019

Thank you! Rather than share more now with the full group, I’m going to ask you to hold on to your touchstones and return to them later when we move into table discussions.

My goal in the next 30 or so minutes is to share some of my own reflections and learning with you, drawing from one of my own long-term touchstone words: care. I’ll be weaving in some of what I learned and contemplated yesterday. Then I’ll end by framing the next discussion-based activity.

I have been taught to begin with gratitude. Thank you to the land, these beloved homelands of the Dakota and Anishinaabe. Thank you to the plants and animals, the rocks and soils, the waters and airs. Thank you to the organizers of this event, my colleagues and collaborators, the many brilliant presenters. Thanks to all of you for being here today. Thank you to all the teachers and ancestors who made it possible for us to be here. Thank you to the staff who are feeding us, housing us, cleaning up after us here. Thank you to all the people who are not here because they are busy doing the work of the world, including watching our children and checking on our elders and pursuing justice and wholeness in so many places. May our time here become worthy of their work. May our community widen and deepen.

I also would like to begin with a reassurance. The title of my talk is “Caring for the Ecosphere,” but I am not here to try to convince you to care.

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Steffen et al. 2015, “Planetary Boundaries”

Ripple et al. 2019, “World’s Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency”

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I also do not want to suggest that people in general should just care more. Of course some people should care more! It’s hard to talk about why some people don’t care—because they are preoccupied with pursuing dominance—and why some people are then burdened with the work of care. But people who do not care at all are probably not the majority here.

The amount we already care is a struggle for many of us. People, especially young people, are grappling with concern, worry, anxiety, anger, fear, rage, despair, and grief due to the harm that is happening and is to come. Big feelings come when we come out of denial—when we let ourselves feel what we know. Reckoning with our mortality is one thing, and in fact a very human thing, but reckoning with the accelerated loss and extinction of species and ecosystems feels unprecedented.

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Wôⁿgithe, thatʰí�i tʰe ūdaⁿ.

I have spent several years working with Umóⁿhoⁿ people, learning their language and developing this collaborative textbook to aid with language and cultural revitalization. The Umóⁿhoⁿ way of greeting people is to say, Thatʰí tʰe ūdoⁿ. This translates as, It’s good that you are here, and means Welcome. Their language is incredibly precise and rich with the use of something called positionals, a grammatical form that locates people. The literal translation of Thatʰí tʰe ūdoⁿ is You are here, and that is good. Consider what it has meant for Indigenous peoples so attentive to place and location to lose their homelands, or have to fight for their sovereign rights to care for their homelands. And consider what it means for these Indigenous peoples to be the ones leading advocacy efforts and doing a lot of care work. As I heard Kwagu’ł researcher Sarah Hunt say at a conference earlier this month, when it comes to organizing and community events, “there has to be somebody to make the sandwiches.”

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Care work as

necessarily repetitive actions and practices

feminized and invisibilized

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As feminist economists have been demonstrating for many years, care work is unevenly distributed. More recent philosophical analysis identifies “human giver syndrome,” which depends on the reasoning that the humanity of some humans (women) is contingent upon them primarily giving their time and bodies and attention to the moral support and needs of other humans (men). Giving care is good, but since care is work, it comes at a cost. In a world where giving care is not valued and supported, human givers get burnt out. That is not an accident: it is a logical outcome of a system in which some people are allowed to exist only to serve the creation of other people’s wealth, as Ricardo’s analysis yesterday demonstrated.

As we seek to build networks and collaborations, we should seek to make visible who is doing the tending to those relationships. Yesterday Sarah spoke of how partnerships require time and commitment to build trust. In our organizations and communities, is the care work that goes into building partnerships evenly distributed, or is it mostly people of color and women who carry that burden? How could white people and men become willing and able to do care work and do it well? And who will do the work of teaching people how to care well?

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Bellacasa’s three�dimensions of care:

labor/work

affect/affections

ethics/politics

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“I wrote this because I believe we stand at the crossroads, between both the gifts and the unexpected, inevitable collapses of our work, and we have the opportunity to dream and keep dreaming ways to build emergent, resilient care webs. I believe that our work in creating the new world depends on it—because all of us will become disabled and sick, because state systems are failing, yet ‘community’ is not a magic unicorn, a one-stop shop that always helps us do the laundry and be held in need.”

You will have noticed that even though I am not taking the time to name each of my sources, I am showing many of my teachers on the slides throughout this talk—I want to give acknowledgement, and show some of the wide body of work that I am integrating and building on. (Also, I show my love to people by recommending books for them to read.) Here is another of those teachers, Leah Lakshmi, whose words I want to share because they have really stuck with me: “I wrote this because I believe we stand at the crossroads, between both the gifts and the unexpected, inevitable collapses of our work, and we have the opportunity to dream and keep dreaming ways to build emergent, resilient care webs. I believe that our work in creating the new world depends on it—because all of us will become disabled and sick, because state systems are failing, yet ‘community’ is not a magic unicorn, a one-stop shop that always helps us do the laundry and be held in need.”

Community is not the simple or easy answer. Community is the joy and grief and work of life. To build community, rather than change the quantity of our care, I believe we need to change the quality of our care. We need to learn how to more skillfully and collectively care. How to direct it—to what purpose. How to recognize and value the care of others. How to join with them. How to persist in caring down deeply, down to earth, toward grounded imagination and liberation.

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http://www.geography.hunter.cuny.edu/tbw/wc.notes/1.atmosphere/notes1.htm

If we want human societies to fit within planetary limits, we should consider the ecosphere as both recipient of and participant in care. Caring for the ecosphere includes ourselves. The ecosphere is the dynamic mantle of life on this sun-fed planet in the Milky Way—the nexus of airs, waters, rocks, and creatures whose interactions together with light make life. The ecosphere includes lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. Some have also postulated additional layers, such as the ethnosphere, the intellectual and spiritual web of life: the thoughts, ideas, concepts, stories, cultures, etc. I like the ecosphere approach for how it prioritizes integration and process across what has often been divided or made into static abstractions. The ecosphere is a way to name the particular astonishing realization that there is a dynamic mantle of life on this planet at this time in this galactic place—and here we are, ecospherically entangled and interdependent.

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Photo by Jim Richardson.

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��“Our Lives Are in the Land” by Christi Belcourt (Métis).

Agriculture is not just out there, it is “in here” among us and making us, with every breath we take and calorie we burn and word we speak or hear. How humans feed ourselves is how we express relationship to the ecosphere our bodies are constituted by, including our material relationships to non-humans and seemingly non-living matter, and our social relationships to other human beings in communities. Agricultural landscapes—including the social, institutional, economic, and educational structures that have emerged with agriculture—are what we are in, in the field and in a university.

One theme expressed so beautifully yesterday across presentations was the importance of attending to the people part of agriculture. I want to affirm that there is a need to understand people’s relationships to each other and people’s relationships to plants, animals, land, water, and air (the ecosphere). People does not mean single, self-made individuals. We are people only in relationship; we are made and remade by the land and by each other.

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“Is the Future of Agriculture Perennial?” Crews, Carton, & Olsson 2018

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Ecosystem services could be used to describe the supposedly “background” work of ecosystems that is necessary for our ecosphere to sustain human life. These ecosystem services are not fully understood or properly valued and yet they are increasingly disturbed, disrupted, and degraded. Care work is the “background” work of our lives and jobs that is necessary for our communities to sustain human life, but is similarly undervalued and is often degraded.

In social terms, I’d like to suggest that the way we care for the ecosphere might involve learning to value care work and learning how to care for these new perennial grain crops and each other at the same time. Ecosystem services could be used to describe the supposedly “background” work of ecosystems that is necessary for our ecosphere to sustain human life. These ecosystem services are not fully understood or properly valued and yet they are increasingly disturbed, disrupted, and degraded. Care work is the “background” work of our lives and jobs that is necessary for our communities to sustain human life, but is similarly undervalued and is often degraded. So perhaps we could say that care is about loving and doing the seeming background work of the world. Except there is no background down here on earth: since human communities are inextricably in ecosystems and the ecosphere, since we are in agriculture for worse and hopefully someday for better, we humans need both ecosystem services and care work to continue. We need them to be valued—which is not to say appropriated and subsumed by the global economic system.

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If the ecological future of agriculture is to be diverse and perennial, what is required of us in social terms?

The Ecosphere Studies program I direct at The Land Institute works to integrate sociocultural research and educational projects with agroecological research. New crops open new possibilities. But positive change in people’s behavior is not inevitable with changing plants. Humans are land animals who live in relationship with biophysical and ecological processes, and humans are social creatures who live in relationship to each other. Transforming agriculture requires attention to and perception of both. As Ricardo reminded us, if we want to change agriculture, it’s not just changing how the landscape looks. Our investments, values, all the people and who benefits has to change too. So on the human side, we must ask: if the ecological future of agriculture is to be perennial and diverse, what is required of us in social terms? I believe this is fundamentally a question about what human communities are willing and able to learn….maybe for the first time ever.

At the same time, I recognize that no human being or community is a blank slate. We are deeply enculturated by agriculture. To learn something new, or remember something that others have known but we have forgotten, we may need to unlearn. We need to let go of things—to let go of denial, to let go of domination, to let go of current systems and structures, to give back homelands—if we really want to care for the ecosphere.

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Threshold concepts as:

transformative
integrative
irreversible
troublesome

(Meyer & Land 2003)

J. Glover/J. Richardson

The best way I have found so far to hold this paradox of learning and unlearning in my mind is to picture a threshold. A threshold is an entry point. A doorway. It comes from the word thresh: to separate the grain from the stalks and chaff. A threshold is “the sill under the door that contained the thresh within the domicile.” People step on it with their feet, just like you step on plants to beat the grain from the straw. So threshold reminds us of threshing, of separating the grain from the stalks to the chaff. There is a recent framework that grows out of educational research that explores “threshold concepts.” Threshold concepts are basically ways to name the things one must know in order to participate in a discipline or research community—the entry points or portals through which one must pass, the transformed ways of thinking or feeling or behaving one must acquire, etc. Threshold concepts come at a cost—they are not easy to achieve, they take journeys to get through to the other side, and you lose and unlearn things along the way. Threshold concepts are transformative, integrative, irreversible, and troublesome.

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I believe that perenniality and diversity may together be threshold concepts. Ever since I interned at The Land Institute back in 2005 as an undergraduate, I have been working to learn these concepts and unlearn my sense of our current agricultural system as natural and normal.

I grew up in a small farming town of a couple hundred people in northcentral Kansas. The men farmed, the women cooked and cleaned and taught. Social life orbited around the grain elevator, church, and school, which people fought to keep open. I grew to see this landscape as beautiful and inevitable and as having no place for me; I was encouraged to leave and go get an education. Thanks to a lot of brilliant people in and beyond the bounds of a land-grant university, I’ve been able to do that. And still I come back to the field every summer, to make sure I get at least one day to be in the combine, the dust swirling and grain flowing.

Unlearning has meant seeing the vulnerability of this annual wheat monoculture—its ecological reliance on disturbance and fossil fueled inputs, its economic precarity dependent on subsidies and inherited wealth or the goodwill of landlords, its social undermining of a community life in which everyone’s labor is seen and valued. Unlearning has meant seeing the pain of the past alive in this land. It has meant recognizing myself and my hometown as settlers, a pretty homogenous culture that are pretty newly arrived and just a temporary blip.

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“A platform, or stage, was often built in a garden, where the girls and young women of the household came to sit and sing as they watched that crows and other thieves did not destroy the ripening crop. We cared for our corn in those days as we would care for a child; for we Indian people loved our gardens, just as a mother loves her children; and we thought that our growing corn liked to hear us sing, just as children like to hear their mother sing to them. Also, we did not want the birds to come and steal our corn.”

�—Maxi’diwiac, Buffalo Bird Woman, in Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians by Gilbert L. Wilson (1917)

We might learn how to care for new perennial crops by listening to people who have done the dynamic work of caring for plants across generations. Ricardo narrated how it came to be on this continent that humans didn’t matter in agriculture. I want to affirm his lesson that this history was not inevitable. In my dissertation on ethnobotany, I learned this from a truly expert farmer of the northern Great Plains: Buffalo Bird Woman. She recalls how “A platform, or stage, was often built in a garden, where the girls and young women of the household came to sit and sing as they watched that crows and other thieves did not destroy the ripening crop. We cared for our corn in those days as we would care for a child; for we Indian people loved our gardens, just as a mother loves her children; and we thought that our growing corn liked to hear us sing, just as children like to hear their mother sing to them. Also, we did not want the birds to come and steal our corn.” This is practical, physical, emotional, economic, ethical, political, spiritual, relational, agricultural care work done by women in the field.

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We have an opportunity to make new forms of relationship between silphium and people. We are learning together how to organize a community to gather information about how silphium responds to multiple growing environments, including the pollinators, pests, and pathogens in those places. Such information may be helpful for silphium breeding in terms of broad adaptation. Our civic science collaborators are also sharing their experiences with caring for silphium. They have to water, weed, and observe the plants. They explain the silphium project to family and neighbors. They send in photographs and exchange emails with questions and ideas. In monthly surveys, we ask questions about their choices and reflections in order to understand how their repetitive, modest, hands-on care work shapes their learning.

Will they develop stronger emotional attachments to just their particular silphium plants, or to plants more broadly? Will their understanding of threshold concepts in ecological agriculture, such as perenniality and diversity, deepen? Will their direct and active involvement in research matter for their own mindsets, beyond the fate of the seedlings they care for? Will their experiences and the educational materials we provide simply help them perceive silphium as a beautiful, native ornamental garden plant? Or, will they learn to socially and commercially value silphium as a next generation food crop with ecological benefits?

Answering these questions involves transdisciplinary research. We need to learn how involving a broad representation of people—including groups and regions often disconnected from scientific research—early and deeply in a domestication process may increase the rate and quality of that domestication. I’m involving my son Bob in this work—I want him to learn how to care. But far more importantly, I want to create a project and world in which all children have access to and the ability to care for perennial crops.

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economy in�Ecosphere

Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, which draws upon Rockström and Steffen’s work on planetary boundaries

https://inthebooks.800ceoread.com/editors-choice/articles/doughnut-economics-seven-ways-to-think-like-a-21st-century-economist

We’re trying to live into a world in which caring for the ecosphere is valued. We are trying to transition our agricultural economies into the ecosphere. It is hard to understate what is at stake in this work, and we have no way to know the outcomes. What we have is an opportunity to increase our moral imagination and enact an agricultural transformation. People everywhere have choices: what to carry forward, what to leave behind, what to accept, and what to learn for the first time. And even as options close down, new options are opening with the possibility of new perennial grain crops and new ways of feeding ourselves. But I believe any new tools must be accompanied by a radical change in human relationships if it’s to really be transformative. We have an opportunity to care in new ways—not just to care more, but to care more wisely.

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I’d like to conclude by bringing these ideas back down to earth. What does caring for the ecosphere look like in practical terms?

First, along with divesting our dollars from what harms people and planet, we can divest our collective attention from systems based on productivity and perpetual growth that is economically and energetically based on exploitation. We can drop our most comfortable tools—our habits of mind, our automatic rationalizations, our hard-fought individual identities, our trusty methods—when they no longer fit the situation at hand. We can enter the threshold and unlearn. We can recognize what we have been given and choose to give our gifts where they are actually needed and valued. We can surrender any sense of entitlement and turn toward a gift economy that operates within limits.

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Photo by Rena Detrixhe.

Thank you!

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Measuring up

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Measuring up

Worksheet 1 – understanding the numbers

How are you currently measuring success at your organization and in your work? What metrics do you track and how do you report that?

What are your go-to sources for data, resources, and references related to measuring progress in this work?

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What does true, lasting, success look like for you, your organization, and our collective work?

Please share with the person next to you. You might like to come back to your touchstone from earlier.

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Measuring up

Worksheet 2 – going deeper & realizing the vision

What are we missing? What matters that can’t be easily measured? Whose perspectives and expertise are missing in design and implementation?

Picture us all here again in 2030. We’ve collectively made meaningful changes to our farming landscapes and our agricultural systems. How would we measure that change? What approaches, metrics and collection mechanisms would be needed? Who can help?

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Reporting back