Ecological Care’s Compromised Conditions

Abstract

Braiding personal narratives and philosophical meditations, throughout this essay I reflect on what it means to care for more-than-human others when doing so often leaves us utterly compromised and when the broader conditions under which we coexist on earth with others are themselves antithetical to ecological continuity. Ecologically, the essay is situated in the midst of Cook Forest, an 8,500-acre public park in northwest Pennsylvania, where ancient eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) find themselves imperiled by the hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae), an aphid-like insect native to east Asia. Considering responses to the adelgid at Cook Forest, I engage in a series of philosophi­cal and ethical meditations about ecological care—about its complicities and its conditions of (im)possibility. And, finally, in conversation with Theodor Adorno and Judith Butler, I reflect upon how critique and resistance might open onto still more radical modes of ecological care.