A scuba diver is planting the seagrass on the seabed, one seedling at a time. A care worker gently washes the body of an impaired elder. The tide is rising, and the salt marshes are washed over with salt water – now the water filtering and the small fish feeding on the barene begin. An urban activist is waving a flag saying “No to big ships” in front of a cruise ship from their tiny wooden traditional rowing boat. A local fisher spotted the saltmarsh wooden protection broken in one of the side canals of the lagoon – they took a mental note to come and repair it the next time. A nanny is hurrying to catch the waterbus to pick up a child at school – she is worryingly watching the fog thicken over the lagoon, which could cause a halt in public transportation.

All the above care instances can and are happening at once in human habitats located on coastal wetlands such as Venice (Italy). The Venice Lagoon, the largest Mediterranean lagoon, is a shallow body of water with an average depth of around 1 meter, strongly interconnected with the human history of Venice. The lagoon is home to a dwindling and aging human population, with Venice being a city affected by over-tourism. The lagoon itself contains ecologically valuable habitats such as salt marshes, mudflats, and seagrass meadows, which are under immediate threat from climate change, coastal erosion, pollution, and eutrophication. 

Only 9% of the surface of Venice is two or more meters (6.5 feet) above sea level. With a low land elevation, Venice is prone to flooding, with 69% of the terrain flooding at a tide of +140 cm, and is predicted to experience yearly flooding by 2050 and potentially be underwater by 2150. The lagoon’s ecosystem is also vulnerable to rising sea levels, which can cause submergence, salinization, and habitat loss, threatening biodiversity. 

In the augmented understanding of care, there is room for human care for humans, the human habitat, and the ecosystem, as well as nonhuman care in the form of ecosystem services. When analyzing all the different forms of care in the Venetian lagoon, we found inspiration from two theoretical approaches: the care infrastructure and ecosystem services in particular. 

The care infrastructure approach defines care as ‘building and maintaining human infrastructure’. The care processes occur both within and outside the household and have been partly or entirely delegated within a historical process to institutions within the education, social care, and healthcare sectors. This approach provides a framework to extend the understanding of essential life infrastructure to cover water, oxygen, and nutrients that we receive thanks to ecosystem services. Ecosystem services, in turn, are the benefits that ecosystems provide to people, including material flows, better environmental conditions, and cultural services. These services form an underlayer of the care infrastructure, highlighting the interconnectedness of human care and ecosystem services.

Ecosystem services refer to the benefits that ecosystems of any kind, be they terrestrial, marine, or freshwater, and wild, anthropized, or even urban, provide to people. These benefits include material flows, such as food, timber, or energy; better environmental conditions, such as clean air and water or climate change mitigation through carbon sequestration; or the so-called cultural services, such as the possibility to do recreational activities in nature, gain inspiration from it (e.g., for artistic work, or in connection to religious practices) or to enjoy its beauty and relaxing effects. Ecosystem services depend on the presence of biodiverse and healthy ecosystems, whose complex ecological structure, processes, and functions represent the foundation for providing ecosystem services to human societies.

We propose to examine the care and environmental processes jointly in the form of ecosystems of care. Human habitats within coastal wetlands offer the opportunity to bring environmental factors to the fore in the analysis of care processes. This type of environment, on the one hand, offers enormous benefits in terms of ecosystem services and is, therefore, the goal of many conservation actions. Still, at the same time, it constitutes a challenging environment that provides obstacles to the provision of care and its infrastructure and is more exposed to the impact of environmental factors, including climate change. 

Analyzing Venice, the fragility of the human population and ecosystem, as well as their exposure to the effects of anthropogenic pressures and human-induced climate change, reveals a shared vulnerability. Social and environmental crises are not only similar, for example, in the invisibility of the most vulnerable actors, but interconnected. Humans and the environment share the struggle to face global changes, and care is an important lens through which we can frame both these issues and their possible solutions. Care work advocacy and environmental activism have much in common and should become allies, highlighting the interconnectedness of human and environmental care.

The cover image is by Anna Rosinska, Burano from Torcello, https://www.flickr.com/photos/200740506@N07/54295469443/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.