The way we are entangled within webs of life, together with fungi, animals, insects, plants, trees, and other forms of life requires mutual care and reciprocity. Acts of care have been posited as reproducing life; reproducing ‘our world’ so that we may all live in it as best as possible. In this short blog post we introduce our work where we consider acts of destruction to nuance and enrich said propositions in the field of more-than-human care. We ask the following questions: How can acts of destruction, of killing trees, be considered as care? Whose life is being reproduced and why? What more-than-human relationalities underlie said interventions and how do these differ from other land management practices? 

What is Care?

What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘care’? Perhaps a mother feeding her child or workers in elderly homes or perhaps, the so-called work done by trees that capture carbon dioxide and effectively cool down the planet we call our shared home. Care is cornerstone to shared survival, and as other scholars have effectively and critically shown, care work often goes unrecognized. Swedish writer Katrine Marçal, for example, eloquently titled her book published in 2012 ‘Who cooked Adam Smith’s dinner?’ to refer to the (care-)work women do that is often ignored by mainstream economic thought. 

The movement to recognize care-work has gained significant momentum with the creation of initiatives dedicated to basic income, recognizing housework as paid labor, artistic recognition of care-workers like people working in garbage collection or cleaning of public places, and more recently organizations recognizing the care undertaken by nature, like the WHO drawing attention to the value of nature for individual and societal health. Relevant to this latter notion of care, more-than-human care scholarship considers the wellbeing of humans as entangled with the wellbeing of ecosystems, with the term ‘more-than-human’ decentering the human to consider all beings as interrelated and interdependent. 

Work on (more-than-human) care, recognized or unrecognized, has tended to concern itself with acts of creation, acts that ‘contribute’, acts that maintain; acts that allow us to continue engaging in the shared dance of interdependency on a broken planet. With recent scholarship arguing for the need to recognize the care-work done by other-than-human entities but remaining in the realm of mutual care and reciprocity. In this short blogpost we enrich such thought by considering the unlikely acts of destruction, violence, and exclusion within more-than-human communities as acts of care. 

The Brigadas Deseucaliptizadoras and their Acts of Destruction

The Brigadas Deseucaliptizadoras is a grassroots movement that started in 2017 after yet another wave of deadly fires swept across Galicia, a region in the northwest of Spain. Their interventions into Galician landscapes constitute the removal of eucalyptus and acacia trees, working together with local communities. More than 1,500 people are currently signed up to the Brigadas and a few times per month the group engages in acts of destruction in different places across Galicia. Their interventions constitute a morning of work, where chainsaws and handsaws are used to cut down trees, younger exemplars are pulled out of the grand, regrowth is cut away with a small axe, or the bark of trees is cut and then peeled off the trees as to allow fungi to enter and effectively kill the tree. After the work is done, a communal lunch and an afternoon activity are organized.  

The Making of the More-Than-Human Community in Galician common lands

How can these acts of destruction be considered acts of care? As acts reproducing ‘our world’, as Joan Tronto and Berenice Fischer’s original work around care accentuated, and whose world would these acts be reproducing? 

To address such questions, we draw on the theory of sociotechnical imaginaries, as developed by Jasanoff and Kim (2009, 2015). This theory helps us understand how ideas of “good knowledge” and social order evolve over time. Specifically, we use it to examine how plants, animals, humans, and other forms of life in the Galician landscape have been shaped and defined historically in the pursuit of prosperity. The Franco dictatorship, which lasted from 1939 to 1975 is important to consider when engaging with environmental governance in Galicia, as its landscape has been remorselessly shaped by interventions at the hand of said dictatorial State. To reduce reliance on foreign raw materials, Franco’s regime aimed to localize production, like that of cellulose for paper, chemicals, weapons, and more. To secure the necessary biomass, the regime seized common lands—over a quarter of Galicia’s territory—and transformed diverse landscapes into monoculture plantations. Eucalyptus, prized for its rapid growth, was seen as a promising solution to Spain’s dependence on imports, reshaping Galicia’s landscape in the pursuit of national self-sufficiency. As such, the essential qualities of eucalyptus as fast-growing warranted large-scale intervention into common lands to turn them into plantations – in turn shaping these so-called intrinsic qualities. 

Destruction as Care 

Acts of destruction with the Brigadas Deseucaliptizadoras are situated within a historical context of State interventions into common lands. In order to be imagined as acts of care, they respond to how a more-than-human community has been shaped over time. The antagonism embodied by eucalyptus for communities is not an intrinsic quality as purported by knowledge claims made by scientists working for State regimes (e.g., eucalyptus as fast-growing for the cellulose industry, or a useful absorber of carbon dioxide in later times), instead acts of destruction conceive of trees (and other beings, forms of life, humans) differently, namely as existing within socioecological relations. In this sense approaching environmental politics in Galician common lands through the framework of sociotechnical imaginaries loosens the intrinsic, ‘natural’ qualities of particular trees to lay bare their dependency on socioecological relations, while also shaking up the more-than-human category that more-than-human care scholarship develops. The beings that partake in the more-than-human web that we care for and that takes care of us becomes knowable differently by appreciating the historical construction of trees, like eucalyptus. Our paper draws attention to the role of knowledge in ordering more-than-human communities and allows scholarship on more-than-human care to explore acts that may not, at first, seem care-full. Like destruction. 

The cover image is by Noortje Marie Keurhorst. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.