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Ethical doings in naturecultures

Article in Ethics Place and Environment June 2010
DOI: 10.1080/13668791003778834

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Mara Puig de la Bellacasa

University of Leicester
School of Management
m.puig@le.ac.uk

Paper submitted for Goodman, M and McEwan, C, Place Geography and the Ethics of
Care, Ethics, Place and Environment 13 (2)

Ethical doings in naturecultures i

Abstract
What new forms of ethical engagement are emerging in naturecultural worlds? In this paper I
explore the example of the practical ethics of the permaculture movement. I put these in
dialogue first with discussions regarding ethics in bios and naturecultures and second with a
reading of feminist care ethics. Across this discussion I focus on the potential of ethos
transformations experienced through everyday doings to promote ethical obligations of care. If
we are living in a naturecultural world where politics and ethics conflate in biopolitics, the
permaculture movement is an example of an alter-biopolitical intervention. It works within bios
with an ethics of collective empowerment that puts caring at the heart of its search of
alternatives for hopeful flourishing for all beings.
Introduction: exploring ethics in naturecultures

care of earth
care of people
return of the surplus
Principles of permaculture ethics

In May 2006 I travelled to the hills that overview Bodega Bay, an hour and a half north of San
Francisco, to participate in two weeks of training in permaculture technologies. This intensive
course was organised by the Earth Activist Training (EAT) collective ii. The main teachers were a
world renowned spiritual figure and activist, Starhawk, and the permaculture expert, ecological
landscape designer and activist Eric Ohlsen. This training introduced permaculture technologies
of ecological practice as a form of concrete political activism based on a commitment to care for
earth. Permaculture is a global movement with many local actualisations. Generally speaking, it
promotes ecological living (urban and rural), local food production, development of alternative
energies and radical democratic forms of organisation: Permaculture is about creating
sustainable human habitats by following natures patterns (Burnett, 2008, p. 8). The reference to
natures patterns is not an anti-technological stance, as permaculture includes the search for
alternative sciences and technologies that work with natural mechanisms. The issue is not so
much for humans to act upon the environment but that we are nature working (Penny
Livingstone in Starhawk, 2005, p.9). The natural and the cultural are not considered separately.
The term permaculture itself usually attributed to the Australians David Holmgren and Bill
Mollison (see Holmgren, 2002) puts culture at the forefront, indicating also the purpose of
cultivating communal practices with a certain permanence. I see this movement as a timely
intervention at the heart of a renewed contemporary awareness that we live in a naturecultural
world (Haraway, 1997; Latour, 1993).
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The motto quoted above: care of earth, care of people, and return of the surplus,
circulates in permaculture networks as the principles of permaculture ethics iii. These indicate an
ethics of care, but of which sort? As part of a larger research project on this movement, in this
paper I explore its contribution to rethink the ethical in a naturecultural world. I thus will not
address the history of the movement, its developments and technologies per se but concentrate
on engaging its ethical contribution. Permaculture is extending through practice-sharing,
teaching, community building and social activism, but many envision its effectiveness in the
possibility of transforming peoples ethos in our everyday relations to the earth, to its inhabitants
and its resources. In that sense:
- Its ethical obligations and commitments do not start from a normative morality. These
ethics, in discourse and practice, focus on concrete relationalities. Principles start from
everyday practices at the level of ordinary life; and personal practice is connected to a
collective.
- Permaculture ethics engage with the consequences of living in naturecultures, recognising the
interdependency of all forms of life humans and their technologies, animals, plants,
microorganisms, elemental resources such as air and water, as well as the soil we feed on. It
thus decentres human ethical subjectivity by not considering humans as masters nor even as
protectors of, but as part of earths living beings.
- Correlatively to the above, in spite of this non human centred stance, permaculture ethics do
not disengage from developing specific ethical obligations for humans. Collective and
personal actions are thus also moved by ethical commitment.
The main motivation in this paper is to put the ethics of the permaculture movement in
dialogue with other discussions regarding ethical engagement in the world of biopolitics and
naturecultures. This requires approaching the ethical as an everyday doing that connects the
personal to the collective and decentres the human, as well as grounding ethical obligation in
concrete relationalities in the making rather than on moral norms. In order to develop this
discussion I will first set a landscape of contemporary ethical questioning in which a
permaculture care ethics could make a difference. I start by acknowledging the pervasiveness of
the ethical in contemporary worlds to then set a theoretical background in which everyday ethics
are a form of biopolitics. Arguing that common understandings of biopolitics mostly remain
focused in preserving human life I move to seek in naturecultural cosmologies a necessary
awareness of human existence as interrelated with that of nonhuman beings. Against this
background I introduce the contribution of the permaculture movement and develop an attuned
reading of feminist care ethics that combines a focus on ethos transformation and ethical
obligation. Ultimately, this paper is based on the conviction that, if we are living in a
naturecultural world, and if politics and ethics conflate in biopolitics, the permaculture
movement is an example of an alter-biopolitical intervention. It works within bios with an ethics of
collective empowerment that puts caring at the heart of its search of transformative alternatives
that nurture hopeful flourishing for all beings.
1. ETHICS EVERYWHERE ETHICS DILUTED?
When engaging with everyday practices at the level of personal living, it is difficult to ignore that
we live in the age of ethics. Concern for ethics can indeed be seen as a form of hegemonic
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thinking that confirms a dominant tendency. That we live in the age of ethics is perceivable in an
inflationist use of the word: from corporate ethics to everyday ethical living garbage recycling,
fair trade from international relations to the life sciences, every human practice seems today to
cultivate awareness of its ethical component. In most instances interest in the ethical translates in
a local or global search for rules, recommendations or resolutions regarding a specific field or
profession. No wonder that in 2007 ethics was reported to be the largest field in growth in
philosophy departments in the US (Bourg, 2007) and that more generally, an everything is
ethical has installed itself in academic and research contexts. This is especially notable in the
social sciences though most disciplines would acknowledge today that their work involves ethical
issues in one or other way. Clearly, engagements with the ethical have exceeded the specialist
realm of philosophical discussion.
A statement such as everything is ethical is of a different tenor than its not so outdated
predecessor: everything is political. However, politics and ethics seem bound to be discussed
together: whether it is to oppose, contrast or correlate them. There is, for instance, a sense in
which to affirm ethical commitment seems more acceptable, neutral, and less confrontational
than to affirm political commitment. Not surprisingly, some can see the move to ethics
negatively: if political problems become ethical they tend to fall in the domain of personal
choice, of life and the level of custom and culture, or even of minimal humanitarian subsistence.
The ethicisation of the political signifies its dilution in the private domain, in personal
everydayness, the desertion of political collective transformation (for a counter-argument see:
Bourg, 2007). From another perspective, the prevalence of ethics confirms a further depoliticisation
of social life. This is true for classic ethical theory that places the ethical at the level of individual
morality. Following an Aristotelian line taken up by Hannah Arendt the ethical/moral realm
belongs to the private dealings of a person, particularly to the way her own self lives in
accordance to the good. This involves a distinct set of negotiations than those happening in the
political domain understood as the public of the polis aimed at collective interventions.
Nonetheless, in classical theory, practical wisdom in the search of the good life is developed
also by having a life in the public sphere (for further analysis see Collier & Lakoff, 2005, p. 26).
But what does this means today, when everyday ordinary life has become central to the political,
challenging the traditional hierarchic relation of the public and private? From a classic
perspective, this is a negative move: if even the political comes to mean the private, the personal
and the ordinary, the ethical building of the person cannot but further withdraw from the noble
affairs of the polis. Interest is diverted from the social production of being into more biological
constraints of reproducing and subsisting; from ethical life as a process of moral edification of a
higher Self, into matters of ethical everydayness. From signifying a distinctive and greater form
of Life, human living is also seen as part of the generic substance of life and its plain biological
continuation what I call here bios.
Diagnoses of an ethicalised politics or a depoliticised ethics seem to go in different directions
but I want to emphasise that both associate ethical and political degeneration to a fall in the
domain of the personal and private. This is also the domain of ordinary living traditionally
denigrated as the place of subsistence rather than existence, as the mere continuation of
natural life rather than its edification as social and moral. I do not want to dismiss concerns
about how the age of ethics dilutes the significance of ethical as well as of political action. In
particular, as we will see, it is worrisome for me that distributing ethical agency in an amorphous
3

way, the everything is ethical or everything is political can also lead to rendering ethical
obligations and commitments undistinguishable. In other words, if every personal action is an
ethical action, intentional ethical commitment makes no particular difference nor does the
building of collectives. However, I want to take seriously the significance and challenges of the
implosion of politics with ethics in everyday practices dedicated to the everyday continuation of
life. Specifically at the very moment where the political significance of bios in peoples
everydayness is dramatically exposed, regretting the socio-political decay in the age of ethics
because of the emphasis on personal everyday agency can instead foster more ethico-political
disengagement with the life domain traditionally considered as closer to biological life.
Meanwhile, the everyday of the politics of bios means pervasive technoscientific intervention in
the very matter of biological existence and wide ecological disruptions. This is what we are facing
in the everyday of our corporeal existence. This is how I address biopolitics, as a theoretical
tradition that has engaged with the ethical significance of practices at the level of everyday life as
bios.
2. BIOPOLITICS OUR BIOS

OUR SELVES

Unprecedented technological transformations of biological life are remaking the tissues of social
relations. Increasingly in the name of enhancement, technoscience doesnt merely study
biological actualities but (re)makes them, it coproduces new forms of worldwide relationality and
living (im)possibilities. The pervasiveness of technoscience in the living world raises a justified
sense of urgency to further embed ethical engagement at the level of bios including to tackle
with the economic pressures to extract biocapital (Sunder Rajan, 2006; Cooper, 2008) from the
bodys biological labour (Vora, 2009). But while reference to ethics becomes more pressing in
contexts dealing with technoscientific biopower, it is also here that the limits of classic ethical
theory and institutional bioethics are often pinpointed.
An intervention merging the ethical and the political in the domain of bios is Nikolas
Roses articulation of a somatic ethics for biological citizens (Rose, 2007). First of all, Rose
acknowledges that we live in an etho-political age in which political issues are problematised in
terms of ethics. And this ethicalisation of politics is particularly visible in the worlds where
politics are biopolitics and in which value-driven debates accompany bioscientific development.
It is in such a context that bioethics have become a necessary supplement for the public
acceptance of decision making (Rose, 2007, p. 97). But bioethics as it is today does not suffice,
or it should be extended in order not to represent exclusively the institutional regulatory
frameworks that legitimise, amend or pave the way for bio-technological transformation. Going
in this direction, Roses somatic ethics (from soma, the body) designate a form of bioethical
engagement emerging in communities coping with the politics of their corporeal existence
(Rose, 2007, p. 257). This approach indeed relocates ethics at the level of ordinary living. Somatic
bioethics recognises that biopolitics happens in peoples concrete everyday practices and not
only in institutions, ethical committees or even citizen groups.
Two points are important here. Here I refer to a notion of biopolitics which is different
from positions in which bio signifies a general idea of life. In these positions biopolitics
comprises those forms of power aimed at controlling peoples existence at every level of
experience and subjectivity as well as to the forces that confront or escape this power by
4

producing alternative subjectivities and forms of collective living (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, &
Tsianos, 2008; Hardt & Negri, 2009). This is continuation of debates around a Foucauldian
vision of biopower that addresses the normalisation of life through the control of human
populations and selves. However, as Donna Haraway points out, Foucaults biopolitics were a
flaccid premonition (Haraway, 1991, p. 150) of what contemporary technoscience implies for
everyday bios. Neither Foucaults biopolitics nor contemporary notions of biopolitics based on
the general idea of life engage directly with the radically transformative character of
technoscience that is changing the very substance of life on a molecular and genetic level and has
significant effects on the wider planetary ecosystem. What I am considering here as a
contemporary biopolitical cosmology is that which acknowledges that we are living in a world
where political power can intervene in existence, not only by social normalizing but by
intervening in its cells, its biology, its genetic makeup, its organic matter (see Papadopoulos,
forthcoming, for a discussion of alternative politics in technoscience).
A second point I want to address concerns the notion of ethics. Ethical agency in
perspectives such as somatic ethics concentrates in human life as affected primarily by
(biomedical) technoscience. Rather than focusing on how biopolitics affects the ontological
nature of the human (Agamben, 1998) this requires considering ethical disruptions in specific
and practical ways. New forms of ethics in this context are diverting from universalising
conceptions of the ethical subject as an autonomous, rational and defined self (Stuart &
Holmes, 2009) and are focusing on the ethical concerns affecting bodies in transformation
(Heyes, 2007). Ethics here are not about individual rationalisation, nor about a normative
identification between the rational and the good. These ethics are better understood as
developing in what Collier and Lakoff call a regime of living. Regimes of living are situated
configurations of normative, technical and political elements that are brought into alignment in
problematic or uncertain situations. These involve forms of living that have a provisional
consistency or coherence but not really the stability and coherence of a political regime (Collier
& Lakoff, 2005, pp. 31-33). Such collective arrangements are not primarily founded on an
individual as arbiter with standards of judgement of what is properly or improperly moral. In
other words, the ethical of biopolitics in technoscience is not based on stable norms of morality
managed among humans; it includes a range of elements, and doings, constantly reconfigured in
the function of material conditions in specific situations.
These new engagements with biopolitical regimes of living partly respond to the search
for a way of thinking ethics according to requirements I stated at the beginning of this paper:
engaging with ordinary personal practices considered as part of a collective and pushing towards
a decentring of ethical subjectivity. Indeed these approaches take very seriously the importance
of science, technology and socio-technical assemblages in the remaking of contemporary ethical
practices at the level of the everyday and the unexceptional. Interestingly, the ethical is approached
as an object of sociological or anthropological study in a very different way than it was for moral
theory. The bioethical attracts the attention of the social scientist, as an important element to
understand the emergence of new social forms. This is different from promoting a particular
ethical (or political) obligation, i.e. from adopting a normative stance and vision of the moral
subject. A more processual approach affects the way ethical agents are envisioned in new
sociologies/anthropologies of ethics in biotechnologies. Individuals are not at the centre of a
rational decision making regarding biomedical choices. Collectives are not clusters of individuals
5

managing the mastery of their agency. Both are embedded in the processes of a biopolitical tissue
conceived, rightly or wrongly, as fairly unpredictable. Bodies (soma) or situations (regimes) are
seen as sites where socio-political interests and scientific developments touching life itself
coalesce iv.
But, coming back to my initial questions, does such a move to decentre subjects and their
moral norm dilute the problem of ethical obligations? Not necessarily. Even decentred from the
focus on a rational subject, ethical subjectivity can remain crucial. However, from another
perspective, the approach to obligation remains traditional in most contemporary discussions on
biopolitics: ethical challenges are mostly attached to humans biological life considered in terms
of people dealing with their corporeal existence, with their body-self or their environment. Also,
conceptions of biopolitical ethics such as somatic ethics start from an obligation to care for ones
own body, personhood, and by extension that of proximal ones. Also, when individuals join in
collectives it is mostly from concern with their relatives or the future of our kin (citizen and
patient groups). They could respond well to todays overwhelming focus on the responsibility of
self-care often corresponding to deresponsibilisation of the collective (Stuart, 2007). Thus
even when the focus of ethical action is placed in matters of ordinary living, the identification of
ethics with matters of private life of individuals can still be maintained.
In order to shift the perspective on what counts as an ethical intervention in biopolitics,
in order to understand the committed difference in the hegemony of diluted ethics that is being
made by a movement such as permaculture, we need to consider two additional moves. First, we
have to interrupt further the association of personal ethical engagement with the individual
and the private. Thinking with the feminist insight that the personal is political, personal
ethico-political practices of change need to be also thought as collective. By this I refer to
situations when people are changing their ways of doing at the level of personal everyday life, not
individually but in connection to a collective. For instance, early feminist theories of care ethics
were built from the standpoint of values grounded in womens maintenance of everyday
relationships (Gilligan, 1982). However, these approaches thought the problems affecting
personal labours of everyday care as concerning a larger societal disengagement from their
importance. Moreover, the purpose to transform the ways society deals with caring for others in
the everyday was brought upon by a collective rethinking made possible by the womens
movement. This way of engaging with the problem of care is different from the one in which
care starts with self-care it is also different from advocating pastoral care of the State for its
subjects and from a Foucauldian inspired care of the self (Foucault, 1990, 1988). I will come
back to this later, but for now I want to emphasise that in order that reclamations of the political
significance of everyday personal experience (Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006) do not simply
verify the hegemony of diluted ethics (everything is ethical), we need a notion of personal ethics
related to collective ethico-political commitment. This is particularly important to push forward
the ethical challenge in approaches to bios towards a second move I want to address. Thinking in
bios is not only about attempting to think the politics of bodily, corporeal and material existence,
but challenging the notion of collective with an extended conception of bios (Esposito, 2008). An
additional move, to challenge the ethical subject of biopolitics and disrupt the hegemony that
associates the personal ethics with concern and care for ones body/self or by extension that of
ones kin, children, family, fellow citizens is to disturb a vision of the world that turns around
human survival and well being and starts its ethics from the protection and flourishing of human
6

life. This requires engaging with another important cosmology of non humanocentric bios: that of
naturecultures.
3. NATURECULTURES MORE THAN HUMANS
Natureculture is a term explored particularly by Donna Haraway (Haraway, 1997). It
signifies the inseparability of the natural and the cultural against an ontological split largely
supposed in modern traditions (Haraway, 1991; see also Latour, 1993). Naturecultures as a mode
of thought is a cosmology that affirms the breaking down of boundaries of the technological and
the organic as well as the animal and the human whether this is considered to be a historical
phenomenon, an ontological shift and/or a political intervention. This shift has attracted interest
in disparate fields of the humanities and the social sciences. More today envision the material
world less from the perspective of defined objects and subjects but as composed of knots of
relations involving humans, non humans and physical entanglements of matter and meaning
(Barad, 2007). What I distinguish here as naturecultures can be also identified as a strand of
thought in social studies of science and technology (STS). Radical constructivist approaches in
STS Actor Network Theory in particular rethink the social by bringing attention to concrete
practices of world making in which agency is distributed between actors which are not only
human. STS draw attention to entities that go from the microchip to the molecule, from the
robot to the primate. These visions have challenged the bifurcation that separates culture from
the natural; they share a shift of attention to non human ways of life, an awareness of the
ontological connectedness between multiple agencies and entities. They dis-objectify non
human worlds by exposing their liveliness and agency, they de-subjectify the human by thinking
it as an agency among others. As such it can be said that they promote a mode of attention that
resists falling automatically into the human perspective.
What these approaches have in common is a contribution to a conception of ethics that
decentres the human subject in bio-political and techno-social collectives. They enrich our
perception of the complex articulations of agency, decentring individual human agency and
considering the social as a tissue of associations between humans, non humans, and objects
working in the realisation of new relational formations. These views have the potential to
challenge the ethical beyond its focus on human individual intentionality and flourishing. They
could contribute a post-conventional (Shildrick & Mykitiuk, 2005) vision of the ethical that
embeds it in processes, rather than discussing it as a set of added concerns that humans reflect
on when technoscientific and other material matters are already established. It is easy to note that
STS has not remained immune to the age of ethics: references to the ethical in this field become
more and more frequent in combination with, or replacing, earlier concerns for elucidating the
political interests supporting science and technology. However, like in many of the approaches to
biopolitics above considered the ethical remains in this field of study an ethnographic or
sociological object. A general perception is that STS scholars avoid taking explicit judgements or
elaborate prescriptive frameworks: their job is to illuminate the social processes by which
arguments achieve legitimacy rather than to use their understanding of those processes to
establish the legitimacy of their own arguments or positions (Johnson & Wetmore, 2008).
Interest in the ethical here is not aimed at promoting ethical obligations nor commitments but
remains mostly about observing the ethical under construction around a socio-technological
7

problem and detecting the participants assembled in this making. Thus, in spite of the potential
of STS to transform the ethical, it is rare to see its insights thematised as possibilities for
proposing new ethical visions. From an ethicists perspective this is often discussed as a
normative deficit (Keulartz et al., 2004). However, to reduce engagement with the ethical to
normative claims is a reductive approach that allows overlooking other potential contributions.
As STS scholar Lucy Suchman reminds, ... the price in recognizing the agency of artefacts need
not be the denial of our own (Suchman, 2007, p. 285; see also Barad, 2007 for an ontology of
asubjective ethical agency).
In fact, I think disengagement with ethical theorising might respond to a rejection of the
humanist framework in which ethics is traditionally understood. Naturecultures cosmologies
require a form of ethical commitment that learns from the decentring of the human. But here
there is an important point to be made for the purpose of this paper. The category nonhuman
in studies dealing with science and technology conflates very diverse forms of life. But
decentring the human has different effects whether we refer to engagement invested further in
the dis-objectification of the natural (bios and/or phusis) rather than of the technological
(techne) v. Not only each human-nonhuman configuration points to different specificities, but the
interference of the nonhuman in the ethical and the political varies generically whether attention
is turned to an artefact or to an animal/organic entity. This is not only a conceptual issue or a
matter of ontological categorisation; it is a concrete problem. If we aim to think the ethical not as
an abstract sphere but as embedded in actual practices, when dealing with the organic and the
animal we enter a world marked by concerns of, for instance, animal rights and ecological
movements, also we touch affective spheres associated with living beings such as suffering,
loving, caring. The non human brings us in different ethico-political directions when it involves
bio-worlds. In engaging with alterities that are capable of responding to human intervention
with pain, death and extinction (Van Dooren, forthcoming; Bird Rose & Van Dooren,
forthcoming) and by creating affective and life-sustaining interdependencies (Haraway, 2007)
acknowledging agency and liveliness is not the same as recognising that machines are alive. The
semantics of naturecultures when they concern bios might then be less those of networks and
connections than those of ecologies and relations.
In consequence, the inclusion of non human others from the animal/organic world produces
a different set of ethical concerns than the engagement with technological entities. In a
naturecultural perspective on technoscience, agency is indeed distributed and decentred from its
humanistic pole. But here the ethical consequences of interdependent entanglements of
nonhumans and humans are not only about the preservation of human existence, and/or about
which decisions will better respond to novel forms of biopower introduced by technoscience
e.g. the effects of biomedicine for human subjectivity, of technological waste on humans and
their environments. Other problems become crucial: how do we actively engage with the lived
experiences of forms of non human bios whose existences are today increasingly integrated in
the cultural world of human techne? How do we acknowledge their agency without denying the
asymmetrical power historically developed by human agencies in bios? How do we engage with
accountable forms of ethico-political caring that respond to alterity without nurturing purist
separations between humans and nonhumans? How to engage with care of earth without
idealising nature or de-responsibilizing human agency by seeing it as either inevitable destructive
or paternalistic stewardship? There are many sites where one could look for situated pragmatic
8

ways of addressing these questions (e.g. animal carers, conservation planners). Based on my own
research and involvement in permaculture collectives, I propose a vision of this movement as an
intervention in naturecultures that builds ethical obligation on personal practices in a non
humanistic way.
4. PERMACULTURE ETHICAL DOINGS
Permaculture practices are ethical doings that connect ordinary personal living with the
collective. They decentre human agency without denying its specificity. They promote ethical
obligations that do not start from, nor aim at moral norms, but that are articulated as existential
and concrete necessities. These are born out of material constraints and situated relationalities in
the making with other people, living beings, and earths resources. Thus, the principles: care
for earth, people and return of the surplus, are both quite generic their actualisations vary
and involve very concrete material ways of conceiving how to work with patterns of bios
(ecological cycles, physical forces). The people I talked to during my research and activism, often
spoke about how, after a training, they started trying to implement the practices they learnt in
local communities both in urban and rural environments from the backyard to the local
council, or joining larger ways of public activism. Most of them strongly affirm that they have
changed their personal everyday way of relating with nature, of measuring their own impact on the
planet in smaller and bigger ways. This can go from starting to compost food waste, to plant and
produce food locally, to promote ecological building. But even when the action is acknowledged
as a deeply intimate one as can be a spiritual connection or the building of ones self as an
ethical being it is mostly affirmed as collectively engaged.
The collective here does not only include humans, but the plants and animals we cultivate,
raise, eat (or not), as well as earths energetic resources: air, water. It is in connection with these
that we individuals live and act: at every level of our lives we depend on them and they depend
on us. Permaculture ethics of care are based on the perception that we are embedded in a web of
complex relationships in which personal actions have consequences for more than ourselves and
our kin. And that conversely those collective connections transform our personal life. The
ecological perception of being part of the earth, a part which does its share of care, requires that
the earth is not reduced to a spiritual or visionary image, e.g. Gaia, but is also felt: earth as real
dirt under our fingernails (Starhawk, 2004, p. 6); our bodies responding to the needs of water
because we are water (Lohan, 2008); our energy being living material processed by other forms of
life. Permaculture ethical principles can indeed be seen as ideas that we became able of doing,
but it is more appropriate to say that it is the doing that transforms the way we feel, think,
engage, with the principles. We are pushed to thicken their meaning, by for instance, wanting to
learn more about the needs of the soil we take for granted (Ingham, 1999).
Before continuing, Ill give a simple example, practicing composting. Here naturecultural
interdependency is not only more than a moral principle, it is also more than a matter of fact that
we become aware of: it becomes a matter of care to be dealt with through ethical doings. I use the
word doing to mark the ordinariness, the uneventful connotation in contrast with action. For
people living in urban areas composting is a more or less accessible practice to caring for the
earth, as an everyday task of returning the surplus. One of the basic principles that permaculture
endorses is to produce no waste (Carlsson, 2008, p. 9). Thus techniques of composting are an
9

important part of earth activist trainings. Not only how to keep a good compost going, but also
how to become knowledgeable regarding the liveliness, and needs of, a pile of compost. One of
the ways of knowing if a pile of compost is healthy is if we see it fill up with pinkie sticky worms:
... worms are the great creators of fertility. They tunnel into the soil, turning and aerating it. They
eat soil particles and rotting food, passing them through their gut and turning them into worm
castings, an extremely valuable form of fertilizer, high in nitrogen, minerals and trace elements....
(Starhawk, 2004, p. 170). Worms, in compost some people keep worm buckets in the kitchens
are a good example of the nonhuman beings of which permaculture ethics make you aware,
but not the only one: anyone who eats should care about the microorganisms in the soil
(Starhawk, 2004, p. 8, my emphasis). However, this should doesnt work, without a
transformation of ethos. Worms are a more visible manifestation of soil life than
microorganisms, but are as easy to neglect. Caring for the worms is not a given: most people
have learned to be disgusted by them. Becoming able of a caring obligation towards worms is
nurtured by hands on dirt, love and curiosity for the needs of an other, whether this is the
people we live with, the animals we care for, the soil we plant in. It is by working with them, by
feeding them and gathering their castings as food for plants, that a relationship is created that
acknowledges our interdependency: these neglectable sticky beings reappear as quite amazing as
well as indispensable for they take care of our waste, they process it so that it becomes food
again.
This commitment to care for an earthy other is not understandable with reference to
utilitaristic ethics I take care for the earth and the worms, because I need them; because they are
of use to me. Nonhuman others are not there to serve us. They are here to live with. And,
clearly when we dont listen to what they are saying, experiencing, needing, the responses are
consequential as mass extinctions and animal related epidemics testify. But if this is not a
utilitarian relationship, is it an altruistic one? We need to avoid this binary to understand what is
becoming possible in this specific conception of relationships and mutual obligation.
Human agency in the permaculture cosmology is nature working. This means that
humans are full participants to the becoming of natural worlds. However they have their own
worldly tasks. Creating abundance by working with nature is seen as a typical human skill and
contribution. However, abundance is not considered a surplus of life that can be squandered, or
considered as self-regenerative biocapital to invest in a speculative future (Cooper, 2008). On the
contrary, it is only by returning the surplus of life e.g. by composting that the production of
abundance can be sustained. This is something that permaculture activists consider ancient
wisdom. Many refer to knowledge of indigenous populations and ancient agricultural knowledge.
In the words of Mabel Mc Kay, a Powo healer: when people dont use the plants, they get
scarce. You must use them so they will come up again. All plants are like that. If theyre not
gathered from, or talked to and cared about, theyll die (quoted in Starhawk, 2004, p. 9; see also
Mendum, 2009). This vision could be also named naturecultural. Though some refer to
permaculture as a humanist vision and even a better science (Holmgren, 2002) these arguments
are often produced to avoid the movement being identified with ecological visions that put
other beings before humans e.g. considering humans as a destroyer invasive species and
science and technology as evil. However, in the contexts I have been involved in, the accent is
put on a commitment to the people of earth that inseparably includes nonhuman beings. In
10

other words, without caring for other beings, we cannot care for humans either. Care for the
environment wouldnt be a good way to conceptualise permaculture ethics.
Coming back to altruism, and how it does not respond better than a utilitarian
perspective to how these relations of self/other work, I see these practices as marked by a form
of biopolitical ethics attuned to naturocultural awareness. In other words, here, care for ones
body-self is not separable from peoplecare and earthcare. In this sense, this movement
exemplifies well the interrelationship between the three ecologies of self (body and psyche),
the collective, and the earth that Flix Guattari famously called upon as the urgency for the
near future, believing that none could be realisable without the other (Guattari, 2000). As
Starhawk considers, material-spiritual balance cannot be attained through abstract engagement
with caring for the earth. On the contrary, the reference to an ideal earth conduces our spiritual,
psychic, and physical health to become devitalized and deeply unbalanced (Starhawk, 2004, p.
6). Conversely, in permaculture trainings there is an insistence on not neglecting the needs of
ones body-psyche in the profit of serving burn-out is taken into account as a typical activist
sickness. Thus, while activist care of ones self is embedded in obligation towards a collective, it
is not considered healthy, nor even effective, to ground care in an altruistic ethics in the face of
catastrophe. As Katie Renz argues permaculture is not some last-ditch effort in the emaciated
face of scarcity, but a cultivation of an intimate relationship with one's natural surroundings to
create abundance for oneself, for human communities, and the earth (Renz, 2003). Moreover,
the aim is not modest, nor sacrificial, it is not even sustainability it is abundance. The affect
cultivated in earth activist trainings is not despondency in front of the impossible, but joy in face
of possibility.
Ultimately, permaculture ethics is a situated ethics. I remember one of the mottos
transmitted in the training I attended: It depends is the answer to almost every permaculture
question. As such, the actualisation of principles of caring are always created in an interrelated
doing with the needs of a place, a land, a neighbourhood, a city, a particular action. Here,
personal agencies of everyday care are inseparable from their collective ecological significance.
It is important to note that permaculture ethics are not only about planting food or raising
animals or sustainable building. In the Earth Activist Training tradition, they are also related to
public actions of civil disobedience and non violent direct action illegal garden creation,
public demonstration of techniques in alter-globalisation oppositional events (Starhawk, 2004,
2002; see interview with Olhsen in Carlsson, 2008, pp. 74-79). More generally, permaculture
ethics are thought also as forms of organising for instance promoting forms of collaborative
direct democratic sharing instead of competition. They are not about an abstract external vision
of the practices of others. This has consequences for persons who, like me, are reporting these
ethical doings in a different context. I am not merely observing these ethics in the making; I am
trying to support their ethical obligations. This approach is different from an ethnographical
reporting of ethical transformation on the ground: the ethical involves and affects the
observer/researcher, in a search for engaging and responding with the transformation not
necessarily with answers. But it is also different from seeking the appropriate philosophical
framework that could fit this practice in. The ethical transformation that this
observer/researcher endorses is articulated not as norm but as invitation to relate with it. In this
spirit I attempt to contribute a conception of a care ethics that communicates with this vision.
11

5. DOINGS WITH CARE FROM ETHOS TO OBLIGATION

Throughout this paper I have worked with an unexplained assumption: I have thought ethics
from the perspective of its closeness to ethos rather than to morality, taking distance from ethics
as the enactment of normative stances. Indeed, as I have noted, focusing on practices of
everyday ethos transformation, on ethical doings can be a form of ethical inquiry that does not
necessarily define a code of conduct or a normative definition of right and wrong. But this
doesnt mean that ethos is unruly. An ethos is marked by constraints. Constraint is a term that I
borrow from Isabelle Stengers philosophy of practices (Stengers, 1997). Constraints in her
vision are not negative aspects of a practice, on the contrary they are enabling the practice, they
make it specific, they develop in close relativity to particular ways of being and of doing. These
constraints include the relations between objects and subjects entangled within a specific
setting. As such, practices develop an ethos relatively to material constraints, and these relations
create situated possibilities and impossibilities. Our practical doings can thus also be envisioned
from the perspective of their dimension of ethopoiesis, that is: their production of ethos, and we
could say of ontologies vi.
In this conception ethos creates its ethics, more than the contrary. The ethical
meaningfulness of practical doings is thus inseparable from constraints but these are not
necessarily moral norms. Morality is neither outside, nor before, nor even after ethos. Rather, it
can be said that norms and principles are particular modes of expression of ethos formation and deformation but do not express the whole of its ethical significance. This is different than
explaining ethos by behaving according to pre-existent norms and conventions that sort out the
good and the bad, the true and the false; or of explaining choice as the action of objective selfreliant individuals in a given situation. Such are situated explanatory artifices belonging to a
historical mode of thought prevailing in (western) ethical thinking. Thinking ethics from the
perspective of its closeness with ethos, points at a more immanent conception of how ethics is
formed: of the ethical as a social practice; as a living technology with material implications in
remaking human and non human ontologies.
We are now closer to a constructivist vision of the doings and undoings of the ethical on the
ground. This in itself, as we saw previously for bioethics and STS, can be an object of social
research in which the ethical doesnt come as an added set of concerns but is entangled in the
making of socio-material worlds. However, such a perspective is not sufficient to consider,
among the material constraints that are produced in practice, those that I have called ethical
obligations throughout this paper here not only borrowing but twisting another Stengersian
term. I mean by obligations constraints that get to endure across more or less changing relational
fields, transcending the production of ethos not necessarily to become moral norms, nor
necessarily political positions, yet somehow calling upon a necessity that requires ongoing
commitment. These ethical obligations are commitments that stabilise as necessary to maintain
or intervene in a particular ethos. They are not a priori universals, they do not define our nature,
they have become necessary.
I believe that a constraint in which ethos becomes commitment through its necessity, is the
obligation to care. I end this paper by summing up a series of ethical obligations of care ethos,
inspired by feminist theories. These respond to the problems I have explored, but not as an
answer or an application of principles i.e. ethics of care would be the adequate ethics. The
12

vision of care ethics proposed is selective and situated. It tries to meet the requirements I gave
myself at the beginning of this paper: problematising normative ethics by engaging with the
ethical as doing and responding to increasingly human decentred approaches.
The personal-collective. Throughout this paper I have stressed the significance of personal
everyday ethics, within a politics of the ordinary related to a collective rather than based on
individual choices. No field of ethical thinking has focused more on the politics (biopolitics or
not) of everydayness, of ordinary and mundane ways of living than feminist ethics of care
(Jaggar, 2001). But my perception of care ethics as a doing is influenced by feminist sociologies
of care labours (Malos, 1980; Precarias a la Deriva, 2006, 2004) as well as political theories of
care (Tronto, 1993). Reclaiming the significance of historically neglected values developing in the
reproductive sphere of living, feminists insisted on how everyday practices of caring in private
realms are political. This move went against the traditional reduction of politics to public life
addressed in the introduction. From this feminist perspective, care is an ethico-political issue, not
only because made public but because it pertains to the collective and it calls upon
commitment. Personal lives are both affected by what a society values and considers relevant and
transformable through collective action. Thinking of practices of everyday care as a necessary
activity to the maintenance of every social world makes them a collective affair. As such, when
someone cares for a child or an elderly person, or an animal, s/he is doing a job for a collective,
not only her/his self perpetuation nor that of one family. Conceived as such an ethics of care
responds to a perception of the societal (and naturecultural) tissue as made of interdependencies
and avoids understanding care to be negotiated as a utilitarian contract between individuals, or as
an altruistic ideal.
Care as a doing. Care is a necessary practice, a life sustaining activity, an everyday
constraint. Its actualisations are not limited to what we traditionally consider care relations: care
of children, of the elderly, or other dependants, care activities in domestic, health care and
affective work well mapped in ethnographies of labour or even in love relations. Reclamation
of care is not the veneration of feminine values (Cuomo, 1997, p. 126), it is rather the
affirmation of the centrality of a series of vital activities to the everyday sustainability of life that
have been historically associated with women (Carrasco, 2001). This is an important aspect to
think a naturecultural meaning of care ethics. Useful here is Joan Tronto and Berenice Fischers
generic notion of caring: everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so
that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our
environment, all that we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web (Tronto, 1993, p.
103). We need to insist on this interweaving in order to be able to think how care holds
together the world as we know it and allows its perpetuation. Acknowledging the necessity of
care in every relation is to be aware of how all beings depend on each other. Moreover, if care is
a form of relationship it also creates relationality. In that sense, as permaculture care ethics
consider, humans are not the only ones caring for the earth and its beings we are in relations of
mutual care. Many nonhuman agencies are taking care of many human needs, as much as
humans have their own tasks in the maintenance of the web of caring.
Remediating neglect. Ethical obligation to care stands against neglect. Neglect is what
happens when the doings of care are not attended. But also, societal labours of care are often
themselves neglected as less important domestic, or even petty-emotional or personal-oriented
tasks. Though we all need this work we predominantly continue to value the capacity to be self13

sufficient, autonomous and independent from others (Lpez Gil, 2007). Paying attention to care
still directs attention to the doings that are mostly devalued and accomplished in every context
by the most marginalised mostly, but not necessarily women vii. This has an ethico-political
translation. When caring is absent, obligation to care calls upon a commitment to share troubles
and burdens of those who are neglected. This is not a moral abstract principle of solidarity, but
as a doing within our practices. For researchers this kind of caring for the neglected can
correspond to an epistemic-political strategy that has been widely explored by feminist scholars:
a commitment to render visible dismissed or marginalised experiences (Harding, 1991). In
permaculture practices, ethical obligation is related to avoiding and remediating the neglect of
earths needs. Its ethics attract attention to the invisible but indispensable labours and
experiences of earths beings and resources. In this sense it is about making us care for what we
humans most of us learn to collectively neglect. This responds to the dilution of ethical
obligation: not everything is ethical, nor is the burden of care universal and homogeneous
humans would be per essence the pastoral carers of nonhumans. The ethical obligation to care is
historically situated: today it is also about humans assuming responsibility to intervene in
unbalanced worlds, to respond to a biopolitical situation in which ones are in measure to care for
others who are in need of being cared for.
Care as affective concern. It is easier to see how care is a material constraint and an ethical
obligation when we associate it with the necessary material doings that get us through the day.
But care is also an affective force, contained in the phrase I care - associated to love,
responsibility and somehow to concern for anothers well being. I count this dimension of care
as a practice of relationality necessary to living as well as possible. Both dimensions are
inseparable in an ethical perception of care as something we do and feel. Moreover, thinking care
as a doing also changes the way we envision care as affective concern. Feminists have shown
how much affective labour can be energy consuming and how it is even a commodity e.g. in
customer care (Vora, Forthcoming, 2009; Hochschild, 1983). In a world in which inequalities of
care are a burden mostly carried by ones at the expenses of others, to care can be devouring for
women and other marginalised carers. So the obligation to care is more than an affective state,
it has material consequences. As I said previously, in permaculture practices the condition of
sustainable collective caring is the maintenance of resources, including those of ones self. In a
conception of care as a collective good, care has to be shared, the surplus of life and energy that
it produces returned to the carers in order to avoid affective and material burn-out.
Care as situated and non innocent. The ecofeminist philosopher Chris Cuomo has pointed
out problematic assumptions in simplistic ecologist reclamations of care ethics. In particular its
reduction to purportedly feminine values: interest in the concrete rather than the abstract,
nurturance, intimacy, ego denial (Cuomo, 1997, p. 127). Cuomo pointed out two problems in
these assumptions. First, from a feminist perspective, we cannot forget that automatically
associating women as those in charge of these qualities is part of oppressive systems that neglect
caring. This means there are situations in which we could abstain from giving out care. Secondly,
she insisted that the meanings and ethical relevance of acts of caring and compassion are
determined by their contexts and objects (Cuomo, 1997, p. 130). Indeed care is a necessary
activity but its actualisations are always specific. Thinking its necessity does not imply
universality. In every context care responds to a situated relationship. Like in permaculture, it
depends will be a nuance that accompanies the ways acts of care are realised, and this again is
14

affected by constraints. On the ground doings are always more messy than they appear in
principles, an ethics of care cannot be just conceived as moral disposition. Far from being an
innocent activity care in naturecultures shouldnt be expurgated from its predicaments: e.g. the
tendency to pastoral paternalism, the power it gives to care takers, and the unequal depletion of
resources it implies in existing divisions of labour. In some contexts, care is related to killing: like
in weeding ones garden to make possible more fertile growing. As Haraway puts it, interspecies
living is also about mortal relatedness (Haraway, 2007). Sometimes the question of caring might
engage with thorny questions concerning how to kill and for what: e.g. in preoccupations with the
welfare of the animals we slaughter for feeding (see Miele and Evans in this issue). It is thus
important not to reduce caring to an ideal relationship, especially in the context of ecological
engagement in naturecultures. Caring in naturecultures cannot be reduced to stewardship or
pastoral care in which humans are in charge of natural worlds. Such conceptions also separate the
human subject from its natural object of caring. Nor should we go to the other extreme:
acknowledging that we humans are part of bios translating in the dilution of thinking our specific
obligations of care in relations with nonhumans (or worst, resulting in a naturalised conception of
the bios collective we are also animals, period). These are poor generalisations that eschew
engaging with actual situated necessities in naturecultures and with what these are requiring from
humans. In permaculture movements, where care for the earth is an inseparable doing from care
of the personal, interdependency is not a principle but a lived material constraint.
Coda: Alter-biopolitics
So, caring is neither angelic, nor unproblematic. We cannot take good care for granted by moral
intention. Hands on dirt, could be a way to say this in a funny permaculture way. Personalcollective permaculture ethics are inseparable from political significance of care. And today, ecopolitical awareness of the wounded state of the earth and its resources, in a context of extension
of consciousness about naturecultural catastrophe and massive extinctions, the necessity of
returning the surplus of life, puts the requirement to re-think a naturecultural politics of care at
the forefront. Encouraging collective care at the heart of an alter-biopolitics is thus also urgent.
This involves of course confronting forms of biopower by creating alternative forces of world
making relationalities that cultivate power-with and power-from-within more than powerover (Starhawk, 1987, 2002). But I do not call it alter only to refer to the embeddedness of the
permaculture movement in alter-globalisation strategies and struggles. Permaculture care ethics
also point at a different form of biopolitics. I believe that most discussions on biopolitics remain today
focused on the body, humanistic and individualistic, however politicised: the body-self, the bodycitizen or that of a public concerned about our bodies. Under contemporary conditions of
pervasive forms of biopower and in the current worrisome state of planetary bios we are all
dealing with fears, risks, rights, and protections in order to pursue the self-preservation of our
own biological life. Individuals may or may not join in collectives but the prevalent
understanding of ethics in biopolitics starts from how individuals transform their lives and
practices in resistance or in adaptation to biopower. As such they seem as a contemporary
version of the Foucauldian souci du soi, a care of the self that though it is not separated from its
collective inscription it does start from cultivating a healthy relation to the self in order to live
ethically. Ethical agency here is focused on practices that have as its object the edification of an
15

ethical self. But today this type of ethical engagement becomes not easily distinguishable from
contemporary forms of hegemonic thinking: self-care.
The forms of care I have addressed in this paper do not start from or aim at ourselves
nor do they put others before our self. Care is embedded in the practices that maintain the webs
of relationality that we form. Also, as a practice care is about an ethos that produces ethical
obligation, but neither is primarily directed to the ethical edification of human selves: they are
doings required by bios to subsist as well as possible. Living in naturecultures requires a perspective
on the personal-collective that, without forgetting human individual bodies, doesnt start from
these bodies but from awareness of their interdependency. This needs a decentred perception of
bios, in which we are involved in sustaining these relations, an ethics that includes non humans
responsibly but in a non paternalistic way. The turn to biopolitics cannot only mean more
awareness of how politics increasingly concern the biological dimension of our existence, but
requires that we better cultivate belonging to bios as another form of community. These are not
easy things to think or to do. This paper was just an attempt motivated by the conviction that we
need to imagine (bio)ethical practices which focus less on coping with, accommodating or
resisting biopower, and more on creating alternative forms of collective and caring biopolitics.
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I dearly thank Joan Haran and Dimitris Papadopoulos for precious comments and readings of this paper. Previous
versions were presented at the STS speaker series at the James Martin Institute, Sad Business School, Oxford and at
the 2009 Sociological Review Conference on The Politics of Imagination. I thank the participants to both occasions for
their comments and insights.
ii
http://www.earthactivisttraining.org
iii Another version being: Earthcare, Peoplecare, Fairshares (Burnett, 2008, p. 14).
iv Life itself is not simply appropriated, it is made to collaborate in its own transformation and productivity
(Cooper, 2008).
v An example of how these moves go together in naturecultures is Haraways famous cyborg, a hybrid of organic
matter and machine materials.
vi
This is the perspective explored by the Groupe dEtudes Constructivistes on practices of knowledge construction at the
Universit Libre de Bruxelles.
vii For instance, waged care work is mostly assured by migrant women without legal visible citizenship (Alvarez
Veinguer, 2008).

18