The scales of ecological care: Reflections from Harvard Forest

In this essay, I explore the scalar and rhetorical dimensions of care. On one hand, I argue, care can be calibrated to different scales, and caring at one scale often involves neglect or harm at another. On the other hand, I claim that decisions to care at one scale rather than another emerge in particular rhetorical ecologies within which certain things are made to matter more than others. Scale and rhetoric productively, if also frustratingly, complicate our understanding of care. While the notion of scale forces us to front the unsettling fact that acts of care at one scale often require acts of violence at another, the notion of rhetoric invites us to face the fact that decisions to care for this rather than that – at this scale rather than that one – are inevitably forged amid a rhetorical ecology that moves us to care in some ways and not others. To demonstrate the utility of these insights, I dwell at length on the rhetorical ecology in which Harvard Forest researchers arrived at and articulated their decision to ‘do nothing’ to save an imperiled native species. This article is part of the special issue ‘Re-creating Care as Mattering Practices’.