The scales of ecological care: Reflections from Harvard Forest

Abstract

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’.

Introduction

For living beings and lively entities to persist, much less flourish, care is necessary. Enacted by human and more-than-human beings alike (Barnett, 2023b; de la Bellacasa, 2017), in its various guises care sustains some beings and ways of being into the future, staves off particular losses and safeguards specific possibilities for further becoming. Care holds together and holds open. Its enactment is vital. And yet, care often involves neglect, exclusion and harm. Intentionally and not, caring for some regularly entails closing down possibilities for others’ persistence and flourishing. Crucial though it may be, then, care is troubled and troubling – especially, perhaps, for human beings, since we also care about our cares and about the consequences of our caring deeds.

For human beings, caring for others inevitably involves difficult decisions. Perhaps the trickiest question of all is also the most fundamental: For whom and for what should one care? Implicit in this question, though, is yet another, usually underacknowledged one: At what scale should one care? I evoke ‘scale’ here to draw attention to the fact that one may care for many different kinds of phenomena and that a crucial part of what distinguishes such phenomena is their relative size, scope and complexity. It is one thing to care for a single tree, for example, and quite another to care for the species to which that tree belongs. So, too, is it one thing to care for a species and quite another to care for an ecological community of which it is but one, albeit perhaps very important, component. In some cases, caring at one scale positively affects other scales – as when, for example, caring for a particular species helps ensure the persistence of a specific ecological community. In other cases, however, caring at one scale may negatively impact other scales – as when, for example, sustaining a particular ecological community into the future requires that certain individual beings be sacrificed. When it comes to figuring out how to care (for human beings, anyway), scale proves decisive.

This is not the only reason I use the word ‘scale’, however. As a scholar of rhetoric, I am concerned not just with whom or what people care about but with how they come to view some living beings and lively entities rather than others as worthy of their care, and with how people move others to do the same. After all, where rhetoric is concerned, judgment is at issue. In a nutshell, rhetoric can be understood as ‘the art, the fine and useful art, of making things matter’ (Farrell, 2008: 470). According to Thomas Farrell, who penned this definition, rhetoric makes things matter by modulating magnitude – by, that is, making some things seem weighty and important while making others seem smaller and less consequential. Magnitude, explains Farrell (2008), affects

whether an audience may care about any topic sufficiently to attend to it, to engage it, and to act upon it; what consequences will weigh most heavily upon their prospective deliberation; what priorities will finally tip the balance in their judgment; and what appetitive attachments will need to be overcome for rational reflection to be feasible (p. 472).

By lending more weight to some matters than others, rhetoric can, as it were, tip the scales of care by making some living beings and lively entities appear and even feel more worthy of care than others (e.g. see Hawhee, 2023).

Historically, academics have tended to center humans as both providers and recipients of care. Occasionally, however, otherwise anthropocentric care theorists have acknowledged that humans can and routinely do care beyond the human – for other animals and plants, for example, and for other species and the ecological communities we collectively inhabit (for two classic examples, see Noddings, 1984; Tronto, 1993). More recently, care theorists have begun to consider more fully the ways in which care circulates well beyond the human. As Thom van Dooren (2014a, 2014b) and María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) teach us, we are responsible for tending to our more-than-human relations. This care work is complicated and ambivalent, but it is necessary to sustain other beings and ways of being into the future. In this essay, I follow their lead by turning my attention to a particularly instructive example of what I call ‘ecological care’. Ecological care is enacted at varying scales; the example I examine here is calibrated to the scale of ecological dynamics.

Harvard Forest – the fabled university’s outdoor laboratory – provides the scene for my analysis of how care comes to be calibrated to some scales rather than others. A Long-Term Ecological Research site, Harvard Forest’s (2021c) researchers ‘examine ecological dynamics in the New England region resulting from natural disturbances, environmental change, and human impacts’ across a ‘range of spatial and temporal scales’. Since 2006, scientists at Harvard Forest have been studying the impacts of a relatively recent anthropogenic disturbance: the introduction of the hemlock woolly adelgid – a tiny, aphid-like insect that is native to regions of Asia but considered invasive in eastern North America, where it now threatens the eastern hemlock, a beloved native conifer. Unlike many other governmental agencies, organizations and individuals that are caring for eastern hemlocks and the ecological communities they support via a wide range of human interventions (insecticides, biological controls, silviculture, seed saving and genetic modification), Harvard Forest scientists advocate ‘doing nothing’ (Foster and Orwig, 2014). Though their approach to the eastern hemlock’s plight may at first seem to be uncaring, upon further reflection, it becomes clear that Harvard Forest’s researchers have decided to care at different spatial and temporal scales than many of their peers.

In a given ecology of care, what matters of concern are made to loom large and to feel weighty or pressing? How are inhabitants of a rhetorical ecology invited to care about and for those matters of concern? And at what scale are they encouraged to calibrate their care? These are the key questions I take up in this essay via an examination of the rhetorics through which Harvard Forest’s decision to ‘do nothing’ is articulated, defended and circulated. In doing so, I demonstrate how rhetorical ecologies modulate magnitude, shift the scales of care and redistribute the benefits and harms of care in important ways. Before returning to Harvard Forest, however, I further explain how care, scale and rhetoric are related.

Care, scale, rhetoric

Whatever else it is – say, a felt disposition, a moral value or an ethical orientation – care is that which is necessary for living beings and lively entities to endure (de la Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 1993). Though mortality, and finitude more generally, dictate that no one or thing shall endure forever, care enables earthly beings and ways of being to persist for shorter or longer periods. Care, in other words, sustains. This is as true for the usual human subjects of care (infants, the ill, the disabled and the elderly) as it is for gatherings of such subjects (families, communities, nations). And it is true, too, for more-than-human entities – for individual animals and plants; for populations and species and for habitats and ecological communities (e.g. see Brelje, 2023; Curtin, 1991; Van Dooren, 2014b; Whyte and Cuomo, 2018). Every mortal being and every finite thing – in short, nearly everyone and everything on earth – needs care.

Though care is a universal imperative for living beings and lively entities, caring – as a practical endeavor – always plays out in highly specific ways. After all, what ‘counts’ as care depends on just who or what is being sustained into the future. Care responds to needs, and needs are both many and diverse. Thus, though different beings and ways of being all require care, the degrees and kinds of care they require differ. How different it is to care for a healthy human infant, for example, than it is to care for an ailing tree. And that is not all! How different is it to care for this healthy human infant (with all her peculiarities) rather than for that one, for this ailing tree (with all its peculiarities) rather than that one. When it comes to meeting needs, there is no – and can be no – one-size-fits-all response. To treat non-equivalent subjects of care as equivalent would be to ignore the haecceity of those for whom and which we care. To do so would be to wander away from care itself. Indeed, because needs vary, care conforms to only a single overarching principle: to each according to their distinctive needs.

Unfortunately, needs always seem to outstrip our capacities to care. Or, as Joan Tronto (1993) puts it, ‘there will inevitably be more care needs than can be met’ (pp. 137–138). Although Tronto had in mind only the needs of human beings, working with a more expansive concept of care, one that accounts for the caring needs of more-than-human others in addition to those of human beings, only underscores the basic moral dilemma they identify (Barnett, 2023a). ‘In meeting some needs’, Tronto explains, ‘other needs will inevitably go unmet’ (p. 138). It is the inevitability of this dilemma – the fact that no matter how hard one tries one will never be able to meet all the care needs that present themselves and, thus, that one must decide to care for some and not others – that ensures care-taking will always be fraught, always tangled up with violence of one kind or another (e.g. see de la Bellacasa, 2017; Giraud, 2019; Van Dooren, 2014b). Recall that the verb ‘to decide’ comes from the Latin de (off) plus caedere (cut), and so literally means ‘to cut off’. The cutting that is deciding draws the bounds of just which needs will be met, of just who and what will be sustained into the future.

The act of deciding implies responsibility, just as taking responsibility involves making decisions – and often very difficult decisions at that. In some cases, the decision to care seems not to be a decision at all. Must a parent decide to care for their child? Must a paid healthcare aid decide to care for their patient? These caring relations appear to be based in either altruistic or economic logics. And yet, the fact that the parent and the aid could opt out of these caring relations only underscores the connection to responsibility: to decide not to care for the child or the patient would certainly be to act ‘irresponsibly’ because of a prior, probably implicit, decision to care for them. And since we cannot help but make such decisions – no matter how implicit or obscure their origins – it behooves us to take responsibility for the act of deciding. After all, life and death, endurance and disappearance, are often on the line. For better and for worse, our decisions matter.

The question ‘For just whom or what should one care?’ implies yet another question: ‘At what scale should one care?’ I use the word ‘scale’ here in a couple different ways. First, I invoke scale’s etymological origins. From the Latin scala, one meaning of scale is ‘ladder’. As Joanna Zylinska (2014) explains, scale can be understood as a ‘practical and conceptual device that allows us to climb up and down various spatiotemporal dimensions in order to see things from different viewpoints’ (p. 26). Similarly, Joshua DiCaglio (2021) calls scale a ‘way of looking’ that can transport us ‘beyond our human-centered ways of dividing and seeing reality’ (pp. 4, 5). Going down the scale, our view of the spatial and the temporal constrict. Going up, they expand. At the bottom end of the scale, one deals with narrower, more concrete subjects on shorter timelines. At the upper end of the scale, one confronts broader, more abstract subjects on lengthier timelines. Care can be scaled down or up in terms of both the spatial and the temporal, though these need not scale in the same way. For example, one may calibrate one’s care to an individual being over a long period of time. In this example, the spatial dimension is ‘small’ while the temporal dimension is ‘long’. In yet other cases, the spatial and temporal dimensions constrict or expand in unison. Think, for example, of the caring relation between a doctor and a patient who has cut their finger and needs stitches: the doctor cares for a single person for just a few moments. Simply put, care plays out on many different scales.

Historically, discussions of care have focused primarily, but not exclusively, on humans caring for humans: parents caring for their children, doctors caring for their patients, teachers caring for their pupils, pastors caring for their flocks, children caring for their elderly parents and so on. In contrast with this relatively scaled ‘down’ concept of care, some scholars have argued for a scaled ‘up’ version – one that encompasses but also exceeds such interpersonal caring relations. Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto (1990), for example, view care as ‘a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (p. 40, emphasis in original). ‘World’, as Fisher and Tronto construe it, includes specific beings and relations but it also includes larger, more diffuse entities like ‘our environment’. Similarly, Ella Myers argues for a scaled-up version of care, what she calls ‘care for the world’. ‘Caring for the world’, according to Myers (2013), ‘involves not owning, ruling, or enjoying dominion over but collaboratively tending to the world, an entity that is bigger, richer, and more varied and lively than human life alone’ (p. 129). Like Fisher and Tronto, Myers also understands ‘world’ to include more-than-human beings and entities. We should, these scholars contend, conceive of care across a range of spatial and temporal scales.

Thinking about scale in relation to care raises practical questions, for what care consists of changes as one moves up and down the scales of care. Indeed, practically speaking, the scale at which one decides to care will shape how one cares. Consider efforts to restore the American whooping crane as just one example. By the beginning of the 20th century, a combination of hunting and habitat destruction had decimated American whooping crane populations. In the mid-20th century, however, whooping crane advocates in both the United States and Canada created captive breeding programs meant to preserve genetic diversity with the hopes of one day releasing juvenile cranes into the wild. In many ways, this vision has been realized. There are many more American whooping cranes in the wild today than there were in the early 20th century. Calibrated to the scale of this species, and to its distinctive way of life, these programs involve holding cranes captive, artificially inseminating female cranes, encouraging young cranes to imprint on human surrogate parents and instructing juvenile birds on how to be American whooping cranes – including, most famously, by teaching them to migrate using lightweight aircrafts designed to look like parental cranes. As Thom Van Dooren (2014b) notes in his account of these captive breeding programs, the story of the American whooping crane’s revival is one of care, to be certain, but it is also one of violence. The violence of captivity and of literal manhandling is ‘justified’ by the overriding goal of caring for the species qua species. Deciding to care at one scale, in other words, authorizes violence at another.

As the story of the American whooping crane’s revival makes painfully clear, thinking about scale also raises axiological questions. After all, who and what we care for – in the sense of sustaining them into the future – depends on what we care about and what we value. Of course, we can and usually do care about several things at once. We may, for example, value specific more-than-human beings and the ecological communities in which they dwell and the broader natural processes of which they are a part. And yet, when the needs of one scale conflict with those of another (as is the case in the whooping crane example), we find ourselves facing some difficult decisions about which scale ought to take precedence – about, that is, which scale we value more. Such ethical quandaries are familiar to conservationists and others who value, in a general sense, ecological well-being. While some argue that we are obligated to calibrate our care to the needs of individual living beings, others assert that we owe our care to species, to relations among species and to land communities (including, e.g. a forest). My point is not to side with any of these camps, but to note that legitimate, though sometimes conflicting, claims can be and are made for caring at a variety of scales.

Though rhetorical and ecocritical scholars have taken up the concept of scale as a way to rethink questions of representation vis-à-vis increasingly complicated, planetary phenomena (e.g. see Clark, 2015: 71–114; Jones, 2020; Pilsch, 2017), I am mainly interested in how people are moved to care at some scales rather than others. At a basic level, undergirding a conception of rhetoric as ‘the art . . . of making things matter’ (Farrell, 2008: 407) is the notion that what ‘matters’ is rarely simply given or obvious. According to Farrell, a rhetorical culture is one in which what matters – what groups of people attend to and care about – is open to negotiation and contestation. This is not to deny outright the possibility of intrinsic value or to disavow the fact that people come to care about specific beings and ways of being for many reasons. It is, rather, to underscore the fact that our cares are conditioned by the rhetorical ecologies – the material-symbolic milieus – we both inhabit and shape through our actions (see Barnett, 2024a; Eatman, 2020; Edbauer, 2005). To approach care rhetorically, then, is to trace the features of a given rhetorical ecology that help account for why a group of people understands certain things – again, rather than others – as worthy of their concern and care.

Individual rhetorical artifacts or performances – say, a particular text, image, speech, memorial or video – rarely tip the scales of care in one direction or another. And, of course, we never encounter such rhetorical artifacts and performances in the singular. Rather, we live in, travel through and sometimes transform rhetorical ecologies, material-symbolic milieus in which particular thoughts, feelings, values, beliefs and actions seem sensible – and in which others do not. Thus, understanding how a group of people come to care about this rather than that, at this scale rather than that one, requires an engagement not just with singular rhetorical artifacts and performances but with the range of texts (a word that I use here capaciously) that collectively compose the discursive landscape on which decisions about who and what to care about – and at what scales – are rendered (Barnett, 2024b).

When species meet: the eastern hemlock and the hemlock woolly adelgid

The hemlock woolly adelgid most likely arrived in the eastern United States in the early 1950s. Hoping to diversify the flora in their backyard, a homeowner in Virginia imported and planted a Japanese hemlock (see Orwig, 2014; Stoetzel, 2002). Unbeknownst to the backyard gardener, hemlock woolly adelgids were present on the underside of the imported conifer’s needles. Like the hemlock they arrived on, the adelgids are endemic to Japan (see Havill et al., 2006), where the two species coevolved and live in relative harmony.

Roughly the size of poppy seeds, hemlock woolly adelgids are ‘easily transported’ on birds’ feathers, mammals’ fur and humans’ clothing; they can travel long distances on nursery plants; and they can even be blown about by the wind (Orwig, 2014: 124). Soon after arriving in Virginia, the adelgids found their way onto the Japanese hemlock’s eastern North American cousins: the eastern hemlock and Carolina hemlock. Not having evolved alongside the adelgid, and not being associated with any predator species that eat the adelgid, these North American trees are especially vulnerable to the insect (see Havill et al., 2011: 10). As the forest ecologist David Orwig (2014) explains,

The adelgid does not eat leaves but rather competes with the plant for resources by extracting sugars and other food from it. The adelgid accomplishes this by settling along hemlock twigs at the base of the needle, inserting a long feeding tube or stylet into the twig, and feeding contentedly for months (p. 124).

Over time, the adelgids sap eastern and Carolina hemlocks of the nutrients they need to survive (see Limbu et al., 2018: 3). In response, affected trees shed their needles – their photosynthetic organs – and then they die, typically within just a few years (Orwig, 2014: 128–29).

Today, the hemlock woolly adelgid is present across most of the Carolina and eastern hemlocks’ native range, from the Appalachian foothills in north Georgia to the coastal forests of Nova Scotia (USDA Forest Service, 2023). In some places, the native trees have been more or less wiped out by the adelgids. In the early 2000s, for example, roughly 95 percent of the hemlocks in Shenandoah National Park died. Today, the graying husks of the former giants – what some call ‘ghost trees’ – pepper the Appalachian mountains there and elsewhere (Coxe, 2016). In other places, especially at ‘the northern fringes of their range’, where sustained cold temperatures suppress adelgid populations during the winter months, hemlocks remain a part of the landscape (Palmer, 2018: 123). And yet, climate change is providing the adelgids with an in-road even in these areas: warmer temperatures give adelgids a better chance of surviving the winter months.

The hemlock woolly adelgid was unwittingly introduced into North America just a few years before the founding text of the field of ‘invasion biology’, Charles S. Elton’s (1958) The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, was published. In the first chapter of his now-classic book, Elton issues a warning: ‘It is not just nuclear bombs and wars that threaten us, though these rank very high on the list at the moment: there are other sorts of explosions’. Elton was acutely concerned with ‘ecological explosions’, which he described as ‘the enormous increase in numbers of some kind of living organism’. Although often less spectacular than other types of explosions, ecological explosions ‘can be very impressive in their effects, and many people have been ruined by them, or died or forced to emigrate’ (Elton, 1958: 15). And for Elton, the most worrisome ecological explosions happen when a ‘foreign’ species – an ‘invader’ – enters a place and reproduces or spreads rapidly, thus imperiling ‘native’ plants and animals as well as the communities they constitute. Elton’s analysis, and the field of study he helped inaugurate, rests upon a binary view of nature where species belong in some places and not others. And it is always humans who get to police – often violently so – those boundaries.

In North America, people typically encounter so-called invasive species in a rhetorical ecology heavily shaped by what Donnie Johnson Sackey calls ‘the Eltonian paradigm’. Within this rhetorical ecology, Sackey (2024) contends, ‘nonnative species are always seen as potential threats to communities’ (p. 10). Introduced species are understood as ‘potential threats’ in large part because of the story that is being told about them – ‘a story’, James Stanescu and Kevin Cummings (2017) explain, ‘of conquest where the enemy is ruthless in plundering and despoiling the land’ (pp. xi–xii). In such stories, native species are inevitably characterized as ‘good’, while invasive species are necessarily framed as ‘bad’. Whereas the former are in their proper place, the latter have trespassed a boundary and must be stopped – or at least controlled. Care and violence, of course, overlap within such a rhetorical ecology (Barnett, 2024a). Because native species are good, and because invasive species are bad, caring for the former justifies harming the latter. Thus, what I call ‘rhetorical ecologies of violent care’ have profoundly shaped how both individual people and institutions relate to species deemed native and invasive (Barnett, 2024a).

Working within such rhetorical ecologies of violent care, individuals and groups across the eastern and Carolina hemlocks’ native range have gone to great lengths to sustain the native conifers. Such care assumes many forms. Spraying individual trees with horticultural oils can curtail an infestation, but the process is time-consuming and exacting. If even one adelgid is spared, the insect can quickly make a comeback. When larger stands of hemlocks are at stake, caretakers usually ‘treat’ trees with one of two neonicotinoid insecticides – either cheap and long-lasting imidacloprid or expensive but fast-acting dinotefuran (Palmer, 2018: 134–135). Both insecticides have proven effective at warding off adelgids, but we know these chemicals also impact other insects. In an effort to move away from insecticides, some caretakers release predatory insects – ‘biological controls’ – in the hopes of controlling the adelgid. But since the adelgid has no natural predators in eastern North America, biological control has consisted of introducing other non-native species into hemlock forests (see Hemlock Restoration Initiative, n.d.). Meanwhile, others are trying to better understand and even create adelgid-resistant hemlocks and some are cultivating and planting hemlocks in forests where the trees once lived (Palmer, 2018: 136–139). Of course, if the saplings survive they will also be vulnerable to the adelgid. For now, then, horticultural oils, insecticides and biological controls remain the main means of caring for (in the sense of sustaining) eastern and Carolina hemlocks.

Practiced within a rhetorical ecology of violent care, these modes of care are calibrated not to a single but, rather, to multiple scales: individual hemlocks, the hemlock ‘element’ in a forest, the ecological communities that hemlocks create as a ‘foundation species’ (Ellison and Baiser, 2014) and even the species itself. Although care looks different at each of these scales, the rhetorical ecology within which such decisions to care are made promotes a common belief that the ‘native’ hemlocks matter more than the ‘invasive’ adelgids and that sustaining the hemlocks justifies killing the adelgids. Though pervasive, this is not the only rhetorical ecology in which decisions about how to respond to the hemlock woolly adelgid’s presence are made. As the case study set in Harvard Forest makes clear, ecological care can be calibrated at scales beyond individual organisms, elements, communities and species.

The forest as dynamic unfolding

In north-central Massachusetts, near Quabbin Reservoir, on the unceded homelands of the Nipmuc people lies Harvard Forest. Founded in 1907, Harvard Forest comprises a mix of primary forests (never clear-cut or transformed into agricultural land), second-growth forests (cut but then allowed to regrow) and wetlands. Hand-crafted stone walls throughout the forest gesture toward recent human inhabitation and use of the land. In this sense, it is a typical New England landscape – one transformed by Native Americans, European settlers and present-day denizens. Among Harvard Forest’s arboreal residents, red oaks, red maples, black birches, white pines and eastern hemlocks currently predominate. The eastern hemlocks, which prefer moist, cool, well-drained areas, are particularly populous near the streams and the ponds that punctuate the forest (Harvard Forest, 2021d). And it was precisely in these areas that the adelgid gained a foothold in 2006. After arriving, the adelgid dispersed and took up residence in the various tracts of land, not all of which are contiguous, that collectively compose the forest (see Harvard Forest, 2021b). ‘By spring 2013’, one team of Harvard researchers notes, ‘dense aggregations of adelgid could be found on most hemlock branches’ (Ellison et al., 2014: 151).

In contrast with the eradication and control efforts at many other forests, at Harvard Forest neither horticultural oils nor insecticides nor biological controls are being used to halt the spread of the adelgid. Nor are the scientists at Harvard Forest planting eastern hemlocks or investigating resistant trees. Instead, the researchers at Harvard Forest are making no efforts to safeguard their eastern hemlocks against loss. In a book of essays entitled Hemlock: A Forest Giant on the Edge, they celebrate the eastern hemlock’s place in the history of the eastern forest and explain their decision not to try to save their hemlocks (Foster, 2014). In a chapter entitled ‘When Doing Nothing is a Viable Alternative’, they make their case for allowing the adelgid to transform the forest. ‘If the objective is to manage in harmony with natural process and to minimize environmental impacts’, they argue, ‘then in most cases we recommend doing nothing, meaning no active management’ (Foster and Orwig, 2014: 199). Of course, ‘doing nothing’ is, in fact, doing something. And at Harvard Forest, ‘doing nothing’ means encouraging forest dynamics to unfold (Barnett, 2021). An analysis of the rhetorical ecology in which this decision to ‘do nothing’ was developed, articulated and circulated reveals the ways in which the forest as a dynamic unfolding has emerged as the scale at which ecological care at Harvard Forest is being enacted.

Witnessing loss

As an outdoor lab committed to long-term ecological research, Harvard Forest (2021e) regularly plays host to a range of researchers studying an array of ecological phenomena. From October 2017 to November 2018, Harvard Forest hosted ‘Hemlock Hospice’, a ‘year-long, art-based interpretive trail’ created by artist and designer David Buckley Borden and ecologist Aaron Ellison. According to their brochure, ‘Hemlock Hospice’ aimed to:

[1] respect eastern hemlock and its ecological role as a foundation forest species; [2] promote an understanding of the adelgid; and [3] encourage empathetic conversations among all the sustainers and caregivers for our forests – ecologists and artists, foresters and journalists, naturalists and citizens – while [also] fostering social cohesion around ecological issues (Harvard Forest, 2017).

‘Hemlock Hospice’ consisted of 18 sculptures installed along a path that winds through a 200-year-old grove of eastern hemlocks in Harvard Forest’s Prospect Hill tract. As hardhat-clad visitors ambled from one sculpture to another, they also came face to trunk with dead and dying hemlocks – some standing, some fallen, some persisting and some decomposing on the forest floor.

Situated alongside the walking path, Borden’s colorful sculptures encouraged visitors to bear witness to the eastern hemlock’s demise in central Massachusetts and, by extension, in all those places where it dwells. For example, the first trailside installation, ‘Wayfinding Barrier No. 1’, blocks walkers’ access to one of Harvard Forest’s many footpaths. The structure itself assumes the form of a blockade: a sturdy, multi-colored wooden cross bar made from recycled ant nests is supported by two painted A-frame wooden structures. Hanging between them, a simple sign proclaims: ‘Trail Closed’, ‘Do Not Enter’ and ‘Safety Hazard’. The accompanying brochure clarifies the source of the safety hazard:

Harvard Forest’s yellow trail is now closed due to safety hazards from standing dead and dying eastern hemlock trees. Hemlock, with no natural resistance to the aphid-like HWA, succumbs as the insect feeds on the fluid and starches flowing through the tree’s needles. Notice that the towering hemlocks at this closed trail head have significant canopy loss because of the HWA (Harvard Forest, 2017).

Even as ‘Wayfinding Barrier No. 1’ blocks access to the yellow trail and to what lays beyond, the sculpture also directs attention to its surroundings, to the endangered hemlocks that make the forest itself a dangerous place for human and more-than-human beings alike. By directing visitors to attend to the dead and dying trees in their midst, the barrier also points more subtly to what passes away with the trees: opportunities to become with eastern hemlocks, what the ecological philosopher and anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (2011) called ‘double death’. That is, the loss of the hemlocks entails losses of relational possibilities in the future.

As the name of the installation, ‘Hemlock Hospice’, suggests, Borden’s aim with this project was neither to ‘save’ nor to inspire others to ‘save’ the imperiled eastern hemlocks. The aim, rather, was to provoke people to dwell on and with the loss to come. The brochure that visitors received upon entering the exhibit explains that ‘A cure does not exist; hospice, or end-of-life care, is not about saving the trees, but [about] managing their loss’ (Harvard Forest, 2017). Hospice, in other words, is about staying with the dying. And, in many ways, it is as much for the dying as it is for the living, for those who will endure and survive the loss.

The 13th sculpture along the trail is titled ‘Exchange Tree’. Made to look like a fallen hemlock, the ‘Exchange Tree’ consists of a central ‘trunk’ made of a natural hewn log from which more than 36 bright yellow ‘limbs’, themselves painted cylindrical dowels, radiate. At 12-and-a-half feet long and ten feet tall, the ‘Exchange Tree’ stands out amid the collapsed eastern hemlocks nearby. The brochure encourages visitors to ‘pause here to reflect on these fallen giants and leave a message for yourself, for the hemlock, for the HWA, for others, or for the future forest’ (Harvard Forest, 2017). Visitors so inclined could write their message on a blue ribbon and then hang it from the spindly yellow branches, thus forging a personal connection with the dying hemlocks and giving voice to their affection for and concern about the species. The words ‘love’, ‘remember’, ‘sorry’, ‘respect’, ‘awesome’, ‘thank’ and ‘save’ appear prominently on a word cloud that Borden created based on the messages people left at the ‘Exchange Tree’. Such messages honor the lives of the fallen hemlocks and gesture toward a future in which, although they will one day no longer populate the Massachusetts landscape, they will live on, as it were, in those who remain.

Between ‘Wayfinding Barrier No. 1’ and the ‘Exchange Tree’, visitors to ‘Hemlock Hospice’ encountered ‘Memorial Woodshed’. Approximately halfway through the two-mile walk, ‘Memorial Woodshed’ also invited onlookers to pause, take in their surroundings and reflect on the ongoing loss of the hemlock. Unlike ‘Wayfinding Barrier No. 1’, which directs attention to nearby dying trees, and unlike the ‘Exchange Tree’, which encourages amblers to give voice to their affective responses to the loss, ‘Memorial Woodshed’ gathers visitors’ attention to two hemlocks that have already succumbed to the hemlock woolly adelgid. This particular installation articulates a traditional New England structure – the woodshed, a place to store cut and chopped wood for the cold winter ahead – to the loss of the hemlock. Here, the woodshed encases the bottom portions of two eastern hemlocks. The upper bits of both trees have already fallen; what remains are the ragged, decomposing, and, in one case, moss-covered trunks. But that is not all. Young, unidentified trees – birches and maples, perhaps – also shoot forth from moist earth. At ‘Memorial Woodshed’, then, visitors glimpse not just dead hemlocks but the forest to come in the wake of the loss of the eastern hemlocks.

Visualizing change

Subtly and not so subtly, ‘Memorial Woodshed’ echoes another set of artworks for which Harvard Forest is known. Not far from the trailhead that led visitors through Borden’s site-specific installation stand several buildings, including one that houses Fisher Museum (Harvard Forest, 2021a). Dedicated in 1941, the two-story brick building was constructed to ‘contain 23 dioramas of New England forests designed by Richard T. Fisher, the first director of the Harvard Forest’ (Harvard Property Information Resource Center, 2019). According to a short booklet published in 1936, Fisher had two aims with the dioramas. First, he wanted to ‘illustrate [. . .] the forest history of central New England’. And, to that end, 7 of the 23 dioramas provide detailed images of the forest at various moments from 1700 – just before European colonists arrived in the area – to 1930. Second, Fisher (1936) hoped to demonstrate ‘the methods of treatment of existing stands as developed at the Harvard Forest’ (p. 3). Ten of the dioramas do just this, illustrating numerous silvicultural methods. Still other dioramas offer viewers a glimpse of several aspects of the forest landscape: two show an old-growth forest on the shore of Harvard Pond, one emphasizes wildlife, one illustrates the relationship between agriculture and erosion, one shows firefighters battling a fire in the forest, and one visualizes the aftermath of said wildfire. Finally, one diorama illustrates how the models were painstakingly constructed of copper wire, clay, wax and other materials (see Fisher, 1936: 4). Arrayed around the interior walls of a large, rectangular, dimly lit room, each of the backlit dioramas is remarkably detailed; at several feet wide, tall and deep, they give visitors a sense that they are peering into miniature forest worlds.

Entering Fisher Museum’s main entrance, visitors walk into the room that houses the dioramas. Working their way clockwise around the room, they first encounter the landscape history models, which visualize changes in the forest following European colonization of the area in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The first diorama, purportedly set in the year 1700, shows what the forest looked like prior to European settlement. Although the Nipmuc people inhabited the forest at the time, no humans appear in this particular tableau vivant. Instead, viewers are offered up a scene of a so-called ‘virgin’ forest. In the immediate foreground, a mix of white pines and eastern hemlocks mingle with deciduous trees. Perched atop a hill, this proximal forest gives way to a sublime background of yet more forests as far as the eye can see. Indeed, the apparently untouched hills and valleys and mountains beyond are covered by trees. It is this initial scene that provides a baseline against which to judge the visual narrative that follows.

The next six dioramas tell a tale of ceaseless transformation. In the second model, set in 1740, most of the trees in the immediate foreground have been cleared. Stumps gesture to the recent past, but the forest has been replaced by an open field: the scene of settlement, cultivation or ‘Progress’. Whereas the first diorama is devoid of humanity, the second is full of traces of the human. Not only do viewers glimpse a farmer; they also see his dog, his bull, his stone wall, his small orchard and his modest home in the distance. In the third diorama, it is not just the trees in the foreground that have disappeared. Set in 1830, the model depicts deforestation on a grand scale. Aside from a few trees scattered here and there, the hillsides have all been cleared, fenced-in, and given over to agriculture. But in the subsequent model, the forest begins to return. Titled ‘Farm Abandonment’ and set in 1850, the diorama shows what happens when farmers stop tending to their fields: trees, in this case eastern white pines, reclaim pastureland. The final three dioramas in the ‘Landscape History’ illustrate a process of succession. Once the pioneering white pines were large enough to be harvested, absentee farmers did so, which in turn gave hardwoods an opportunity to flourish. In the final vignette, the farmers’ fields and homes are no longer visible. Instead, a mixture of maples, oaks, ashes, cherries and birches have regained the ground they held in the first diorama. It is not a story of restoration but, rather, of transformation. The forest returns, to be sure, but it takes a new form.

Taken together, the landscape history dioramas disclose the New England forest not as a stable, unchanging being but, rather, as a dynamic, unfolding becoming. This has important consequences. If the forest were a being capable of persisting in an unchanged state, Harvard Forest’s decision not to launch a defense against the hemlock woolly adelgid might well seem suspect. After all, care for identifiable beings is guided by a doubled telos of ongoingness and flourishing; the purpose of such care is to enable the being to, minimally, carry on and, ideally, to thrive. If doing so entails harming or destroying others, the commitment to safeguard the being with whom or which one has cast one’s lot often serves as ample justification for such deeds. The means, as it were, justify the ends. If, by contrast, the forest is an ever-unfolding and ever-transforming becoming, always in flux and always open to modification, the decision to ‘do nothing’ in response to the woolly adelgid, as researchers at Harvard Forest describe their plan (Foster and Orwig, 2014), makes its own kind of sense. Though these researchers may be sad about the loss of the eastern hemlock from their forests, their fidelity is less to any tree or to any species and more to the idea of the forest on display in the dioramas – an idea of the forest as a dynamic unfolding (see Barnett, 2021).

Preserving wildness

Focusing on the New England forest’s ability to become otherwise and to heal itself over time, Harvard Forest researchers focus their caring attention and labor not on sustaining individual trees, elements, communities or species. Rather, the care for which they advocate is oriented toward the dynamic unfolding of the forest more generally – toward, that is, ensuring that the forest can forest, that it can remain responsive and resilient in the face of ongoing changes or disruptions.

This vision is made concrete by Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities, a Harvard Forest-led initiative to ‘advance land protection and nature conservation as a critical means of improving the health and well-being of nature and the people who depend on it’ (Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities, 2023). The Harvard Forest scientists who composed the initial vision in 2005 recommended that 2.5 million acres of land in Massachusetts – half the state – be conserved. They suggested that about 2.25 million of those acres be comprised of ‘managed woodlands’, which they characterized as ‘well-managed forests of mixed ages and species that provide a wide array of benefits’ to human and more-than-human denizens alike, including ‘habitat diversity’ and ‘locally grown wood products’ (Foster et al., 2005: 13). Recognizing that most land will be managed in some way, the authors of the initial Wildlands and Woodlands report maintain that humans should manage forests in ways that connect people to ‘nature’, generate sustainable industries, yield several ‘ecosystem services’ and enable species to respond and adapt to wide-scale environmental changes (Foster et al., 2005: 14). Although the idea of managing forests is at odds with their recommendation vis-à-vis the hemlock woolly adelgid, they contend that some kinds of land management enable and encourage dynamic processes to unfold.

However, the Harvard Forest scientists also argue that the best way to encourage such processes is to get out of the way. Some lands, they contend, ought not be managed. They call such places ‘wildlands’. According to their 2005 report, wildlands are ‘protected landscapes of forests, aquatic, and wetland ecosystems that are allowed to develop, maintain, and promote natural processes and conditions with minimal human impact’ (Foster et al., 2005: 6). Though it is impossible to eliminate all ‘human impact’, Harvard Forest scientists maintain that it is important to carve out at least some spaces where humans forego attempts to actively manage the landscape, thus ‘allowing’ forest dynamics – ‘including disturbance regimes’ like the introduction of non-native insects – to unfold without intervention (Foster et al., 2005: 7). Importantly, they advocated for wildlands of various sizes, ranging from 5,000 to 50,000 acres, to be interspersed with managed woodlands. According to the Harvard scientists who penned the 2005 report, protecting wildlands is a way to ‘promote natural landscape-level processes, ecological patterns, and biodiversity across the region’s range of forest and environmental conditions’ (Foster et al., 2005: 5). Relinquishing control over a forest’s fate involves trusting the forest to become otherwise in ways that support a range of more-than-human beings and ways of being, though not necessarily – or not only – those that particular humans value at a particular moment in time. Of course, it also means letting go of fantasies of stability, of the idea that forests do not, or should not, transform over time.

Conclusion

I began this essay by noting that care is simultaneously vital yet fraught. I hope the theoretical and critical work that followed has shed some light on why this is the case. On one hand, care can be calibrated to many different scales, and caring at one scale often involves neglect or harm at another. On the other hand, decisions to care at one scale rather than another are not made in a vacuum but, rather, emerge within 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. 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. And 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 never simply the result of careful reasoning but are, rather, forged amid a discursive landscape that moves us to care in some ways and not others.

I bring scale and rhetoric to the foreground in this discussion of care not in order to pave the way toward a purification of care. Too often care is taken to be an uncritical good (Barnett, 2024b). But as María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) reminds us, care is never simply good, never innocent, but, rather, always ambivalent. My point is not that further reflection or comparative analysis will yield insights into the ‘right’ scale of care. Nor do I believe that an exploration of diverse rhetorical ecologies necessarily leaves the critic ready to judge which rhetorical ecology bears the most ethical relations. Instead, thinking about the scalar and rhetorical dimensions of care invites an uneasy reckoning with plurality: people in different rhetorical ecologies come to different conclusions about who and what to care for and at what scales, and they care accordingly. Thus, exploring such rhetorical ecologies can help us understand how it is that the same problem can lead to quite different decisions about what it means to respond with care. Grappling with the scales of care may also help us appreciate why, in certain circumstances, minimizing human intervention is construed as a caring human response. This sort of analysis, it seems to me, is an important part of what it means to honor care’s complexity.