Earthcare on damaged lands; initial reflections on how to move from ego-numbness to eco-belonging

This paper focuses on the question of care in post-industrial urban Amsterdam. With the current crises of biodiversity, inequality, climate and meaning we here in the modern world have to ask questions of how we belong both locally and globally and how we might change that in a materially and experientially meaningful manner. Following degrowth we can confront our mode of living’s complicity in these issues and through feminist political ecology we can ask how care can be a guiding principle for undoing our failing growth-based society and building in the interstices what comes after growth. This paper asks from a highly personal position what it means to belong differently in urban landscapes in the Netherlands and what caring for earth might look like. Specifically, this paper looks at care as manifested through physical labour in urban agriculture. This is done through interviews, personal stories and slices of ethnobotanical history through which initial reflections and tensions are teased out that practitioners of earth care have encountered. Given the primacy of ontological dualisms prevalent in western thinking and the barriers that imposes on ethical treatment of ‘others’ and ‘elsewheres’ ontological transformations through earth care practices are a main focus of this paper. The research shows that participants engage in affective labour in which their embodied experience with urban agriculture leads to different ways of being and relating to earth-others and how they conceptualize their role as humans. Global/local considerations and implications for degrowth of these effects are analyzed.