Care Lessons for the Climate Endgame

Stephen Markley, in his 2023 novel, The Deluge, captures the essence of what he calls capitalism’s “ultimate endgame”: “All the years of talk about the end of the world, but that’s not what’s happening. It’s the beginning. And no one can wrap their minds around what it’s the beginning of yet.”

This endgame is not an apocalyptic finale. There will be no Avengers style battle between heroes and villains, but an ongoing, cascading series of crises, a chronic condition. “Sea levels would rise by 230 feet eventually,” Markley writes. “Earth was on its way to four, five, or possibly six degrees of additional temperature rise. It was an endgame that would push the planet past anything a human could conceive of.” This might now happen sooner than even the bleakest models suggest, and those alive to witness it would see “civilization entering its violent disintegration with a breakdown of the social order, mass starvation, disease, and armed conflict over water and arable land.”

As a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis, the climate endgame is not an end but a beginning, and no one can quite wrap their minds around what it’s the beginning of yet.

Despite these impending scenes of mass devastation, however, at the heart of the idea of the climate endgame is a more mundane concept: care. Care not as some secondary concern, but as the most urgent political question. To put it another way: the concept of care is as central to the climate crisis as the concentration of carbon dioxide itself.

The climate crisis is often told as a story of “the environment”—ice sheets, coral reefs, emissions curves—as if it were separate or separable from the social world. But the climate crisis is also a crisis of care. It is a crisis of organized abandonment, of the slow and violent unravelling of the relationships that make life possible.

The first thing to understand is that everyone needs care, though some need more than others. All human beings are dependent on other human (and non-human) beings. It takes care to maintain life, whether we are speaking of infants, the elderly or those in the so-called prime of their lives. Interdependency is a condition, not a choice, and privilege does not mean not needing care; it means being able to take for granted the care you do need. The second thing to understand is that care is work. While you can have empathy without lifting a finger, to care ultimately means to work, be this physical, manual, or mental labour. It means carrying out repetitive jobs: doing laundry, washing dishes, cooking meals, and countless other less immediately obvious tasks.

The third thing to understand about care is that it is not a neutral concept but a highly fraught one, evoking both ambivalence and anxiety.[1] Alongside its recent elevation into an academic and political buzzword, care readily gives rise to a series of fantasies and temptations: of romanticization (“care is wonderful!”), essentialization (“women and mothers are the primary caregivers of family and society because they are women and mothers!”), and exclusion (“only members of this family, or this nation, or with this particular background, deserve care!”). Embedded in these are many unfortunate dualisms. Some lead us toward a kind of fascism, where exclusive or exclusionary care is directed solely toward that which resembles and belongs to “us”. Others lead to positions where care is perceived as something soft in opposition to the hardness of society and the economy. Care is not, however, inherently soft; it can be as hard as stone: “Care is not an unqualified good. It is not always about hot tea and hugs.”[2]