Abstract

We inhabit multispecies landscapes that we adapt to our needs, transforming them into habitats with local and global consequences for all those who coexist within them, human and nonhuman alike. In contexts shaped by colonial, neoliberal, and extractivist regimes of disturbance, the sustainability of life has been placed in jeopardy, revitalizing the conversation around care as an analytical horizon for describing human–nature relations that fit neither within logics of accumulation and devastation nor within those of environmental conservation. Through a narrative review of the literature, this article traces the theoretical trajectories of the concept of care across the different fields that have shaped it—feminist economics and the sociology of care; science, technology, and society studies; ecofeminisms; community feminisms from Abya Yala; and critical geography—to understand its shift from human toward more-than-human dimensions. Drawing on this theoretical trajectory and engaging with ethnographic cases situated in extractivist and Anthropocene contexts, we propose the notion of “socioecologies of care”—inspired by Markaki (2022) and reworked here—as a framework for thinking about the sustenance of life within what we call “extractivist cracks.” We develop this proposal around four axes of ambivalence intended to move beyond dichotomies rooted in an anthropocentric understanding of care, defining what is at stake in caring in terms of the interdependent, the collective and kin-related, sustenance and repair, and the situated and impure. To these, we add a speculative opening that takes up the tension between care, work, and subsistence. We argue that care does not lend itself to a fixed definition but can instead be understood as interwoven axes of tension that remain open to the more-than-human.