Federal response is key to creating communities of environmental care — caring for our planet is the starting point for a broader social transformation

What would a policy response to the pandemic rooted in an ethic of care for people and the planet look like?

Respondent 4: One important aspect of a policy response to the pandemic rooted in an ethic of care for people and the planet is recognising and valuing emotional labour and care work (which are both unpaid and gendered). Very simply put, we need to care about care because our futures depend on it – caring about each other and caring for the planet. Another critical aspect of a policy response rooted in an ethic of care is to ensure that the policy response is both diverse and inclusive of marginalised communities, as well as informed by an intersectional feminist perspective. These two, together, are important because it is not simply about adding more women or people of colour, then stirring; it is about increasing diversity from within whilst also integrating an intersectional perspective.

Respondent 5: Both the Feminist Green New Deal perspective and broad feminist perspective start with a reimagining that our response would be centred on care. So, if I was in a leadership position where we were building our team to create the response, the first question must be, who are the carers? Who in our community and our country are responsible for life-giving services that sustain health, that sustain food, sustain housing, sustain education? Bring them together to come up with solutions. And I think what you often have in responses and what we’ve seen is that instead of that outreach to carers, you see an outreach to think-tanks and businesses and global corporates to devise models and methodologies that aren’t necessarily about building resilience.

We have seen how mutual aid networks have come together in their own communities in response to the pandemic and outline what the needs were, who the best people are to respond, how to provide things like mental health, how to create systems, or at least get people connected to systems so they could be provided with food. This approach could be adapted to operate at a larger scale in many communities and contexts.

So, if you do that kind of outreach, that kind of engagement, you actually hear people say: We don’t have care resources. We don’t have adequate health care. We don’t have our education system built up. Instead we have war ships coming in to help us with our health-care systems instead of having them centred to begin with. So, I think it’s about really different levels of society – at state, at federal level, at national level – really learning from community groups that are actually working in a way that centres those essential services. And so, you would find us talking a lot more about what we need to do in this instance not to bail out fossil fuel executives, to bail out, you know, our airlines but you would be bailing out human beings, right? You would be thinking about how we make sure that people can stay in their homes through ideas around rent cancellation. You would be thinking about a much deeper analysis of how we cancel student aid debt. How do we make sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that any caregiver in this country has access to the protective equipment that they need for as long as they need it? I think there were a lot of opportunities that were missed and a lot of things we could learn from going forward if we had centred from the beginning of the pandemic the question of how to maintain and sustain human beings and the basic necessities that they need.

Respondents 2 and 3: This pandemic has exposed the ways in which neoliberalism has undermined and weakened the value of care – care that we show for one another, and for the planet that we live in. When we think of care, we consider the state’s responsibility to care for all of us, especially those made most vulnerable by inequality and discrimination. This means policies like universal health care, paid sick and family leave, a living wage, and parental leave. Such policies of social protection would enable us all to care for one another and for ourselves, and to become more resilient in the face of crises like this one.

In this moment of pandemic, it seems like so many are waking up to just how essential the work of care is – both unpaid (care for the sick, for children, for the elderly) and paid (care provided by nurses, teachers, child-care workers). And partly because this work is performed largely by women, by people of colour, by immigrants – our economic system has undervalued and made this labour invisible, even though it is what makes our society and economy run. We must revalue, prioritise, and centre this work in a green economy, and we must ensure that this low-carbon work is deemed a ‘green job’ like any other.

And finally, a policy rooted in care means we uplift care for the planet, for our lands, the water we drink, the air we breathe. This is a value that Indigenous women have long taught us, to see nature as sacred, to recognise the connections among all life, and to call for an end to the privatisation of our vital resources. This ethic of care means we move from an extractive, exploitative economy to a regenerative, just, and sustainable one. That means keeping fossil fuels in the ground and transitioning from agribusiness and polluting pesticides to a regenerative, sustainable food system that uplifts women’s traditional farming practices. It means an end to false solutions that attempt to put a price on nature – like carbon trading or offsets, that ultimately harm human rights and commodify our life-saving resources.