6: Three layers of vulnerability in climatic and environmental crises: the role of cultural caring practices

Overview & Synopsis

Care and caring practices are generally invisible and unpaid yet form the foundation of societies. This chapter draws attention to caring practices of landscapes and herds in Northern and Western Norway, where the policies and approaches to risks that seek to reduce vulnerability inadvertently sever these caring practices. We see this severing as the primary source of vulnerabilities to climatic and environmental changes, through structures such as industrialism and extractivism. Such structures are produced as those in power seek to reduce vulnerabilities in some while ignoring or denying irreducibly related vulnerabilities in themselves. Vulnerability indicators such as income, gender, ethnicity, or farm productivity are thus emergent, tertiary levels of vulnerability. Attention to the relation among all three layers of vulnerability is key, we contend. Judith Butler's insights on primary relational vulnerability are a starting point for our effort to reconceptualize vulnerability to global change.