Paper short abstract:

Contemporary social theory has argued for a 'loving' post-environmentalism based on intimate care. I explore how these ideals map awkwardly onto Indigenous Pala'wan relationships with animals, plants and spiritual entities that hold intimacy in tension with fear, violence and death.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary social theory has invested heavily in reforming human relationships with the non-human world as an alternative to the environmental destruction and ecological injustices wrought by industrial capitalism and enduring neocolonialism. In addition to the work of Haraway, Latour, Tsing and others who articulate a 'loving' post-environmentalism based on intimate care, this aspiration converges with some Indigenous scholars in North America, Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia whose ontologies are often rooted in kin-based relationship non-human world. Together, these trends have formed part of an influential scholarly discourse that envisions 'care, love and kinship' (Todd 2017) as the solution to the near-apocalyptic social and environmental conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic work in the Philippines, I explore how these ideals map awkwardly onto Indigenous Pala'wan relationships with animals, plants and spiritual entities that hold intimacy in tension with fear, violence and death. I argue that care-based futurisms present a narrowed field of possibilities for large numbers of peoples seeking to strategically validate their relationships with nature as conservation practice. For Pala'wan people, this primacy threatens to reinforce longstanding biases in which Indigenous Filipinos have historically been positioned as wasteful "users" rather than caring "managers" of their environment - an experience common to many Indigenous communities globally who cannot, or do not, articulate their relationship with the environment through a language of loving managerialism.