Almonds were once "the gold of Mallorca," a source of modest wealth and a pillar of diversified farming systems for smallholders on the largest of Spain's Balearic Islands. Today researchers believe that nearly every rainfed almond tree on the island will be dead within as few as five years. An introduced bacteria, Xylella fastidiosa, enabled by its spittle-bug vector, and emboldened by climate change, has flooded the xylem of these rainfed trees, impeding the flow of fluid and nutrients to the point where the tree can no longer survive. As a localized island issue, the plant epidemic was a contained tragedy. Once detected in mainland Spain, it provoked a sense of rural crisis. As almond farmers, farm advisors, government officials, and scientists grappled with this new reality, often with sharp disagreement and blame, their words were threaded together by a common fundamental concern: care, or cuidado.
"They should apologize to the farmers. The almond trees were not poorly cared for [mal cuidados]" quoted a headline in the local newspaper (Cortés 2017). The featured interview reflected the frustrated exhaustion of an agronomist and almond farmer who had tracked the disease early in its emergence. When Tomeu Melis welcomed me to his farm, we passed through the gate and immediately came upon the carcass of an enormous infected almond tree, cut cleanly at the base and severed into segments to facilitate removal. The hillsides beyond were dotted with a contrast of vibrant carob trees and decaying almond trees navigated by a small flock of sheep. Carob trees, unaffected by the new disease, would be planted in place of almonds, Tomeu explained pragmatically. The lingering sting of accusations that farmers lacked care for their land would require a more complex and uncertain remedy. What does it mean for farmers to care for trees? For a government to care for farmers? For trees to care for a diverse agroecological landscape? What does it mean to fail to care in these contexts? Or to be careless?
This essay elaborates a distinctly feminist account of Spain's faltering almond assemblage using two tools: María Puig de la Bellacasa's (2017) theorization of care and Karen Barad's (2007) notion of "intra-activity." Puig de la Bellacasa offers a theorization of care that does not entirely correspond to its vernacular usage. Rather than benevolent concern, care is a form of maintenance work. Research on care follows in the feminist tradition of drawing attention to unrecognized labors, such as Silvia López Gil's (2007) description of care as largely unseen work "without which life does not function." It is embedded in everyday practice (M. Barnes 2012), so seamless a process that it lacks a clear beginning or end. Centering care is a feminist approach regardless of the gendered dimensions of the lives in question, as examinations of interdependence, maintenance, and more-than-human relations have been marginalized by Western patriarchal values privileging individuality, invention, and human dominance (Wynter 2003; Puig de la Bellacasa 2012; Mattern 2018; Russell and Vinsel 2018). Consonant with new materialist approaches, care for Puig de la Bellacasa (2015, 2017) includes not only human acts but the activities of an assemblage that promote ongoingness—irrespective of scale, aliveness, or species.
As Annemarie Mol (2008, 84) elaborates, "articulating 'good care' is an intervention rather than factual assessment." As feminist scholars introducing a special issue on the politics of care argue, "practices of care are always shot through with asymmetrical power relations" (Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015, 3). "Care organizes, classifies and disciplines bodies," the authors note, with colonial governance as an instructive illustration (Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015, 3). They encourage a critical approach to care that situates care practices within relations of power and privilege. Care is non-innocent. It is a form of more-than-human biopolitics, privileging the maintenance of certain lives over others. Care is, to quote Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, introduction), "a thick, impure involvement in a world where the question of how to care is posed." She suggests that as researchers we look for where this question is not easily answered.
Barad's (2003) theory of agential realism provides an ontological foundation for thinking with care. She insists that entities do not preexist their relatings. Whereas interaction implies a prior state of independence between distinct actors, her term intra-action maintains their ongoing mutual co-constitution. This blurring of subject-object distinctions becomes palpable in the circling blame of a plant epidemic where causal mechanisms are multiple and uncertain, simultaneously external and internal. Indeed, some farmers confronting Xylella ultimately argued for "living with" the disease by deepening the long-term engagement of scientists and policymakers in their community. Their plea underscores how the narrow agronomic view of disease fails to acknowledge, and may even undermine, the relational maintenance work and interdependence at the core of an agroecological system's resilience.
Environmental anthropology has long attended to the intimacy of interspecies linkages in agrarian lifeways (Evans-Pritchard 1940; Conklin 1957; Netting 1974). Recent work highlights the interacting agencies of organisms across scales, from microbes (Paxson 2008) to forests (Kohn 2013; Tsing 2015). Yet despite the significance of plant diseases to empire-making (Crosby 2004) and their suspected amplification by climate change, these life-altering encounters have received little attention (Seshia Galvin 2018). Anthropological scholarship on pathogenesis has predominantly focused on the threats animal confinement poses to more-than-human lives (Dunn 2007; Lowe 2010; Porter 2013; Blanchette 2015). In studies of agricultural plants, much like their animal counterparts, vulnerability to disease is described largely as a product of industrial conditions of density and uniformity (Soluri 2005; McCook 2006; Guthman 2019). The case of Xylella in Spain, by contrast, reveals the pathogenic vulnerabilities of a diversified agricultural system struggling to persist amid capitalist pressures near and far, both within agriculture and beyond.
The socio-ecological devastation of plant disease is well known. Plant disease famously provoked mass migration during the Irish potato famine (Yoshida et al. 2013), forever changed the ecology of North America during the chestnut blight (Biermann 2016), and nearly eliminated European wine cultivation (Campbell 2004). As global transportation networks become increasingly fluid (Chapman et al. 2017), resistance to agrochemicals becomes more common (Gould, Brown, and Kuzma 2018), socioeconomic change refashions landscapes (Meentemeyer et al. 2008), and climate change alters the ranges and populations of organisms (Jones 2016; Trębicki et al. 2017), experts expect plant diseases to become more frequent and possibly more destructive.
Epidemiological accounts of plant disease used by scientists and policymakers tend to reify boundaries, positioning pathogens as an outside threat or invasion. Here, I want to draw attention to how pathogens, no matter their origin, are produced from within. Pathogenicity describes "the relational ways in which infectious diseases are made" (Hinchliffe et al. 2017, xiv). I detail how Spain's Xylella epidemic is produced not only by bacteria but also by the conditions of possibility created by tourism, unstable land tenure, histories of marginalization, and the retreat of government from farm advising. Theorizing a plant epidemic through care allows us to uncover the intra-action of pathogenicity and shift from a politics of purification toward a politics of more-than-human care.
To admit the intra-active quality of pathogenicity requires acknowledging that containing the pest is only part of the picture. Such an admission requires a political reckoning that goes beyond trade restrictions or government-funded tree removal and replacement. It broadens the scope of dialogue to reflect long-term commitments to the land. Understanding landscape care as non-innocent avoids a good-bad dichotomy, asking difficult questions about how to care. Answers to this question may be incommensurable, as political projects often are (Tuck and Yang 2012), and carry uneven effects. Care is not a shorthand for universal values. It is a call to give relational maintenance work the political weight it is due.
WORKING WITH CARE
How does one observe and classify care? One way is by listening for the multiple interpretations of care articulated by interlocutors. I did not begin this research seeking to examine care, nor did I anticipate encountering an epidemic of such dramatic proportions. It was the voices of my companions repeatedly deploying the word cuidado and detailing the decline in rural maintenance work inherent to the Xylella outbreak that drew me to revisit and deepen my engagement with theories of care in order to make sense of an unexpected phenomenon. While emic uses of cuidado and the etic theoretical concept of care are not perfectly equivalent, their resonance felt too strong to be ignored. Cuidado has a rich variety of uses, including as a common exclamation of caution ("watch out!") and a way of describing nurturing, attentiveness, concern, or support. In the case of Xylella, my interlocutors often deployed cuidado in the negative to signal neglect and assign responsibility, while in the positive it marked connections and investments among people and with the land. Importantly, care is not normatively positive as it sustains particular forms of agrarian political economy that benefit some at the expense of others. Both the emic and etic concepts evoke interdependency, responsibility, caution, and a compilation of actions neither unidirectional nor discrete nor exclusively human that hold a lifeworld together—for better or for worse.
Care as a situated analytical practice (Murphy 2015) is not limited to discourse analysis (J. Barnes and Taher 2019). I read care as relational maintenance work, often at a scale that passes unnoticed until interrupted. It is the compounding impact of microlevel engagements that cumulatively sustain a way of being. To do something carefully is to be atypically mindful of its subtleties and implications. Articulations of care are often voiced when seeking to remedy an undesirable quality of existing patterns of maintenance work, imploring others to pay attention to (care about) something otherwise taken for granted. While care operates discursively, it need not be stated to be recognized. Garbage collectors may not characterize their labor as care, yet it keeps urban life flowing and its cessation would quickly raise alarm. Earthworms cannot use words, yet their daily digestion maintains the fertility of soils, facilitating continued farming. The politics of care constitute a politics of relational maintenance: what relations are being sustained, and to what ends?
This article derives insights from interviews with farmers, managers of almond grower cooperatives, government officials, and scientists in Mallorca (Balearic Islands Autonomous Community) and Alicante (Valencia Autonomous Community); participant observation at farmer organizing meetings to discuss the epidemic; and analysis of archival records and secondary sources relevant to Spain's almond ecology. Through these engagements I drew the landscape itself into walking interviews (Bergeron, Paquette, and Poullaouec-Gonidec 2014), seeking to understand the multiple ways my interlocutors read the landscape for relations between people, trees, bacteria, insect vectors, climate, and more. A landscape, rather than land, is an assemblage of more-than-human relations rich with history, economy, cultural practice, and aesthetic values. The orchard form itself—pruned, spaced, and distinctively assembled—reveals histories of more-than-human sociality (Tsing 2014; Mathews 2018). The material contours of Spain's almond ecologies thus served not only as objects of study but also as key participants in the research process.
In examining the intricacies of landscape care, I build on multispecies ethnographic approaches (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Ogden, Hall, and Tanita 2013) and more-than-human geographic thought (Braun 2006; Whatmore 2006; Panelli 2010; Robbins and Marks 2010), fields deeply indebted to, though often lacking engagement with, Indigenous thought (TallBear 2011; Sundberg 2014; Todd 2017). Such approaches serve to decenter humans as exclusive protagonists, and instead bring relations among beings—plant, animal (humans included), mineral, and otherwise—to the foreground. I find this approach particularly necessary because plant disease is inherently relational across species categories. Xylella fastidiosa alone is simply a bacterium; disease, as a phenomenon, exists as a pathogen-host-vector-environment complex (Scholthof 2007). As a matter of ethics, this approach proffers a modest and imperfect attempt to break from patterns of human exceptionalism that have enabled socio-ecological violence (Wynter 2003; Weheliye 2014). To be clear, this is not a matter of demonstrating nonhuman agency, but rather an effort to eschew bounded objects in favor of relations, which are always more-than-human. I do not intend to prove that Xylella fastidiosa can "speak" (Mitchell 2002) through its impacts; rather, I show how the materiality of a disease event exposes a deterioration of more-than-human relations.