In a Mapuche community at sunrise, an old man takes his freshly poured maté, the first of the day, out of the house to the usual spot. He pads softly past my bed while the rest of the family is still sleeping. I find him outside gathering wood. Old, gnarled pieces of wild thyme, grey and etched with drought, snag on my jumper as I bend over to pick some up from the sandy earth. In silence, he lights the fire and puts water on to heat over the handmade stove. He pours fresh yerba into the maté gourd and the hot water over the top, and invites me outside to join him.

I stand next to Joel while he speaks in Mapudungun, his native tongue and the language of this land. In the directions of the West, South, North, and East, he offers first a prayer, and then a straw-ful of maté to the earth. The sun is already blazing over the land that we know today as Argentina. Joel's family has been traveling and living in this part of the earth, Wallmapu, since long before European settlers laid claim to the land and turned his people into state-less refugees – since long before Chile and Argentina existed. Wallmapu stretches across the land between the Pacific to the Atlantic, ending slightly before the continent of South America tapers off and turns to loch and sea. Joel and his family are mapu-che: ‘people of the land.’ Yet, today Argentinians of Italian and Spanish descent tell his people to go ‘back to where they came from.’ They point at lines they drew in the sand, lines that many people have died for, lines that the wind will blow over in a couple of years or centuries. Regardless of ‘who’ the land ‘belongs’ to, the dry, clear air has begun to heat the vibrant blue sky which reaches down to us, though it cannot be much later than 7am. 

Inside by the stove, we perch on worn, comfortable chairs and he begins to speak more freely. First, we express gratitude, he tells me. For the sun, for the water that flows down from the mountains and up from the earth. For the health of our families and friends, for the health of our animals. After that, we pray. For good weather, for the health of our families and our animals. 

Joel is speaking to God, to spirits, to the earth. Not every Mapuche person does this; he learned the practice from his grandfather. He and a couple of his brothers would always follow his grandfather out in the mornings for the ritual, and listen while he spoke, Joel told me with a smile. I heard about this method of speaking to the more-than-human from many of the families that I stayed with towards the end of the three months I spent living in the community. First, you give thanks. Then you pray. You ask for what you want; typically, for some kind of care. 

On my first day in the community that was to be my home for the next three months, Camila, who would become one of my closest friends, offered for me to join her to turn off the water supply. There are natural aquifers under the community, she told me, 30m deep. This water is what allows us to be here. The government came and helped us install pipes so that we could access it and share it amongst ourselves. I followed her out from the community salon, where a visiting engineer was delivering a workshop to the community on how solar panels work and how to install them. The wind cut through my clothes in the clear air, the final chills of winter clinging to the shrubby sand-scape of the community. I was disappointed to realise we’d be driving – more so when we only drove for 30 seconds to the first well, making this a seemingly unnecessary use of fossil fuels. Driving will enable us to not miss too much of the meeting I thought, trying to justify this seemingly careless action to myself. We continued further up the hill to the next lever, which would divert the water flow. A bit more of a walk, I suppose, but isn’t that a part of living in the countryside? 

My first day in an indigenous community and already I was judging them — "unnecessary", "careless". Without even realising it, I was silently and harshly contributing to the narrative of the Mapuche that settlers all over the country have. This was a horrible realisation to grapple with. I am here to learn from and about these people, to write for and with them at a pivotal moment in their history as they develop the first community-owned solar farm in South America. Instead, I found myself watching the amount of ultra-processed foods they eat with increasing concern, sitting at the table in silence looking at air while people played games on their phones or watched TikTok. Gradually, the judgement began to fade and understanding set in. 

The Waste Contradiction

In the community, people would leave their cars running for 30 minutes while they went in to have a chat with a friend; they would leave gas running on the stove, flames flickering to heat nothing but the air above them; they would keep the TV on for hours, seemingly aware of it only when a ‘standby: automatic power down’ sign would come up, at which point they would pick up the remote to keep it on. More than once I saw a couple of people throw trash on the ground or out the window while they walked or drove. 

At this point in my stay I still had not witnessed a prayer ritual, an active practice of gratitude toward the land and life that I experienced with people like Joel. I did not yet know how to look for relationships between the Mapuche and their land. All I could do was compare it to myself: many of the Mapuche people I lived with did not care for the earth in the way that I have learned to care for it. The litter, the constant leakages of those government-installed water pipes, the seeming insistence on leaving things running – all of these things felt wrong to me, like a maltreatment of the earth and her gifts to us. Yet, over time I began to notice a cultural division between how they engaged with the practices and materials brought on by modernisation, and with those from their traditional culture.

The Mapuche never waste, Clemente, a grandfather, told me over dinner one night. The Patagonian plateau is harsh and unforgiving, and it is hard to scrape together enough for family members to ensure and ease each other’s lives. When the Mapuche kill one of their livestock, the word that they use is sacrificar: to sacrifice. An elder will come out with a couple of their children or grandchildren (rarely daughters, though it happens occasionally), until they are old and experienced enough to do it themselves, and choose a goat. Dogs, children and parents will keep the herd together while someone grabs the animal. They sharpen the blade, kill the animal quickly; sharpen the blade, cut down its front and separate the hide from the skin while being careful not to get blood on the wool; sharpen the blade, hang it up and open it, saving the blood and organs to eat; sharpen the blade, separate the part of the carcass that they will eat that day and leave the rest to begin drying; sharpen the blade, so it is clean and dry for next time. 

This entire process is embedded with acts of care, from the cross-generational mentoring to the selection of the animal, from the family members who are inside prepping the spice mixes to the maintenance of the tool. And every part of the animal has a use: to feed the parents, kids and dogs who work together to shepherd the animals and could not live without the other; to provide leather for shoes, roofs, or horsemanship tools; to provide skins for blankets and horse saddles. Mapuche people suffered from hunger and cold, certainly. But ‘the Mapuche never waste’ not to be sustainable nor only from necessity, but because of the respect that they have for whatever it is they consume or use, an understanding of their dependence on it, a gratitude for its use. They take only what they need; they throw nothing away.

While the Mapuche waste energy - leaving TVs, stoves and cars running - they are exceptionally careful with the natural resources that they use to survive. They take great care with the animals that they tend to, with each other, and with the non-breathing environment which surrounds them. I found this care and respect as much amongst community elders as I did with children. While staying in one particular family, I would go with the ten-year-old in the mornings to feed an orphan calf milk from a two litre glass coke bottle with a little plastic teat on it. He would giggle as the calf suckled the teat voraciously, and prepare himself for a speedy exit as the bottle began to empty, since the calf would try to suckle his black jacket if he stayed any longer. With the four-year-old, we would climb the fence to check on the orphan lambs, her crying out that they would be ok because she loved them. I once watched the two boys play a fighting game and stop abruptly when they realised they’d accidentally shifted from sand to grass and didn’t want to risk destroying the vegetation. Everyone in the community, I came to understand, grows up with an understanding that they are surrounded by the things that they need to survive, and there is a deep care and respect that emanates from that. 

The Sustainability Contradiction

When I first arrived in the community, I struggled to make sense of how this ancient culture with their ancient practices of care and wastelessness could be so—"unsustainable". That was the word that kept coming to mind. And yet its very presence in my mind highlighted a contradiction at the heart of the sustainability question I had not yet interrogated: Sustainable for who?

Sustainability asks that we live in accordance with the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In many ways, then, the Mapuche are sustainable: thinking about how to protect future generations is an important part of their, and other Indigenous, ways of life, as is living in accordance with the needs of the present. On the one hand, the Mapuche are only ‘sustainable’ out of necessity: as food and other resources that ease suffering become more available, and the cost that goes into making them becomes less visible, they are no different to the rest of us, using and disposing without much thought. On the other hand, ‘sustainability’ cannot begin to enable an understanding of how the Mapuche live. Calling the practices that I witnessed – the processes of turning animals to meat, their skins to leather and their hides to horse saddles, of monitoring water consumption, of playing away from fragile vegetation – ‘sustainable’ hollows out the point. It misses the principles and practices of care that ground them, the underlying faith which builds them into world-making. 

Sustainability is enmeshed within a global paradigm that asks the individual to locate themself within a whole. I began to understand that acting sustainably – recycling, eating locally, taking public transport – was only one way to care for the planet. All of the individual things which I had been doing for the invisible and unthinkable ‘whole’ of the planet felt increasingly isolated and irrelevant as I attempted to relate to the land in the way that the people who I lived with did, and not least because my return flights to Argentina produced more carbon emissions than many people in the community will in their entire lives. It is easy to know that the concept of the carbon footprint is a scam by British Petroleum, designed to displace responsibility for the ongoing climate crisis onto individuals. It is harder to live with the implications of that: we must figure out – or perhaps, remember – how to live in an integrated way.

There is a shifting baseline under what our needs today actually are, who is responsible for meeting them, and the level of compromise that is realistic. Many elders I spoke with in the community talked about their suffering with a mix of gladness for their ability to keep from passing it to their children, and uneasiness at the increasing dependence of their children, and themselves, on human technological and economic systems. For instance, while the Mapuche in the community I lived in are dependent on the underwater aquifers for their continued survival on that land, they did not take much responsibility for the government-installed water system, as I witnessed on my first day in the community. While the community does maintain and monitor the system, residents in the community made no effort to create long-term fixes for leaky water pipes. Water would pool over dead land, creating birdbaths for the finches and meadowlarks, while people 50m away did not have enough to irrigate their vegetable patches. The community is not lazy; they were not involved in any of the technical or political decision-making processes that went into installing the water system, so have no sense of ownership or responsibility to fix flaws in that system. All of the unsustainable practices of the community members seemed to come from this: a rupture of interdependence, and an alienation from the local things and processes upon which we depend and for which we care. 

Being Ecological 

In my three months with the Mapuche, I came to understand this distinction between the local and the global, and the practices both necessitate, as the difference between sustainable practices and ecological practices. If being sustainable means doing things, then being ecological means being things: doing because of what you are and how you are related. 

‘Being ecological’ means living in awareness of your humanity. By that I mean that we are human, one species dependent upon many others for our survival. That a part of being human is reflecting, dreaming, relating. That these two parts of being human - being dependent on others for our survival, and dreaming - are not separable. Our bodies are not ‘ours’ in any singular biological way. There are around as many bacteria as cells that go into making us who we are. We are intimately, intricately, haphazardly woven together. We are fantastically dependent, emergent, constantly becoming bodies of water. 

Alongside the deliciously murky poetics of our miniscule makeup and our interconnectedness to the non-human world, we are co-existent alongside our neighbours, our families, our communities. People whose faces we know, who make us feel, who help us grow, who teach us how to live and how not to live. And we are co-created alongside nations, ‘imagined communities’, people we will never meet because they are on the other side of the world but with whom we share some kind of identity, with whom we identify. To make sense, and even find freedom, of and within these ‘inescapable troubles of interdependent existences,’ I return again and again to matters of care. Feminist care scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa creates a shape for the practice of care: it is ‘an affective state, an ethical obligation and a practical labour.’ Caring is the most fundamental relationship we can enter into – without it, we would not exist. Without a guardian’s care, any newborn child brought into the world would not survive. Inviting your friends round for dinner, sewing your clothes when they rip, showing your granny how to download whatsapp onto her computer – these are all ways that we show and receive care. 

Western political projects have worked hard to make care seem like something we only need to do if and as it suits us. Why learn to oil your bike chain if you can pay someone to do it for you? Why take care of your children if you can hire a nanny? Not all life-sustaining care work feels ‘good’ or even necessary. Caring work is not all as enjoyable as taking a candle-lit bubble bath, though increasingly ‘projects of care, feminist and otherwise, are full of romantic temptations that disconnect acts that feel good from their geopolitical implications,’ as feminist technoscience scholar of care Michelle Murphy kindly points out for us. These political projects have worked hard to make care seem like a privately maintained relationship, something that does not need to be seen or thought much about on a social or structural level. The kind of feminism they love is the kind that tells you not to have kids to be successful, rather than the kind which asks them to care-fully incorporate maternal and paternal reproductive labour into political and economic systems that currently seem to be made up of untethered individuals. 

Sometimes caring can look like sustainable doing, but it can be more accurately understood as ecological being. Sustainability tells us, we have to have knowledge, so that we can address the problems facing the specific things upon which we depend and for which we care. Being ecological does not address a problem. Problems are a part of what being ecological is. Being ecological requires that we accept that we live with, and because of, things we can never entirely know. 

When I think about being ecological, I think about faith. Perhaps because in the community they told me over and over again that without faith, you have nothing. Perhaps because prayer at its core is a form of care, demonstrating respect and gratitude for the more-than-human which sustains us. Faith gives us a way to care without the salve of certainty. It allows us to touch the essence of finitude, the parameters of our being alive, while we go about the mundane tasks that keep our hearts, and the hearts of others, beating. 

When Joel prays every morning he is not desperately hoping or clinging to a future of happiness or ease. He knows that sometimes things will be hard, that every day his own, and his family’s, health is a blessing. First he says thank you, and then he asks without expectation. Then he goes about his day. He feeds the animals, he tries to mend old and rusted cars, he watches his grandkids play with a gentle smile on his face. We sit around the table and hold hands while the kids recite mass. Usually I have been inside in the latter half of the morning, learning how to cook with Sofia, Lucia, or Alba – Joel's daughter, Sofia's daughter, and Sofia's mum – who love to cook. Peace and joy overflow from their beings as they gather ingredients and set up the chopping boards. They show me that whatever they have from their garden, with a little bit of flour and oil, is enough and tastes better than anything you could buy from the store. The food is always delicious here – it is made with care.