Planetary Rifting and the Paleogeography of Care

Abstract

With their specter of intergenerational betrayal, global environmental crises increasingly entangle politics with matters of care, attachment, and love—especially the unconditional bonds we are so often assumed to share with our offspring. As a contribution to the nascent field of paleoenvironmental humanities, this article’s approach to questions of care and responsibility turns from future horizon-scanning to the realm of human origins. It focuses on two broad sets of paleo stories that share a concern with rifts or stress points that complicate originary events and scenes. The first of these is a family of hypotheses which propose that pivotal evolutionary developments took place in the climatically variable and tectonically active terrain of the East African Rift. The second is the cooperative breeding hypothesis, which contends that communally distributed childcare arrangements are a definitive characteristic of the genus Homo, while also highlighting the conditionality and precariousness of human intergenerational care. Taken together, these approaches point to deep-seated fault lines running through both our home planet and our own psychosocial being. Confronting these rifts might help loosen the hold of notions of ontological reconciliation between humans and nature that risk exacerbating the very problems they seek to resolve, while also helping us to seek attachments that are more conducive to living with and through earthly volatility.