Keywords

A View from a Body

In July 2019, I drove along Interstate 29 in Western Iowa (United States) toward my childhood home in Nebraska for a brief vacation and with a compelling curiosity to see the aftermaths of the March 2019 flood that I had followed from my current home in Tennessee. Fields that should have been filled with corn and soybeans had become lakes. Some of these lakes had beach-like banks made from Missouri River sand that migrated along with the water from several miles away. Center-point irrigation implements sprung forth from the lakes. A tractor became an island in one lake. Bloated silos, some with corn and soybeans spilling from them, stood like volcanic islands in some of the lakes. A few homes sat in the middle of lakes, their decks now more like docks waiting for boats that would never arrive. Exits that punctuated the drive became waterways, closed due to water still covering the roads. Percival, Iowa, always a marker of “almost home,” was flooded. I would soon learn that citizens of Percival were negotiating whether or not to rebuild the town. The flood happened in March 2019. It was July.

Prior to my July trip, I had followed the flood with great interest, as my parents live in what was called one of the Nebraska Islands. Several towns became islands, surrounded by floodwaters that choked off all road access in and out of the town. Our conversations during spring 2019 frequently focused on the flood. I followed events via the Omaha World Herald, the state’s most widely read newspaper, and social media. Still, I could not anticipate what it would be like to see the devastation, to walk on river sand that was not even close to the riverbanks, to see how river ice chunks made trees into postmodern sculptures, and to find debris—a shoe, lawn furniture, a door, and so on—recreated into river-made art installations.

Donna Haraway (2008) wrote that we are all “ordinary beings-in-encounter” (p. 5) flowing together to create “unpredictable kinds of ‘we’ ” (p. 5). Within the posthuman literature there is a call for these kinds of “we’s” that contingently unite humans, nonhuman animals, plants, trees, and all that inhabit the earth in the precarious Anthropocene. Those flood waters did pull me into a series of we’s that stretched across time and space among humans and nonhumans. Those we’s created water-like movements of a particular conceptualization of affect-rich care as an ongoing and situated and ethical practice in the Anthropocene (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). This chapter is about “the urgency of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and the Chthulucene [and how they] demand a kind of thinking beyond inherited categories and capacities, in homely and concrete ways” (Haraway, 2016, p. 7) and how care shifts in that urgency into affective movements. I write this chapter from a “view of [my] body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring and structured body” (Haraway, 2002, p. 683), a body learning to live in the Anthropocene. Following Gough’s (2006) call for more literary and artistic modes of representation in science education, I write to break free of the arborescent ways I was taught to think about science toward an affect-rich account of learning to live in the Anthropocene that is grounded in situated knowledges and affective partial connections of watery we’s (Haraway, 2002). In this chapter, I follow the work of the “we’s” that the flood collected and the affective practices of care that flood continues to generate. To do this work, I first situate the 2019 Midwestern floods, with a focus on Eastern Nebraska. Then, I share how I put Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) conception of care to work by examining moments that created different affect-rich currents in practices of care.

The Flood

The March 2019 flood was a result of extraordinary 2018–2019 fall and winter weather events. During fall 2018, areas of Nebraska experienced significant rainfall that saturated the ground that would soon freeze over the winter. While the early winter (late December to early January) was relatively mild, it was cold enough to keep the water-saturated ground frozen. January 2019 began with high temperatures that chased records. As the month went on, the weather marched along with a comfortable normality, cold but not too cold with a few mild days. Toward the end of the month, near-record cold temperatures dipped well below freezing. The first week of February offered a rush into near-high record temperatures followed by a return of at or below freezing temperatures. This cold air was accompanied by weekly precipitation of either ice or snow. This is called a blocking pattern in weather. Blocking patterns happen when fronts cannot move and are blocked in by other fronts. February became a month of brutally cold weather, the coldest February on record. In Omaha (approximately 30 miles east of my hometown), a record 27 inches of snow fell on the ground. Nebraskans were blocked in by winter. Each lashing of winter weather beat down hopes for an early spring into a snowy-icy pulp piling up on frozen ground.

A National Weather Service tweet on February 28, 2019, predicting the first week of March’s weather in Nebraska joked that March would come in like a penguin rather than a lion or a lamb. Meteorologists predicted temperatures well below the normal lower 40s Fahrenheit (15–35 degrees lower). The second week of March was no different. Below-normal temperatures further hardened the frozen ground that was covered with snow and ice. These temperatures also further crystallized river ice. March marched in like a penguin over the fifth wettest fall-winter in 124 years and the eighth coldest February in 124 years (Gaarder, 2019).

From March 12 to 14, a battle between winter and spring was happening in the atmosphere. The battle began over Arizona and then moved through the atmosphere over Colorado. Pulling further strength from passing over the Rockies and into the plains of Western Nebraska, the battle intensified over Nebraska and other Great Plains states. According to the Omaha World Herald (Gaarder, 2019), the satellite imagery showed what looked like a land-based hurricane. The air pressure dropped 24 millibars in 24 hours. One to three inches of rain fell over Eastern Nebraska. A blizzard overwhelmed Western Nebraska with snowfall of a foot and 89-mile-per-hour winds, and shut down parts of Interstate 80, the only interstate roadway in Nebraska. Emergency Management Services sent warnings to Eastern Nebraska about the potential for flooding as rain fell on frozen ground. They predicted that the water would move across the frozen ground and find its way to ditches, creeks, and rivers that would then flood.

In the early morning of March 14, the Spencer Dam on the Niobrara River in Northeastern Nebraska failed. Built in the late 1920s, the hydroelectric dam sought to harness the power of the confluence of the Niobrara River and Missouri River. Following the dam’s failure, an 11-foot wave of water was released that took out the river gauges. Also, on March 14, the ice jams jostled their way out of the Elkhorn and Platte riverbanks, the rivers that border my hometown. The ice from the river moved out of the banks and slid across the frozen ground like glaciers and freed the water from the banks. By March 15, the Platte River crested at 12.65 feet, the highest on record. The Elkhorn River set a record of 24.11 feet, 5 feet above the previous record. The Missouri River that forms the border between Nebraska and Iowa had it third highest crest of 31.12 feet on March 18.

On March 19, the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency declared emergencies for 74 counties, 83 cities, and 4 tribal areas. The human population affected by the floods was numbered at 1,735,635 or 95.03% of the state’s human population. Approximately 75% of the land in Nebraska was affected by the flood. The Nebraska road conditions website map had so many roads marked red to denote closures that the map looked like red veins in a body. Nebraska’s roads, its veins, had been opened and blood water poured forth from them. The water took out roads and bridges all over the state. Main streets of small rural towns became canals for the rivers and creeks. Homes destroyed. Farms destroyed. Businesses destroyed. Infrastructure carried away by water. Entire towns and villages swept up in the floods. As early as March 21, 2019, the damage of the flood was estimated to be 1.3 billion US dollars, which included infrastructure damage as well as crop and cattle loss (Schwartz, 2019). All the critters of Nebraska relationally came together in a water-filled we, whether they wanted to or not.

Water Care

Everything, it seemed, belonged to the water. Online videos and photographs made my home state look like it had given itself back to the Western Interior Seaway of the Cretaceous Period. So much water. So many people displaced, the amount of financial damage seemed to keep growing, towns erased from the map, rebuilding efforts, and … and … and .… The water seemed to be “ ‘tearing down, dancing over, laughing at’ our efforts to restrain it” (Schneiderman, 2017, p. 17). With my phone pressed to my ear during my weekly phone conversations with my parents, I listened to their updates about living on an island, with every road out of the town flooded or ruined by the Elkhorn and Platte floodwaters. I read newspapers online. It seemed unfathomable. And it still does. There is a degree of incredulity about these events. The water washed away moralizing, human-centered approaches to care. The water opened space to consider “that a politics of care engages much more than a moral stance; it involves affective, ethical, and hands-on agencies of practical and material consequence” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 3). The water washed away the “shoulds” that often populate moral stances and brought about watery entangling flows collecting people in “we’s” in which we can only work with entanglements.

As the Anthropocene collects us into unanticipated we’s, Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) care is useful to think with. Her conceptualization of care disrupts the moral imperative of care or a sense of care that can be centralized within a subject or structure of power (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Instead, she argues for a relational and situated care that moves between humans, nonhumans, power structures, and other entangling forces in a world that is making and remaking itself. Consequently, care is an ongoing practice in entanglements and cannot be predetermined. Care is generated within relations in entanglements, no matter the time-space distance, and pulls us into a series of we’s that require an ongoing practice of care to live as well as possible in the unpredictable Anthropocene.

As the floods happened and the ongoing aftermath of the floods, the practices of care became flood-like, ebbing and flowing as river levels rose and fell, river water flooded and receded. This flooding sense of care became “continuously reenacted in inseparable entanglements between what is ‘personal’—how one individual is affectedly engaged in attachments—and what is ‘collective’—a web of compelling relations, with humans and nonhumans, included in a community of practice in situations” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 166). While care has always been generated by the relations between myself and the humans and nonhumans of Nebraska and has shifted over time and space, that sense of care became something otherwise with the floods. The practices of care became curious as there were elements that “shifted [my] priorities” (p. 167). In the following sections, I offer movements of this sense of care.

#NebraskaStrong

In the immediate aftermath of the flood, the hashtag #NebraskaStrong gained popularity on social media. The hashtag offers a way to consider how some Nebraskans stayed with the trouble of the floods (Haraway, 2016). Haraway wrote:

In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings. (p. 1)

The hashtag materialized watery we’s that the flood collected and how people and nonhumans configured themselves in the moment so as to “live and die well with each in a thick present” (Haraway, 2016, p. 1).

The realities of the we’s materialized from the hashtags are ongoing and responsive to the always already configuring nows that collect humans and nonhumans. In this way, the hashtag actualized the care work of the we’s. Numerous photographs show efforts such as sandbagging, rebuilding, and others that featured Nebraskan humans coming together to live better in the aftermath of the flood. For example, while two men were cleaning up flood debris on their land, they found a beer fridge that had traveled four miles from its home (Salter, 2019). After a long day of work, they cracked open a couple of beers and took a selfie that then went viral. Not soon after, the owners of the fridge contacted the men and told them about its four mile journey. The beer fridge has since been returned to its original owner. Simply put, #NebraskaStrong was never about some past or future, it was about the now that was configuring itself and the we that the now collected. In this way, the hashtag became a way to focus on a particular kind of care in action.

#NebraskaStrong is an ongoing-everyday care that is grounded in helping others. The hashtag provides a way to see how the collected and contingent we’s put into practice an everyday care. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) wrote, “Focusing on everydayness, on the uneventful, is a way of noticing care’s ordinary doings, the domestic unimpressive ways in which we get through the day, without which no event would be possible” (p. 117). In many ways, the tweets using the hashtag became a way to materialize how the “we’s” got through the day. Nebraska Strong care is an everyday practice that is “about relating with, and partaking in, worlds struggling to make their other visions not so much visible but possible” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 118). In other words, #NebraskaStrong is not so much about the everyday as much as it is about what possible worlds assemblages of humans and nonhumans could create. The careful actions materialized in the hashtag generate a particular Nebraska Strong practice of care. Such a practice is ongoing (as flood relief was still happening as I wrote this chapter in December 2019) as it creates careful actions that are about getting through the day.

Haptic Flows of Technotouching

The #NebraskaStrong hashtag along with newspaper articles and weekly phone calls home became a way for me to touch, but not understand, these practices of care happening in Nebraska. As a non-resident of the state, I watched from afar and did not directly participate in these practices of care. I could only listen from hundreds of miles away to these practices on social media, online newspapers, and to the stories my parents told me. I could not fully grasp the flood and these care-filled practices. There was no way for me to know what it was like to live on a flood-made island as my parents did and directly engage in these practices.

Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) might call this technotouching, or technology developed for and/or used for sensorial immersion that does not “transcend human limitations” (p. 104). While I could not see the floods firsthand as they were happening nor the immediate aftermath, I was still able to touch them through technology. Technotouching became a way for me to co-create meanings and engage in practices of care. Puig de la Bellacasa wrote, “Touching technologies are material and meaning producing embodied practices entangled with the very matter of relating-being. As such, they cannot be about touch and get, or about immediate access to more reality. Reality is a process of intra-active touch” (p. 114). In other words, just because a human can haptically engage from afar does not mean that they get “it,” whatever it may be. Technotouching does not collapse space and distance. Nor does it render meaning as something transferable in a one-to-one correspondence. Rather, technotouching generates a distributed reality through space and time in which multiple situated meanings are created in an assemblage-like fashion. In this instance, an assemblage of technology, humans, nonhumans, floods, and so on co-created a reality and multiple situated meanings.

This is a speculative reality that is “an invitation to participate in its ongoing redoing and to be redone in the process” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 117). In so doing, this reality offers no guarantees of sure knowledge or that knowledge can be enhanced. In the twists and turns of technotouching, one can only be undone, affected, by what one touches.

Technotouching took my breath away with its continual waves of affect that undo me and render knowledge situated, contingent, and shifting. I could not believe my eyes as they haptically touched the floods as I watched the Nebraska Educational Television (Kelly, 2019) documentary about the floods, And the Floods Came. The amount of damage. The cost of that damage. The stories. The photographs. Farmland becoming lakes. The resilient beauty of the practices of care happening in my state. And, it went on, even into December 2019, when I wrote this chapter. Each reality of the flood that is generated over space and time is undoing itself as it undoes me. The incredulity of it grabs me and pulls me under and constantly shifts meanings.

Thinking-Being with Care

As I noted in the introduction, I had the opportunity to see the flood damage and flooding in July 2019. Even when I could physically touch the flooded areas in person the flood overwhelmed me. Proximity to the floods granted me very little, only more co-created realities of undoings. How does one think when each moment creates new arrangements in such urgent times? One can only speculate.

Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) wrote:

We learn that to speculate is also to admit that we do not really know wholly. Though there are indeed many things that knowledge-as-distant vision fails to feel, if touch augments proximity, it also can disrupt and challenge the idealization of longings for closeness and, more specifically, of superior knowledge in proximity. (p. 117)

Prior to my trip in July 2019, I idealized proximity. If I could just see the damage with my own eyes, then I might be able to make sense of it. Someone else’s stories about the floods might spark an insight that might make me be able to say something. If I could walk the flooded areas, then I might create some sort of touch-knowledge. I fell prey to post-positivism’s supposed guarantees that proximity would grant me knowledge. It did not.

If anything, proximity generated more speculative thinking. There was no way to know this flood. I could only think with it, walk with it, story with it. During the visit, I took many notes and many photographs that followed the ever-generating speculations, never catching up to them. The vast majority of these notes and photographs became the evidence of listening to the flood, to its resonances in both real and produced ways (Haraway, 2002). The flood invited me to listen to its resonances (Haraway, 2002). Listening to resonances became acts of humility toward something of such magnitude that I cannot understand, of partial “connections and unexpected openings that make situated knowledges possible” (p. 684). Assemblages, such as the 2019 Midwestern Floods, ought to bring about humility that only comes with the recognition of our interdependency, not only with other humans, but with nonhumans, the environment, and so on. In such a humble interdependency, listening to resonances is critical. Resonating partial connections and the interdependency of those connections invites us into the fray and asks for “accountability and responsibility for translations and solidarities” (p. 684). Acting is done with caution as it results from examining the multiplicities of the assemblage in which we find ourselves and creates uneasy, partial, and shifting solidarities.

Nebraska Strong Onto-ethico-epistemology

The realities that are distributed in technotouching materialize frictional ways of knowing. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) wrote:

Thinking with care also strengthens the notion that there is no one-fits-all path for the good. What as well as possible care might mean will remain a fraught and contested terrain where different arrangements of humans-nonhumans will have different and conflictive significances. (p. 220)

Put another way, thinking with care is about friction, negotiating that friction, and creating practices of care that work within that friction to live better.

This friction materialized in conversations with my parents. It was easy for me to be at home in Tennessee on the phone with my parents and say, “Well, all the research is pointing to stronger storms. I can’t say I’m surprised that the flood happened.” Or, “This is the climate crisis in action.” Or “We should be prepared for these kinds of disasters to happen at any time.” Any time I uttered these statements, I could sense my parents’ frustration through their silence—their unspoken way to say, “You’ve gone too far.” I relied upon a scientific knowledge over an affective knowledge. I offered moralizing statements in the face of constant uncertainty that undermine these statements. My parents’ knowledge of the flood lived in the realm of affect. It was not until my trip to Nebraska in July 2019 that their sense of knowledge came into being for me.

On one of the last days I was there, my father drove me to the area of town that borders the Platte River. We first drove through the state recreational park outside my hometown. I knew the roads of that park, the lakeside beaches that I swam in as a child, the lakes where the geese and other waterfowl tended to congregate, and the areas where certain birds nested in the spring and summer. The flood changed the park. Roads were damaged. Individual lakes that had been separated by picnic areas and roads were now joined together. Two lakes that bordered the state park joined with others not previously in the state park. The water created new borders. The water asked me to learn how to navigate the park again.

Then, we drove on Ridge Road, which provides access to the Platte River. The road greeted us with a sign that warned visitors that they entered at their own risk. We drove slowly so I could see how the water created new landscapes. I stepped out of the car to take photographs. Unbeknownst to me, a group of deer were feeding next to a house made uninhabitable by the flood. I heard warning grunts and looked up and saw them. It seemed like I had offended them somehow. A human presence in an area that they now appeared to claim as their own. I softened my gaze as I looked at them in an attempt to communicate that we could be together without fear of each other. Soon after exchanging looks with me and each other, they ran off into what nature had reclaimed.

I carefully walked along the road in river sand. I studied trees bent at angles that continued to grow. I touched the bark to see where the river ice made them bend. I noticed how the river left debris—lawn chairs, doors, a shoe, outdated wallpaper, and so on—scattered across the area. In a couple of areas, toads once camouflaged by the sand hopped from the sand as I disturbed their area. As I walked, waves of affect flooded me and hopped along with me. I listened. I let those waves wash over me again and again. I returned to the car. Silent. My father and I did not talk the rest of the way home. I tried to “write to be in the reverb of word and world” (Berlant & Stewart, 2019, p. 131) when we arrived home. But, the reverb of the affective floods was too much.

The next day we went to Desoto National Wildlife Refuge, a refuge that borders the Missouri River and is approximately 30 miles away from my hometown. As we walked into the visitor center, cliff swallows, a bird uncommon to the area, populated the eaves of the center. We learned that the cliff swallows had come en masse to the area because of the number of mosquitoes living in the flood waters. Mosquitoes are cliff swallows’ primary source of food, and the flood provided fertile ground for mosquitoes to proliferate. We also learned that migratory birds that have come to this area for centuries diverted their paths because of the floods. Carp populated the flooded areas, and bow fishers (people who use a bow and arrow to fish) captured truckloads of them. Sometimes catching two fish with one arrow.

I walked a path at the refuge and was once again met with toads hopping with me, just as they did the evening before. Water had taken some of the paths, requiring new paths to be made. The water did the same for roads. The water created new ways of knowing and being for so many critters.

As we drove through the park, a snapping turtle slowly made its way across the road. We stopped the car and got out to watch the turtle. The turtle stopped as the humans stared at it, trying to guess its age, wondering about where the turtle had been and where it was going. We also talked about how the turtle had lived this flood and wondered how its life had changed. Slowly, ever so slowly, the turtle made its way across the road. I wondered what it thought of these bipedal mammals chattering on about it.

The flooding reverberations overwhelmed me again. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) wrote:

These engagements do not so much entail that knowing will be enhanced, more given, or immediate through touch than through seeing; rather, they call attention to the dimension of knowing, which is not about elucidating, but about affecting, touching and being touched, for better or for worse. About involved knowing, knowledge that cares. (p. 118)

The everyday practices of driving with my father and visiting a wildlife refuge center I had been to countless times in the past affected me differently. As the flood enveloped me into a watery we, I realized that how I had known the flood in the past was based on an impersonal, scientific view from Tennessee. The we called me to the affect-rich flood that created so many we’s I had technotouched from afar. The everyday practices are about being affected, being touched by others, and, in turn, affecting and touching others generated affective and caring ways of knowing. Nebraska Strong not only became a series of practices of care, it became an affect-rich way of knowing and being within those practices of care.

Unruly Nebraska Strong Solidarities

The hashtag #NebraskaStrong and the practices of care materialized within that hashtag disrupted any sense of moral imperatives and centralization. Analysis of the hashtag, a hashtag that was widely used for some time, and following it as it has moved across space and time demonstrate how the affect-rich practices of care materialized in the hashtag resist centralization and moral imperatives.

The state of Nebraska through the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency and other public and private partnerships borrowed the hashtag #NebraskaStrong and named their recovery efforts as “Nebraska Strong.” The government website offers a secure way to donate funds to flood victims and links to resources. Furthering the idea of Nebraska Strong is the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center. This center is offering mental health counseling and assistance to community rebuilding across the state. The use of the hashtag by a policy center and the state government can be viewed as a way to centralize and normalize the ethical work of the “we’s” coming together into a moral imperative, which Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) warned against.

The hashtag remained active on Twitter as people continue clean-up efforts among other activities. Analysis of the hashtag from late spring 2019 and through 2020 materialized a new series of “we’s” as people continue to find themselves caught up in further relief efforts that are not associated with the aforementioned agencies. These series of “we’s” disrupt any efforts of centralizing and normalizing practices of care.

These series of “we’s” were recently celebrated by the Omaha World Herald when it named the Flood Helpers as Midlanders of the Year (Duffy, 2019). In the past, this award was given to individuals rather than collectives. However, the 2019 Midlanders of the Year focused on those who practiced Nebraska Strong ontoepistemological practices of care. A December 22, 2019, article featured numerous photographs of flood relief and stories of how these people practiced affective care. The news section of the hard-copy paper featured two full pages that described this care work across the state. In brief (no more than five sentences) descriptions of this care work, “we’s” of all Nebraskans (human and nonhuman) were celebrated. Nebraska Strong, indeed.

Affect-rich care work in the Anthropocene cannot be regulated or normalized. It will always be generated responsively. This response is never to the Anthropocene; it is always with it. As the climate crisis continues on, affect-rich care practices are generated with it as we continue to learn to live in crisis. These series of “we’s” must be inclusive as we think, be, and care with the Anthropocene. In other words, these “we’s” must “think together anew across differences of historical position and of kinds of knowledge and expertise” (Haraway, 2016, p. 7). Simply put, we must think together collectively, recognizing the wide ranges of expertise from all as we respond with the Anthropocene without falling prey to the god-trick (Haraway, 2002). This unruly work is always already imperfect, for the human elements of the we’s must recognize that the effects of the Anthropocene many times further displace those people not historically centered. The Anthropocene is not a singular experience for all people. We must listen to the resonances without “appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions” (p. 679). We must work to see how all our stories of the Anthropocene “join with another [without] claiming to be another” (p. 681) in uneasy, shifting solidarities of collective we’s. Such a solidarity moves beyond the moral imperative of creating a good life for all as we live and die in the Anthropocene.

Interestingly, Nebraska’s former state motto was “The Good Life.” For many Nebraskans, the question became “For whom is this good life?” as this good life seemed to be grounded in White, middle-class ways. Perhaps answering that question, the state recently changed its motto to “Nebraska. Honestly, It’s Not for Everyone.” Likewise, Nebraska Strong can be similarly questioned. Nebraska Strong features predominately white people at the exclusion of the Latinx population, Black Nebraskans, the Indigenous Tribes, and the White working class who also call Nebraska home, despite these populations living in some of the hardest hit areas of the 2019 flood. Where are their voices, their historical positioning, and their knowledge in Nebraska Strong? How might their embodied and situated knowledges have generated a stronger Nebraska Strong, a strength that draws from humble listening to resonating partial connections of “living within limits of contradictions” (Haraway, 2002, p. 684) of the flood?

Both the presences and the absences in the we’s that constituted Nebraska Strong point toward a practice of care that moves beyond moral stances to “affective, ethical, and hands-on agencies of practical and material consequence” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 4). Affective stories, such as this one, have the potential to suggest an interdependent onto-ethico-epistemological state in which we (all humans and nonhumans) are relationally living and dying with each other in the Anthropocene. Relational “both ands” create space for humans to consider both presences and absences of stories, how those stories are situated in dense entanglements, and how those stories are both practical and material. Such an affective care is about staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) of interdependence. It is about making kin with diverse people and nonhumans as we learn to interdependently live and die together, attending to the resonating affect-rich situated stories of living with the Anthropocene (Haraway, 2016). Staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) becomes the moral imperative (if one can call it that) as the Anthropocene continues and will continue to collect us into unanticipated “we’s.”

Scenes of Home

In writing with the everyday—from technotouching from afar to touching in proximity—I hope to illuminate practices of care that are affective-rich messes. These frictional messes are never easy. And, I suspect more will happen (have happened, are happening) in the Anthropocene. We write to reverb with the world (Berlant & Stewart, 2019). We write in affect-rich assemblages that sometimes stun us in silence as we listen to, become with, the earth.

As we write these accounts that hopefully do the work that Haraway (2016) asks us to do, to write stories with matters that matter, the “I” who writes is always already a “a mass of reactions vaguely jarred into being at the glimpse of a method or a thought. Just trying to catch up with whatever’s happening” (Berlant & Stewart, 2019, p. 123). So as we examine the knots, descriptions, ties, and matters (Haraway, 2016) that create the “I” that is just trying to keep up with affects that always already overwhelm us in the Anthropocene, “we write to invite and to goad, to bring the weight of scenes home” (Berlant & Stewart, 2019, p. 131).

The reverberations of this flood continued to make we’s well into December 2020, nine months after the March 2019 flood. As the climate crisis continues and provokes more powerful storms, I suspect that all critters will continue to form new we’s that demand different practices of care. These practices of care, like Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) notes, are entangled, material, and difficult. These practices do “somehow own us, we belong to it through the care that has attached us” (p. 167). In other words, climate crisis creates we’s and practices of care that own us; we do not own them. They destroy moralizing stances. They entangle us and ask us to attend to resonances from all critters while adopting practices of care that get to work in those resonating entanglements. Practices of care have the potential to link us together, forever change us, and work toward more better lives.

The practices of care that I technotouched, engaged with, and ultimately owned me (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) with the March 2019 flood created eddies and flows in my life. The more post-positivist understandings of the flood that included weather patterns, river measurements, the numbers of the critters affected by the flood, and the financial damage from the flood provide little to help me think with the flood. It is easy to stand on a river bluff that overlooks the river in which the flooded waters will pass as they make their way to the Gulf of Mexico and offer up these numbers as the only explanations. These explanations negate the movement of affect and the ways in which these movements generate practices of care, which I hope to have illustrated in this chapter.

In the knots, descriptions, and ties (Haraway, 2016) that the flood generated and, in so doing, created a series of we’s, I have tried to write a scene from my home state (Berlant & Stewart, 2019). The affects generated by listening to the earth and attending to the we’s it generated shifted me and created new practices. These new practices owned me and shifted my thinking into the powerful realm of affect and what affective knowledge can do in the Anthropocene. For, when we listen, really attend to the all the critters—both humans and nonhumans—maybe we can begin to make better possible worlds. I am reminded of the flight shifts of migratory birds that happened in March 2019. I wonder how I might be changed by the realms of affect that blow like atmospheric winds, shifting onto-ethico-epistemological patterns and what those new patterns will demand of me. It is the only thing I can anticipate. There are no predictions. No meteorological models can predict how practices of care and affective ways of knowing and being within those practices will collect me. A different scene of home will always materialize in the Anthropocene.