Toward a Politics of Planetary Care: The Limits of More‐Than‐Human Approaches, Silenced Notes From Indigenous Forest Worlds in India

In response to the planetary climate crisis, influential scholarship has directed us to decenter the human, recognize nonhuman agency, and imagine more‐than‐human futures. But what might this leave out? Drawing on Indigenous forest worlds in India and the incarcerated intellectual‐activists who struggled alongside them, this article develops a politics of planetary care. Planetary care begins from the proposition that all life is interdependent, but that life is being sustained under profoundly unequal conditions. Bringing Indigenous forest worlds into conversation with feminist theories of care and social reproduction, the article asks how the conditions that make life possible are sustained, by whom, and how capitalist extraction, state violence, and conjugated social oppression determine whose lives, labor, and environments are valued—and whose are rendered expendable. Care, it argues, is not simply an ethical disposition or a practice of lifemaking but a political struggle to defend and transform the conditions through which human and more‐than‐human life is sustained. In doing so, the article asks which Indigenous ideas are allowed to travel as planetary theory and which remain conceptually incarcerated within the domains of ontology, cosmology, and more‐than‐human relationality.