Carbondale, Illinois, was named after the coal habit that sustained it and the surrounding Confluence region for two centuries. Although no longer the main economic driver, coal remains an emotional driver that is deeply engraved in regional social identities. The local baseball team is called the Miners. In this space between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, east into Indiana and Kentucky and south to the confluence of the two great rivers, extraction forged patterns of human life. Agrarian settlements evolved into towns as immigrants flowed in from Europe. Both immigrants and cash-poor farmers became labor in the mines.

Besides coal, other raw materials were exported for the benefit of metropolitan centers—timber, petroleum, salt, minerals, and more—each extractive wave reinforcing the regional pattern. To this day, despite the damage to land, ecosystems, and the lungs and bodies of inhabitants, extraction is justified by the employment it provides. Illinois’s flirtation with fracking is just the most recent chapter. Those who wish to silence conversation about an end to all this hole digging always raise job loss as an obstacle. This presumed conflict between environment and employment forms a central regional debate.

Our panel for Field Station 4: Confluence Ecologies, “The Politics and Economics of Care,” addressed this antagonism between ecosystems and economic stability with three very different initiatives, each sharing how economic decisions can be infused with methods and metrics of care: Concerned Citizens of Carbondale is an established local group searching for ways to abate the toxic contamination that remains from a former industrial facility, now a brownfield; Carbondale Spring, which emerged comparatively recently, in 2019, is dedicated to forging futural practices that incorporate an ethics of care into municipal economic decision-making; and through their business, Fin Gourmet, John Crilly and Lula Luu seek a restorative impact on both biological and social ecosystems by harvesting unwanted “exotic” fish in the Mississippi watershed.

Each of these initiatives responds to the problem of relegating human and ecosystem damage to the sidelines as externalities, speaking to and magnifying the different kinds of violence borne within the processes of Anthropocenic development. They each seek to redress these generalized forms of violence by adapting to the limitations and opportunities of their socioeconomic and political situations, in all their complexity and contradiction.

Concerned Citizens of Carbondale (CCC) seeks acknowledgment of and reparations for the contamination of their community’s bodies and land from an industrial railroad-tie plant sited at the edge of the Northeast quadrant of Carbondale, a predominantly Black, low-income and working class residential neighborhood. For much of the twentieth century, this facility treated timber with coal-tar creosote for ties and telephone and electricity poles. The proximity of jobs to the railroad encouraged workers and their families to settle near the plant, but they also had little choice, as Jim Crow laws and redlining ruled out other housing locations. During the “The Politics and Economics of Care” panel, CCC member Sheila Brown spoke about the thick smoke that would blow into the neighborhood around her home when the plant was in operation. She related how workers would attempt to protect their homes and families from exposure to the foul substance by stripping off their work clothes and burying them overnight in the earth to soak up the tar, before entering their houses. The enterprise had a doctor to treat plant employees, but citizen activists have been unable to locate the medical records which might have provided evidence linking worker illnesses to creosote or Pentachlorophenol exposures. Following the plant’s closure in 1991 and a mandated cleanup by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 2004, CCC members began to draw connections between the brutality of the worksite, a cluster of deaths from myeloma and other cancers in the Northeast Carbondale neighborhood, as well as the longer socioeconomic pattern of making profit from Black bodies.

When a solar business specializing in brownfield development sought to obtain the site in 2014, CCC launched an intersectional campaign to educate the community in environmental racism. While not opposed to solar itself, they are adamantly against disturbing this land again. For CCC, reparations means prohibiting new development or any new profiting from this site, which they hope will be allowed to grow back into a forest.

Carbondale Spring (CS) is inspired by as many movements are there are members: autonomist anarchism, municipalism, economic civil rights, environmental justice, LGBTQA rights, and police abolition. The group is driven by the premise that the climate crisis urgently calls for the redistribution of productive means and skills in order to provide economic self-determination and a good living for all in the city. Its four-part platform involves the support of Mondragon-style business cooperatives, low-interest loans for sustainable energy development, food accessibility for all through a network of city farms, and, finally, creation of a cadre of care workers to provide the kind of social safety net generally absent in the United States. These “therapists, social workers, holistic healers, and just average do-gooders” would be available to respond to situations usually addressed by the police, who are ill-trained to handle people with mental illnesses or experiencing emotional distress and other nonviolent emergencies. CS’s four proposed programs: support for cooperative businesses, sustainable energy, food access and care workers would all be funded by the reallocation of half the City of Carbondale’s police department budget, which is disproportionately large compared to similar cities in the United States.

Convincing a municipality to reduce its police force is difficult, because such a proposal works against a received notion that policing leads to safety. In response, Carbondale Spring leverages lessons learned from Ferguson, Missouri, only two hours away, where several CS members were organizing against state-sanctioned violence against people of color. In Ferguson, it was documented that law enforcement disproportionally negatively impacts those who are Black and poor in a community, leading to an exacerbation of economic burdens. By monetarily tying law enforcement reduction to an increase in compassionate services dedicated to alleviating despair, CS hopes to de-escalate the slow social violence and de facto criminalization experienced by a share of the city’s residents, particularly Black youth.

CS’s vision is the revitalization of the city through fostering the prospects of good living for all, and its program is tailored to the problems, demographics, and skill base particular to Carbondale. Cooperatives, for example, are a pragmatic answer to economic development in a community with many shuttered businesses for sale, but little capital.

Fin Gourmet is a small local business in the Confluence region, based in Paducah, Kentucky, just over an hour’s drive from Carbondale. The owners, John Crilly and Lula Luu, are former academics in health policy and nutrition who gave up secure research positions to start an Asian carp fish-processing company that would put their knowledge into direct practice to help others. A non-native species introduced into the Mississippi watershed some fifty years ago, the Asian carp is reviled as an invasive scourge in Midwestern rivers. Despite the fact that it is one of the most abundant, nutritious, and delicious wild-caught fish around, very little use is made of this natural resource; while at the very center of the region’s ecology, these fish are kept at the cultural and economic periphery.

Fin Gourmet’s mission is to change that by creating both a supply and a demand for this untapped superfood. Most Americans have never tasted the Asian carp and much of what is caught is shipped to markets on other continents. But harvesting Asian carp for US markets would not only make the freshwater fish more available, it would be an appropriate way to keep fish population down. It’s reproductive vigor and lack of predators has led to fears the fish will enter the Great Lakes system, a concern because the fish outcompetes “native” species. Within the rivers, it is said to exacerbate the decline of some species that were already threatened by habitat loss due to river engineering and channelization. For Crilly and Luu, harvesting Asian carp is a way to help repair riverine ecological imbalance, while providing a nourishing source of protein.

Crilly and Luu take their business a step further in its engagement in an economy of care by recruiting and hiring people recently released from incarceration or in recovery from addiction. This commitment contributes to the reintegration of people experiencing marginalization into a social economy. As part of the Field Station 4 panel, Crilly and Luu shared their vision, and the many attendant challenges, of seeking to do “business as unusual” by coupling together ecological, economic, and social well-being.

As the panel presenters demonstrate through their initiatives, an economy of care sets its sights upon the most uncared for inhabitants and ecosystems, and reimagines existing ecologies of human-social, economic, and ecological relationships.

The participants of “The Politics and Economics of Care” invited us to notice more carefully the myriad ways violence—as pollution, neglect, and human and ecosystem overpolicing—is engineered into current systems of economic production.

In closing, the speakers reflected on how economies based on rampant extraction inevitably generate a disingenuous conflict between jobs and environment by leveraging local needs against the dynamic fungibility of capital. As the mines in the Confluence region of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers slowly close, no evidence of the wealth created is being left in the wake. A “politics and economics of care” encourages us to investigate creative reconfigurations that cut through a false dichotomy of jobs versus environment, in order to transform relations among both human and nonhuman citizens, and everything in between.