Likewise, Indigenous studies scholars have identified a care ethic embedded within Indigenous cultures that prioritize relationships between and among humans and other living beings. The centrality of issues of care during the pandemic creates a prime opportunity for examining care ethics in the eco-social commons and separating care from its gendered foundations. Care has been thrust onto center stage as C-19 patients require caring attention from healthcare workers parents juggle caring for their children while pursuing their paid work and elderly, chronically ill, and disabled people have had their access to healthcare upended by overwhelmed hospitals. The Covid-19 (hereafter, C-19) pandemic has underscored the degree to which care work is associated with essentialized constructs of gender and race, and has also begun to break care work away from these shackles. Care ethicists have emphasized the intertwining of the political and the moral, such that care ethics takes its place alongside Kantianism, virtues ethics, and other political theories (Fisher and Tronto 1990, Tronto 1993, Robinson 1997, Engster 2018). For the past several decades, care theorists have called for the elevation of care ethics and care work out of the private realm, associated with women as caregivers, and into the public sphere (Tronto 1993, Hirschmann 2018). An important axis of this shift is a recognition and re-incorporation into public discourse and policy values that have long been excluded for reasons of sexism and racism, including values of care and care work. The current Covid-19 pandemic, when so many of the systems of the global order have been found to be lacking, is an ideal time for re-thinking social priorities and values (Walker et al. Bhutanese Buddhist values and practices parallel the care ethics articulated by Western moral theorists, providing a contemporary example of caring for the common good and alternative pathways toward flourishing futures.
Bhutan's response was among the world's most successful, forestalling any deaths at all for the first nine months of the pandemic and limiting deaths to nine total as the pandemic entered its third year in March 2022. Elements of an eco-social care ethic became even more vivid in the nation's response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Mahayana Buddhism and indigenous animism blend to create distinctive attitudes and practices of environmental caretaking displayed in rural relationships with forests, mountains, and water bodies that influence community-based natural resource management. Rural practices of caring for the eco-social commons in Himalayan Bhutan demonstrate an implicit care ethic. Attention to environmental caretaking practices of Indigenous, traditional, and rural societies is an important strategy for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, as well as for greater ecological sustainability and resilience.
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