May 25, 2021
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“The Duty of Care”
This past Thursday I raced home from a short morning’s work in the Master Gardener demonstration gardens to attend a board development workshop on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion sponsored by U/Albany’s Institute of Nonprofit Leadership and Community Development. In this workshop, I heard for the first time the phrase, “duty of care.”
New York State, I learned, has laws governing the roles and responsibilities of those who serve on the boards of non-profit organizations. The provisions of these statutes run the gamut from the most general “duty of care” to the extremely specific – e.g. the number of members required to form any board committee. I have served on boards before my current assignment. I should have known about these laws and their provisions, but I didn’t.
The phrase, “duty of care,” was invoked by one of the panelists as she wondered if perhaps it might extend to a board’s responsibility in relation to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I, of course, found it resonating in a different context.
Our lovely cool, wet spring has turned into an unseasonably hot, dry mid-May. There has been no rain for days and there is no rain predicted for the near future. The earth in the gardens is cracked and gray, the plants are parched and wilting. “Chance of thunderstorms” seems a cruel joke devised by weather forecasters to torment gardeners, and their glorying in “another lovely day” seems downright perverse.
Lured into extensive planting and transplanting by the cool and wet, I am now faced with the task of keeping moved plants and new plants alive. I must put aside the debilitating fear of devastating climate change – the Amazon is burning, the Arctic icecap is melting, in the rain forest tree frogs are running out of space at the cooler top branches, May in the northeast should not be so dry and hot– and embrace the “duty of care.”
I do not usually respond well to the word “duty.” I find it often used coercively and in a way that allows little room for reflection. In the context of care, however, it seems just right. Besides, it captures, perfectly, the reason why I rise at 6:30 every morning to begin my two-hour stint of watering. I have a duty of care to my plants, and right now that means water.
The sprinkler system has sprung a leak and blown some caps. I cannot use it. Besides, it does not deliver water in enough volume or sufficient specificity for my new and moved plants. Sara, worried about the strain on my back from lifting buckets, urges me to use a hose, but the hose is a crude instrument, also insufficiently specific. While trees are prolific — thousands of maple seeds pile up along the sides of my driveway; my car is covered in yellow pine pollen; a distant cottonwood tree releases more than a million seeds, too many of which end up in our air conditioner — I,am required to be specific. Each new or moved plant in my garden is special, and each must be kept alive, and this means buckets. And so I rise, and so I lift, and so I carry.
The “duty of care” is complicated. I count on rainy days to give me time free from garden work to meet my other responsibilities. I am behind in my work for the board on which I serve; I am delinquent in my duties towards my writing self; bills and correspondence lie heaped on my desk, unpaid and unanswered. Caring for one thing, I short-change another, forced to prioritize.
Pondering the “duty of care,” I have come to believe that some of the saddest words a person can utter are, “I don’t care.” As humans, I believe we have the duty of care and that when we cease to care we give up our identity. I believe “the duty of care” extends to the world around us and all that lives within it. Of course, there is of course a limit to what we can do. But is there a limit to how much we can care?
Sara and I are taking a wee vacation this week. I worry about what will happen to my plants while I am away. This past Friday Kevin spread compost over those parts of the garden that are home to most of the new and moved plants. This will help retain whatever moisture may fall on them from dew or sprinkle. I watered well this morning, trying to spare my back and to drown out the words of Henry Mitchell that have returned to chasten me for my earlier denials: “The kind of innocence that is best lost quickly is the simple-minded belief that spring will be lovely. It will not. It will be dreadful.”
The spring is no longer lovely, it is rather dreadful. But armed with the duty of care I can manage. So nature does her thing and I do mine.
[Because we are leaving on Monday, I am sending this out a day early.]
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