Caregiver

The definition is broad on purpose. A caregiver is anyone whose work is the care of others, and Marsh deliberately extends the circle past the usual human cases to animals, communities and ecosystems, so that tending a forest or a community counts as caregiving alongside raising a child or nursing the sick. This breadth matters in her framework because care is a form of the outward, sustaining connection she values, the opposite of the extraction and predation her energy model tracks. Caregiving directs energy toward the flourishing of another life or system rather than draining it. The definition sits beside a paired term, the caregiver-self, which describes a circle of expansion that includes or replicates the earliest relationships a child forms with home and caregivers, especially where that circle has hardened into an endogroup.

Ordinarily a caregiver is someone who looks after a child, a sick or elderly person, or a dependent, and care work is a recognised category in economics and ethics, including the feminist ethics of care. Marsh keeps that sense but widens the object of care to animals, communities and ecosystems, folding caregiving into her account of sustaining connection and setting it against extraction.