Why bother to care?
JR - Tehachapi, The Road
When we created Pro(to)topia, Eloise and I realized that all our years of engagement —in activism, advocacy, policy and research—were unlikely to yield results because our work was insufficiently focused on the roots of the multiple crises the world was going through. As we never spared our time and efforts, this was a particularly sobering conclusion. We were also deeply saddened by our inability to find common grounds with our family and friends, due to increasing societal and political polarization around ecology and many other topics existential for us.
Thus, we were looking for a framework which would talk to the origins of the crisis and could help forge a new consensus, beyond current fault lines and the mistaken perception of a dilemma between caring for people and for the planet. Finally, we were looking for a framework which could guide our actions both internally – in terms of our ways of working—and externally. We believe that the notion of care, as developed by the care ethics and ecofeminist movements since the early 80’s, provided us with a promising answer.
“(….) Caring can be viewed as a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”— Berenice Fisher and Joan C. Tronto
Care: beyond politics and at the heart of it
The need of humans for care derives from two biological traits in humanity: women's bodies can give birth every nine months and human offsprings need almost constant care in their first years to simply survive. Thus, homo sapiens evolved as “cooperative breeders”, meaning that child-rearing involves not just mothers but a network of caregivers—fathers, grandparents, siblings, and others. Infants who could elicit care and adults who could respond to others’ needs for care are more likely to thrive.
If care is innate rather than a mere cultural or moral construct, nurturing environments—in families, communities, and institutions—are essential for human flourishing. Conversely, social systems that suppress or ignore caregiving instincts (e.g., hyper-individualism, competitive capitalism) may be at odds with our evolutionary wiring.
A society increasingly at odds with our evolutionary wiring is bound to make us sick, unhappy and violent. We are currently living through a twin crisis of care with human systems of care on the brink of collapsing: on the one hand, demand for care is rising sharply, while on the other, the supply of quality care is collapsing under the weight of chronic underinvestment. Long-term societal, socioeconomic and demographic trends are contributing to increasing the demand for care. Across OECD member countries on average, the share of the population aged 65 and over is projected to continue increasing in the coming decades, rising from 18% in 2021 to 27% by 2050, leading in some cases to old-age dependency ratios which are seen as unsustainable. This is occurring when the supply of services is already severely constrained by decades of chronic underinvestment into systems which provide for the paid and unpaid activities that contribute to human well-being (including childcare, education, health care, care for the disabled and for older people). A clear example of this pertains to mental health systems: According to the WHO, up to 90% of people with severe mental health conditions receive no care at all in some countries, while many existing services rely on outdated institutional models that fail to meet international human rights standards.
Human care systems are also severely impacted by the consequences of our careless destruction of our natural environment. The overconsumption of natural resources is leading to a destabilization of the climate, a mass extinction of species and widespread pollution of the air, water and soils, with disastrous consequences for both humans and non-humans. A 2024 study of the world bank quantified climate-related health risks in 69 LMICs, finding increases in cases and deaths from vector-borne and water-borne diseases, stunting, and extreme heat, with Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia bearing the brunt of these burdens.
The careless neglect of all our life-support systems (whether humans or environmental) is not accidental. Prevailing societal norms conceive care as a cost rather than an investment into human capital and social inclusion. Caring for others and for the living world is conceived as a burden rather than an opportunity for self-fulfillment. Caring for self has become the privilege for the happy few who do not suffer from time poverty and can pay for goods and services provided by the “well-being industry”. Homo economicus does not need other beings or nature to thrive and it has no time to be sick and care for members of his family. And according to some, homo artificialis will need to curb any empathy in return for the mirage of living an augmented life.
The same misguided societal norms apply to care for other living beings and ecosystems. Even though cost-benefit models demonstrate that the net fiscal and economic costs of ignoring planetary boundaries greatly outweigh the costs of proactive mitigation, caring for the living world is seen by many pundits, governments and citizens as a distraction or a luxury, which individuals, companies and countries can ill-afford. This intellectual myopia also explains why people and governments are dumb-founded -again and again--when climate-related disasters strike, as if scientific information and predictions were not readily available and no preventive measure possible.
Of course, the movement of the ethics of care had not waited for our moment of epiphany to exist and did not particularly need us, but we felt that we could inject innovations into it through strategic foresight work on care-based policy frameworks and effort to bring the “traditional” care movement (mostly composed on gender justice groups) with the environmental movement. We also wanted to confront the harsh reality of runway climate change and mass extinction of species: Given that some of the destruction is no longer stoppable, can we think of new ways we could care for self, each other and the living world.
In Pro(to)topia, we have tried to experiment with such new forms of care. Lament, developed with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and associate Margharita Pevere, explored how communities scarred by wildfires could process grief collectively, through art, science and memory, and in doing so begin to rebuild resilience. Our collaboration with the European Environmental Bureau on PFAS shone a light on the invisible but pervasive “forever chemicals” that contaminate water and bodies alike, and asked how policy, citizen engagement and artistic expression could together foster both awareness and action.
Through these and other projects, we have sought to show that care can be reimagined as a powerful lens for responding to today’s crises—helping societies face ecological loss, build resilience, protect health, and nurture solidarity across generations.
After two years of existence, we feel proud of our achievements. We of course know that it is just the beginning. We will continue to forge ahead, provided we can live the values