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The need to develop technologies which are more “respectful of nature” is very widely shared among the general public but also among engineers and designers, who consider themselves more and more concerned by environmental issues (especially in the case of students who, notably in France, have over the last few years developed a growing awareness of their present and future responsibility in the matter¹). The effort to introduce the aim of protecting nature into the activities of engineering and technological design has in fact a long history. The concepts of green design, eco-design or sustainable design also show a significant change in the openness of technological design to ecological issues in the 1980s and 1990s, reflecting more exactly the fact that this openness has gone hand in hand with an increasingly radical and comprehensive understanding of the responsibility of engineers and designers in ecological matters (Madge 1997).

The links between technological design and ecological thinking are older still. Thus, some of the great figures of the Bauhaus such as Walter Gropius (its founder) or László Moholy-Nagy in the 1930s had already forged contacts with representatives of the ecological sciences in London, where they had emigrated following the closure of their school in Germany by the Nazis (Anker 2010). The reflection on design integrated ecological questions very early on.

The current context is marked by the success of a new mobilizing watchword, which is currently bringing together a growing number of initiatives intended to get the industrialized countries to adopt a less destructive relationship to nature. This watchword is expressed in terms of a fairly simple imperative: we must take care of nature. The expression “take care of nature and of people [may indeed appear as] a new watchword of late modernity. It responds to a social crisis [as well as] an environmental crisis” without precedent (Pierron 2013b). We would thus be in the process of moving from a society whose priority is the search for well-being to a care society (Rodotà 1995, p. 103). Businesses themselves compete in order to win the Grand Prize for Caring, as far as the most trivial acts of consumption – buying recycled toilet paper, for example (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012) – which now seems to relate to taking care of nature².

Beyond the excitement that it inspires in advertising executives, care for nature has found important theoretical developments in moral philosophy, more precisely in the so-called ethics of care (Laugier 2012). In opposition to a long tradition of moral philosophy for which the subject cannot be moral unless recognized to be rational, autonomous and free, the ethics of care argue that humans constitute themselves as moral subjects in their vulnerability and in the relations of dependence which flow from it. Vulnerability and dependence are therefore not only accidents which may occur at certain critical moments of life (early childhood, old age or disease); they are our lot. Our moral life is based primarily on our ability to attract attention to, and to pay attention to, everything that allows the ordinary of our lives and which, literally, nourishes us (Pelluchon 2019a). The ethics of care thus put the emphasis on what we do not generally see, on what is rendered invisible by denial of attention, that is to say on everything that makes our lives possible and supports them on a daily basis. However, as noted by Sandra Laugier, indifference, or even negligence and recklessness “in relation to the consequences of our daily actions on the surrounding environment” is expressed more and more today in terms of carelessness (Laugier 2012). In making its irruption into environmental ethics, care does not however limit itself to adding, to the ethical issues centering on the “intrinsic value”³ of nature or on rational calculation of the consequences of our actions upon it, a generous and caring attitude. Environmental care expresses more essentially the recognition of our dependence on nature – a dependence which, for most authors, primarily has a contextual⁴ meaning which, moreover, is in no way a characteristic specific to the ethics of care.

For all that, the meaning and even the relevance of the injunction to take care of nature are debated (Gaille 2013; Hess 2013). Thus, can we unify care for humans and care for nature in one and the same concept of care, or are there several kinds of care (Pierron 2013b)? Can we export “concepts explored in relations with humans to relations with nature” (Pierron 2013a), by so doing deriving concern for nature and for the world, in its widest extension, from care as it is deployed in inter-human relations, and not the reverse⁵? There is no unambiguous and consensual response to these issues. We must state in fact that extending care beyond individual interactions, toward a care for the world in its entirety, does not necessarily lead to care for nature. Thus, in a book devoted to examining the conditions of care for the world, Elena Pulcini (2013) explains that only a transformation in our concept of the subject can allow us to overcome the “pathologies” of the globalized world (exaggerated individualism, communalist temptations). We must do away with the self-referential and sovereign subject of modernity, dominated by Promethean hubris and narcissism, to conceive a subject that is relational, vulnerable, and dependent on others, but also assuming its responsibility with respect to the vulnerability of others. However, Pulcini says nothing with regard to how this relational subject relates with non-human natural beings, and with nature in general. Care for the world certainly implies, as a basic condition, the preservation of life. However, the object of care is not, according to Pulcini, life as such, and even less nature, but the world of human intersubjectivity.

Based on these difficulties some argue that even the idea of care for nature is suspicious and that upon consideration, it is based on very weak philosophical grounds. French philosopher Aliénor Bertrand (2013a, 2013b) thus points to the distortion of principle which exists between the “type of philosophical anthropology” that underlies care and the “naturalism” which guides the relationship with the nature of industrial societies. By naturalism, Bertrand here understands naturalist ontology as defined by anthropologist Philippe Descola (2005): it is a mode of identification of the existing beings which rests on the attribution to all of the same “physicality” (meaning that all beings in the world, living or not, are held to be dependent on the same physico-chemical laws, their behavior can always be explained with reference to these laws) but on the attribution of different “interiorities” between all the existing beings: thus, only humans are assigned a soul, a consciousness or a spirit, all the other existing beings deprived of this. The very concept of “nature” is, in fact, unknown to all human groups which distribute ontological attributes among existing beings according to other identification schemes. The concept of nature therefore has only meaning in reference to a particular ontology, naturalism, suspected of having served as a foundation for so-called modern science and technology, and consequently of having paved the way to a mode of development based on the depredation of the environment. How could the concept of “nature” in these conditions become the reference term for an attitude to care with regard to the living and the environment? Naturalist ontology has led us, we Westerners of the industrial era, to conceive in a very impoverished manner our possible relationships with nature; it is inevitable that the concept of care for nature inherits this poverty and in no way allows us to reorient our attitude towards it. In sum, “the problems raised by natural resources are subsidiary in relation to the issue of values … they only arise, in fact, from within a generally anthropocentric conception of the relationship of humanity to nature⁶”. “To enact all the changes that would put us on the good path, whether on the level of the fight against global warming or as regards animal welfare… it is important to change our representations of animals and of the place of the human in nature…” (Pelluchon 2019b). The anthropocentric conception classically situates the human outside nature, and assigns to the latter only an instrumental value, which tends to justify the behavior of unlimited exploitation⁷. For us to show more care in regards to nature, we would first of all have to deal with this conception of humanity isolated and cut off from nature, that we replace the human being within the entirety of relations that it has with its environment, and that we cease to consider nature simply as a “background in front of which we perform our activities” (Pierron 2013a).

To assume that human beings are not cut off from nature is equivalent to remembering that this being, who likes to define itself above all by its reason, its intelligence and its freedom, does not yet cease to be a living creature among living creatures. If societies that have chosen industrialization have ransacked nature, it is because the humans in these societies have ceased to think of themselves as living beings and have made of themselves, in the words of André Leroi-Gourhan, a “dematerialized image”. They have imagined themselves as separated from the community of beings that they form with all living creatures on Earth, and have assumed the right to exercise over these, and over nature in general, unlimited domination. As Claude Lévi-Strauss also said, “We started by cutting man off from nature and establishing him in an absolute reign. We believed ourselves to have thus erased his most unassailable characteristic: that he is first a living being. Remaining blind to this common property, we gave frein rein to all excesses” (Lévi-Strauss 1976, p. 41). To reconnect with a conception of the human being as a living being among other living beings should in sum lead us, in a way logically, to put care in our relationships with nature.

The question of how to get out of naturalistic ontology, if that is indeed what it is all about, while retaining the term that it has posed in relation to humans, namely “nature”, remains at this point. The question of how it is possible, concretely, to “change anthropology”, as by decree, also remains entirely open.

However, apart from these thorny questions, would this planned change in our conception of the human being suffice to make the very notion of a care for nature? Nothing is less certain.