Home, Care and Love: The Possible Starting Point to Overcome the Climate Crisis

Climate change is one of the most compelling challenges for society today. Unfortunately, many people still struggle to recognize climate change as a serious issue. Why? Scruton argues that this happens because perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the centralized approach to environmental problems is that it ignores the need to provide ordinary people with motives for adopting it.The author claims these motives ultimately should be grounded in oikophilia, the love and feeling for home, recognized as human universals. But why? Scruton's perspective is surely interesting, suggesting that restoring an effectiveness and meaningfulness to environmental ethics, it requires understanding that the source of the problems we face lies in how our ontological and metaphysical assumptions have informed and shaped our behavior. As Guattari argues, we are in need to reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity a sense of responsibility. This reorientation could be achieved by emphasising more centrally a deeper, interconnected sense of the earth as ‘home’, in which all features are intimately interdependent. But why, using an expression of Nel Noddings, can we say that starting from and at home is so important for the life of the planet and of people? My aim in this paper is to outline an “ecosophy”, a wisdom about home, with an embedded ethics and to clarify why it is a key point and what this perspective suggests to the debate on the current ecological crisis that we are experiencing. Knowledge, and care for, the home is required in order to have knowledge and care for both ourselves and our environment.