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Environmental ethics is the branch of ethics that takes into account how human beings relate to the ecosystem we live in.

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The way we live in our ecosystem affects the way we interact with other people.

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Ecological problems create social problems.

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So we should adopt what we call an eco-social perspective, trying to understand both ecological problems and social problems, which are frequently interconnected.

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For example, global warming has forced millions of people to leave their countries and to find a new place to live.

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This means that an environmental problem can create a social and political problem, and only if we face both problems together can we imagine a solution for both of them.

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One way to think about this eco-social perspective is the ethics of care.

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The ethics of care was developed originally by Carol Gilligan.

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She thought that the ethics of justice that were generally developed in philosophy, in tradition, were not good enough.

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They insisted on how important it was to give each person what they deserve, which is quite true.

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But the ethics of justice sometimes forget how important care is, how important it is sometimes to take care of other people.

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And that's what Carol Gilligan invites us to do.

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She says that we should not only think about justice, we should also think about how taking care directly, in a proactive way, getting involved with other people's lives and trying to help them to improve their lives, taking care of them.

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The same perspective can be adopted when we think about our planet.

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We should use the ethics of care in order to take care of our planet, in order to find a new way to live, in order to imagine a way of coexisting in society that can be sustainable in the future and that can ensure the future of our descendants, of our children and grandchildren.

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Some people even think that in order to preserve life on Earth, we should move from an anthropocentric vision to a biocentric vision.

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The anthropocentric vision, which has been dominant since the Renaissance times, thinks that human beings are the center of everything.

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In this anthropocentric vision, the most important thing is the human being.

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So, if you adopt this anthropocentric vision, you think that planet Earth, ecosystems, animals, minerals or water, all these things are resources, instruments that must be used to ensure that human lives are okay, that human beings live a good life, because the human life is the most important thing that we must consider.

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Some people think that this vision is a bit limited, is not correct.

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We should perhaps change our mind and adopt a biocentric vision.

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For the biocentric vision, the important thing is not just human life.

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The important thing is life in general.

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So, important as we are, we should also take care of plants, of trees, of animals, of all living creatures.

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So, the human being is not the center.

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The center should be life.

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And if the center is life, one of the consequences is that human beings must restrict their needs and their consumption in order to let other ways of life thrive and live prosperously in our planet.