I’ve been thinking about other places where we’ve drawn the line too close to ourselves and pursued a self-interest that may eventually come back to bite us. How and where we live and build our homes has an ultimate impact everywhere — socially, economically, and environmentally. The choices that we make, from buying a brand of cereal to building a home, matter in ways that we may not comprehend in the moment. Whether or not we know it, we exercise a lot of power as individuals and as a society.
What do you care about? What do you consider when you make a decision? A person who pursues their self-interest at the expense of everyone else’s we call a sociopath. What about a society that is hell-bent on material progress that externalizes all of its costs on those that have no voice? Whether as individuals, as a nation, or a species, we can’t afford to inch any closer to sociopathy through the practice of undiluted self-interest. Now is the time to expand our concept of “home” as far as it will go, and to widen what I call the “circle of care” to include, not just the global community in the present, but the generations yet to come, and all of non-human nature that supports us.
In future posts I will discuss how we can respond to this challenge in the design and construction of our homes.
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