The Compassionate Community: The Importance Of An Ecological Community

In order to thrive as productive members of society, we often enable ourselves to build connections and relationships with the people around us. While it is vastly important to build lasting relationships with others, it is equally important to ensure we also create a sustaining connection to our environment. The existential importance of this is due to the inevitable notion that we are greatly shaped by not only the people, but the things around us. When considering two types of a community, both compassionate and ecological, I believe that in order to subscribe to the compassionate community, one must first be a part of the ecological community.

Compassionate communities greatly rely on people working for the common good of everyone. Not

If a community is sincerely compassionate, it must care about the different components of the environment within the community – human and otherwise. Both of these views align when presented in the context of doing what is right, not for personal benefit but because it is our humanitarian right to care for each other and the things around us. Being able to respect the people closest to us is equally important as respecting the things that cultivate who we existentially become. As we are shaped by our surroundings, it is incredibly important to ensure that we leave the world better for those to come after

This notion can be based upon the ideal that if we, as humanity are not benefitting from the relationship with the natural world, it is not as important as human life. Some may argue that compassion does not essentially suggest that one has to be concerned about the state of things within the same species. Thus, would it be ethical to care more for a plant than a fellow human being? By arguing that humanity is not interconnected with the natural world would validate the view of irrelevance of things other than human life. Being as though some people may not feel a connection to their surroundings, others may contend that by caring for the Earth we are wasting energy and resources that can be used to help sustain our human communities. With the rate of population growing exponentially and consumption continuously rising, one should ask what resources we will be able to use once the Earth’s resources are depleted. Eventually, our human population will plateau, since there will be not adequate resources to sustain its growth. There is an explicit correlation between humans and non-humans. Furthermore, this fact proves my argument, although one should not preserve nature only for human