In the face of the rapid destruction of the natural world, how much should we care? Two considerations seem relevant. First, it is pointless to care for things we cannot affect. Care is squandered where it overreaches our power. Second, our power should not overreach our care. Not to care for things we affect to is to act carelessly—that is, destructively.

If we want to avoid both destruction and futility, then, our care should be proportionate to our power. The problem is that technology continually extends our power without correspondingly extending care.

We pull an item off the store shelf. The store's inventory drops by one, adding impulse to whatever ensemble of environmentally destructive events is required to replace it: mining, oil extraction, oil refining, chemical agriculture, logging, truck or rail transportation, and so on. Of course, all these practices would continue had we not bought this item; our purchase is relatively inconsequential. But not entirely. The effects are more substantial if the item we buy is an automobile. More substantial still are the cumulative effects of the tens of thousands of purchases made during a lifetime. Yet the typical consumer cares little about these effects.

Let's call the ensembles of events to which we personally contribute our field of power. A person's field of power is strongest closest to home. Our actions have substantial effects on our backyard, much smaller (but still significant) effects on the rainforest in Brazil, negligible effects on the sun.

Similarly, each of us has a field of care — that is, a region of things that concern us. Like our field of power, it too is most dense in the vicinity of home.

Where our field of care exceeds our field of power—that is where we care but are powerless—action is futile. Where our field of power exceeds our field of care—that is, where we have power but don't care—we act carelessly. Both conditions are harmful—futility chiefly to us, carelessness to everything we affect.

But is technology to blame for our carelessness? It might be argued that the same technology that has magnified our power has opened up new possibilities for care by increasing our knowledge and enlarging the field of our perception. We sense the whole earth through satellite-borne instruments and access incessant streams of information from everywhere through the electronic and print media. Doesn't this help us to care?

But I doubt it. Though technology increases the variety of things we can care about, it does little to increase our total capacity for caring. We can respond to distant problems by sending money, to problems nearer at hand by more direct forms of work, but both our money and our waking hours quickly run out. Instead of enlarging the field of care, the information glut merely fragments it. For many people, the result is, not widened care, but the conviction that caring is useless. Each of us has a relatively fixed and finite capacity for caring, and as technology enlarges our power, care is overwhelmed.

And while technology expands some forms of knowledge, it radically diminishes others—most especially close familiarity with the essential processes of life: provision of water, food, and energy; disposal of waste; fabrication of clothing and shelter. With respect to these basics, technology functions largely as insulation, concealing from us the effects of our living.

We dwell, work and transport ourselves in climate-controlled capsules. Seldom do we actually set foot on earth. We learn about the world mostly not by encountering it firsthand, but by reading about it or seeing it on video screens. We are insulated from the sources of our food and clothing. We usually have no acquaintance with the factories or farms where they were produced, the people or things that were poisoned or wasted in their production, how they were transported, how their packaging was manufactured, and what will happen to the waste when they're used up. Many of us could not say where our water comes from—or where it goes after it's flushed into the sewers. Few of us have ever seen the landfills to which our garbage is taken. We don't know or understand the processes by which our tools or appliances are made. Thus our firsthand experience of even the most fundamental life-sustaining processes is constricted to an extent unprecedented in human history.

In sum, technology, both because it insulates us from our effects and because we have only so much attention to pay, helps little to enlarge our circle of care. It is usually aimed, in fact, at the opposite: convenience, the ability not to care.

We ought to care more, and to some degree we can; that's one aim of a good environmental education. But our ability to care, even at its best, is no match for our technological power.

It doesn't follow, though, that power and care can't be balanced. Unable to enlarge our care to match our power, we may reverse the strategy, drawing our power back toward the circle of our care—that is, aiming to limit our technologies to those we can use responsibly, those whose effects we personally can understand and control.