Faculty of scienceYour first step towards your future

Human empathy is not only about human relationships, but also about relationships with the living beings around them, their relationship with the world. Through subsistence practices and rituals, humans practice putting themselves in the place of a bear, a star, an ancestor, or a god, and talking to them as if they were alter egos.

Human communities have woven dense networks of connections around themselves, in mythology, animal mothering, and domestication. They have reshaped ecosystems, creating landscapes of empathy with astonishing diversity. How do these dense networks become degraded? What are the ecological consequences?