Why have we been so cruel to our non-human friends to the point of thinking of them as characters in a planetary tragedy in which everyone is confined for life in their own home? The answer to this question is a bit long and I will try to summarize it. The responsible guy is Linnaeus, the Swedish biologist to whom we owe the biological classification system of living beings. In 1749, one of his students, Isaac Biberg, published the first great treatise on ecology and entitled it, translated in contemporary terms, means roughly "On natural household, on the domestic order of nature". Why has nature been interpreted as an enormous domestic order? At the time, most biologists did not believe in the transformation or evolution of species. In such a context, the only way to understand whether there is a relationship between an Arizona buffalo and an Australian fly was to take the point of view of the one who had imagined, designed and created both: God.
Being responsible for the existence of both, he must have conceived and established a relationship between these two species, as well as between all living species. In the Christian universe, God relates to the world not as a simple governor or political leader relates to his people, but rather as a father relates to his family and home: he has power over the world only because he created it. On the other hand, the world does not relate to God as a subject relates to the ruler but rather as a son to his father. All life on earth, therefore, is one household and one family of the one Father-God. For this reason, Biberg and Linnaeus called this science "economics of nature". It was then Haeckel, a 19th century German biologist, who suggested to switch from economics to ecology to distinguish this discipline from capitalistic economics.
The image of the household proved useful because it immediately expressed the evidence and the need for a reciprocal relationship between all living people: all are part of an enormous house and an immense family. However, it is also problematic. First of all, this image is the heart of all patriarchy. Ecology does not realize this, but it continues to be in essence a patriarchal mythology, regardless of all the efforts made by eco-feminists. In antiquity as today, the house is a space in which a series of objects and individuals respect an order, a disposition that aims at the production of a utility and that is subject to the power of an individual. To say that life on the planet is a great house means that it respects that order and that each element that composes it produces a form of utility by virtue of that order. From this point of view ecology shares the same origin, the same vocabulary and the same conceptual structure with the capitalistic economy. Ecology will never save us from neoliberalism.