This anecdote, read somewhere a long time ago, resurfaced lately from the depths of my memory: the Indian Jesuit Priest Anthony de Mello was walking with a friend by the edge of the sea where thousands of jellyfish had been washed ashore to certain death. Without interrupting conversation, de Mello would bend down every few moments to collect the unfortunate creatures and put them back in water. His interlocutor noticed: “You are not going to save them all, why bother?” De Mello replied: “Ask the ones I rescued.”

I don’t know whether saving jellyfish stranded on a beach is the right thing to do or not. However, that is not the point of the anecdote. I read it rather as making a declaration: an act motivated by empathy is never insignificant – even if its practical consequences are minimal. It is so easy to say: “That won’t change anything.” But for whom? This little story shifts attention from the human interest and the values professed by our culture (that an activity must be effective, that is to say, remunerative in one way or another, in order to be worthwhile) to that of an animal – in this case, a very inconspicuous one, gelatinous and certainly redundant when considered with human economy in mind. In this shift of attention, I read a premonition of an environmental logic, one that will certainly not rescue our civilization but perhaps something else, without which this civilization is not exactly worth rescuing.