The possibility that human beings could virtually destroy the natural substrate in which we live, or modify it in some irreversible way, only arose in mainstream imagination and political thought with the modern accelerated transformation of technical means that gave our species a power with no precedent. The human capacity for excess, amplified by growing technological development and the visible effects of this combination, raised awareness of the world’s vulnerability in the place of the former Enlightenment sense of invulnerability. There is an evident linkage between ecological care and frailty in contemporary political thought, and this correlates to the notion of care in other fields that also seem to be tied to an acknowledgment of vulnerability.