What is your EQ?

I watched the Academy Awards last Sunday. It was the usual grand affair, of course. Plenty of sound and fury.

At some point during the leading up to the actual Oscars, there was a brief interview with Leonardo DiCaprio. In the interests of disclosure, I am beginning to like this guy. I used to think that this guy was always going to be something of a milkdud, going by his early movies like The Basketball Diaries, The Quick and the Dead (if you haven't watched this particular gem, add +1 to your blessings), and Titanic. But watch his recent stuff like Catch Me If You Can and The Aviator and you see a great actor in the making.

Anyhow, it appears that Mr. DiCaprio is an ardent environmentalist. While the other grand poobahs rolled up in fancy stretch limos the size of a city block, Leonardo puttered in driving a gas-electric hybrid car. This marks him as a decent human being in my book, whatever his other faults may be. There are worse things that you can do than care about the environment. One of the perennially sunny anchors asked Leonardo why he cared about the environment. Leonardo's reply was, "Well we must, because this is the one thing that can't defend itself."

Now, now. I think that there is an incredible amount of anthropocentric hubris in the above statement. It paints the environment as this delicate darling that will wither away to nothing if we don't care for it. The unstated assumption is that the environment is at a happy equilibrium at this moment in time and that it desires to continue to be at this equilibrium. If we bump it out of true, it will be hurt somehow.

Let's call a spade a spade. The earth is fine. It is our own welfare that concerns us. The earth will be perfectly happy at other equilibrium points. It won't be upset in the least. But the situation may not be all that hot for us--to use an expression--if the environment shifts to those other equilibrium points.

Consider for example what if the average temperature of the earth rose a hundred degrees. This would promptly turn most of the terrestrial surface, which does not go underwater, into a scorching hot desert. Would the earth care? Would it be happy? Sure it would. Nature, ever bountiful, will simply spawn a whole bunch of species suited to the extreme climate. If species can live in deep ocean biomes like geothermal vents, then this should be a snap. How about us humans though? Would we care if the temperature climbed a hundred degrees? You bet we would.

I repeat. We don't really care about the earth. There is no need to. We care about us.

Or consider this. What if nature "defended itself" by raising the mean sea level by twenty feet? Would nature be at equilibrium? Yes Virginia, it would. It would proliferate marine life out the wazoo. What about us, though?

Many of us say that we care about the environment and I am not saying that this is a bad thing. On the contrary. But in the interest of accuracy, I would submit that when we say that we care about the environment, what we are really saying is that we care about what will happen to us if we don't care about the environment. We don't care about the environment. Not really. What we care about is our own pockmarked hides.

So the real question is not whether the environment can defend itself. Sure it can. Can we afford to play with it, and wait to see exactly how it will defend itself? No, that would be stupid.