Edward O. Wilson said:
When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we degrade the greatest heritage this planet has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence. Humanity did not descend as angelic beings into this world. Nor are we aliens who colonized earth. We evolved here, one among many species, across millions of years, and exist as one organic miracle linked to others. The natural environment we treat with such unnecessary ignorance and recklessness was our cradle and nursery, our school, and remains our one and only home. To its special conditions we are intimately adapted in every one of the bodily fibers and biochemical transactions that give us life.
That is the essence of environmentalism. It is the guiding principle of those devoted to the health of the planet. But it is not yet a general world view, evidently not yet compelling enough to distract us away from the primal diversions of sport, politics, religion, and private wealth.
The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense. Why do they think in this short sighted way? The reason is simple: it is a hard wired part of our Paleo-lithic heritage. For hundreds of millennia those who worked for short term gain within a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring- even when their collective striving caused their chiefdoms and empires to crumble around them.
