"Save the environment!" How many times have we heard that plea?
It's an emotional appeal in a good cause. The slogan was originally meant to make people think about the natural world around us and help protect it from unthinking actions that cause pollution, damage our health, and even destroy entire species of plants and animals.
We humans have a long history of changing the environment to suit ourselves. This has allowed us to thrive and prosper, but it hasn't always been so good for other creatures.
All through prehistory, whenever human tribes moved into a territory for the first time, wholesale changes in that area's environment soon followed. The big, meat-bearing animals were the first to go, usually hunted to extinction within a few generations of human occupation.
In North America, the woolly mammoth, giant sloth and other "megafauna," as the biologists call them, were wiped out within a few generations after the first humans arrived.
Our ancestors cleared forests to make room for farms. The Europeans who settled the New World after Columbus carried parasites and disease microbes with them. Smallpox wiped out a thousand times more Native Americans than guns ever did.
Today the cry of "Save the environment!" is aimed more at stopping the pollution we spew from our smokestacks and tailpipes, and finding ways of lowering the vast tonnages of nondegradable plastic and other detritus we produce as part of our modern, industrialized society.
This is a noble endeavor. While practically no one wants to return to living in huts without electricity or indoor plumbing, we should be able to live comfortably without producing such mountains of garbage.
But there's a danger in all this. Saving "the environment" presumes that there is a one-and-only environment that must be saved. The concept is based on a vision of the kind of environment we find ideal — for ourselves. A beautiful, pollution-free world, a world that has never existed. And probably never will.
Face it. There are seven billion human beings on this planet (plus a few in the International Space Station). We produce an enormous amount of pollution. We are a threat to all the other plants and animals on the globe, whether we mean to be or not.
Still, despite our unthinking behavior, the environment around us isn't being destroyed. It's being changed.
In the Everglades, pythons brought to Florida as pets have escaped into the wild and are eating up most of the raccoons and other small mammals that have existed there since time immemorial.
They're not destroying the Everglades, but they certainly are changing it. Soon they will have gobbled up so much prey that their food sources will shrink, and the python population will shrink along with it. The environment will change again, as it always does.
Crocodiles have found a haven in the warm waste water from the Turkey Point nuclear power plant. So have manatees. That nuclear power plant is changing the local environment.
A few years ago I visited Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, at his home in a posh southern California housing development. His neighborhood had turned into a happy hunting ground for coyotes, which were eating all the local pets.
Coyotes are a very successful animal. After being hunted nearly to extinction, they have moved into suburban areas, and even cities. I've seen them slinking along city streets in Phoenix, lean and hungry.
The environment changes. The motto of "Save the environment!" really means, "save the environment that we want to live in." That's fine, but if you think you can keep the environment from changing, you're fooling yourself.
The environment changes, on the local, regional, continental and global scales. It's a very admirable goal to try to produce a world in which we humans don't pollute ourselves to death, but we have to understand that the environment is constantly changing.
Our goal should be to try to make sure the changing environment remains comfortable for ourselves. That means making it comfortable for all the other creatures we live with and depend on.
There's no rule that says we can't go the way of the dinosaurs. And the dodo.