Cav's Place

Stumbled upon an animation with an environmental theme recently and made the mistake of glancing at the comments. It seems like whenever I do that I should add people to a potential hit list. For example the author of the comment that starts with “Environmentalists are more anti-human than any other ignorant -ism I have seen. They feel that the environment has its own value aside from its use to humans, even though without humans there would be no one to give it value. They anthropomorphize mindless beasts in order to play on people’s emotions.” (At least the spelling’s proper!)
Let’s analyze that for a moment. The way humans treat the Earth is certainly similar to the way a virus treats the organism it infects, using resources without providing anything in return, multiplying recklessly, causing damage to said organism’s components, eventually even changing the way that organism’s inner systems work in order to cause even more harm and ultimately causing the organism’s death. Actually, that’s the description of a stupid virus, because smart ones don’t cause that much damage and certainly don’t kill their host, therefore ensuring their own survival. Humans aren’t just a virus, they’re a stupid virus!
Now, on to that comment. Having established that humans are a stupid virus, why exactly wouldn’t one be anti-human? I don’t see anyone saying they’re pro-ebola, for example… Moving on, who exactly gave humans the right to establish the value of things greater than themselves, like the environment? While we’re at it, the question should be what’s the value of humans if they’re of no use for the environment, don’t you think? I mean, if we want to have any value, shouldn’t we work towards evolving from a stupid virus to a symbiote? As for those “mindless beasts”, they cause far less harm than we do, and when they do harm it’s not on purpose. Besides, for any really intelligent species which might be observing us, we’re the mindless beasts. Put that into perspective.
Thinking about it logically, we weren’t “put” here for a certain purpose and neither was the environment. It’s just the way things developed and we should strive to live in harmony with each other, with all the other creatures that we share this planet with (except the viruses and parasites, since they won’t live in harmony with anything) and with the Earth itself. (And even if you look at it from a religious perspective and say everything was “put” here by a greater intelligence for a certain purpose, you still end up with the conclusion that humans are the stewards of the Earth and therefore need to take care of it, not destroy it.) When we’ll manage that we’ll be worthy of calling ourselves “intelligent”. Until then we’re just the human virus…