“What Should I Care About *Your* Environment?”

The question has stuck with me for the last 30 years.

I was in high school back then, national TV’s youth program was regularly featuring pro-and-contra discussions and similar programming on things such as environmental issues, and I was a regular guest.

It was a school mate who was annoyed by all my environmental activism who asked me that question.

“What should I care about your environment?”

Of course, there’s the easy problem with it: This isn’t *my* environment, it’s the world we live in.

Why the question stuck with me, however, is because it betrays a deeper misunderstanding, and it strikes at an issue we’re still dealing with decades later.

The misunderstanding that has remained a constant problem facing any and all environmental communications, activism, initiatives is that we commonly take the world for granted.

We keep on thinking – and worse yet, acting – as if the Earth were just this stage for all of our doings. A stage which sometimes has its upheavals, but usually remains all the same except for the rearrangement we sometimes do on it.

At yet a deeper level, we fail to understand – let alone properly take into account – that we ourselves are biological beings. We are nature.

Ecological relationships such as our requirements for air, water, nutrients, but also all the living beings inside and around us that provide us with air, water, and nutrients, help us digest, keep us healthy or make us sick, are us.

When we care about the environment, we care about us.

Of course, things aren’t as easy as often presented. Only because something is natural does not mean that it is good. Because we should, and indeed, must, care about our environment, we wouldn’t want to protect that which makes us sick – but we need to know about its ecological and evolutionary dynamics or we may cause inadvertent bad effects.

We still need to, indeed, consider why we should care about the environment, because we can get to better living through it.

Ultimately, if we understand ourselves as the biological beings we are, as dependent on ecological relationships as we are – alongside culture and technology – then we will *only* get to better living, in the long term, through an understanding of these aspects of our ecology!