[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 19, 2006]

Liberals complain about the environment as though humans were not a part of it and as though the environment has significant meaning beyond how it exists for the benefit of humans.  Before you stop reading because you think you know what I'm going to say next, think again.  When humans speak of their environment, they are speaking only of THEIR environment as they perceive it, THEIR environment, which is brutally ambivalent about what humans do.  Humans cannot destroy their environment.  They can perceive it.  They can change it in some ways.  They can even make it less hospitable for human habitation if they try hard enough.  But this is a far cry from destroying it. 

If someone drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa with a permanent marker, art lovers would not necessarily be considered unreasonable in claiming the masterpiece was destroyed.  The painting would be defaced, diminished, and made much less attractive (no matter how talented the mustache artist), but it would not be destroyed in the physical sense.  Destroyed in the aesthetic sense, yes, for we know how DaVinci wanted his painting to look, and obscuring DaVinci's vision behind the irreverent commentary of the vandal has the effect of destroying it.  Fair enough?

Destroying the environment is another story.  It changes constantly and people adapt to it constantly.  The proposition of so-called environmentalists that the way the environment is today is the way God intended it for all time is fatuous nonsense.  It is strange that they would adopt this sort of unchanging conservationist posture toward the environment (which, like DaVinci's painting, means nothing beyond how humans perceive it) while they reject any sort of moral conservationism or political conservatism that would have far more significance to the way humans exist in the world.  To assume that a spotted owl's feelings would be hurt and that its anger at the human race would fester into a depression so deep that only a trial lawyer could cure it is just plain loony. 

Anthropomorphically putting the assumed best interests of animals ahead of the known best interests of innocent humans (if any human in the radical environmentalist's view can be considered innocent) is immoral.  Nature is designed—Oh, that word!—so that each of its species puts its own interests ahead of every other species.  For humans to be the only species to act against its own self-interest for the benefit of other species is a hopelessly vain attempt to fool Mother Nature.  But Mother Nature herself doesn't really care whether spotted owls or humans become extinct.  She was around for a long time with no organic life forms for company, not even Oprah.  The only reason radical environmentalists want to conserve nature as it exists is their species-centric, egotistical desire to look at it the same way they always have, just as the art lovers want the Mona Lisa to stay clean shaven.

The Mona Lisa was intelligently designed and we know who the designer was.  The radical leftist environmentalists seem to be saying that nature was designed by an "artist" who deserves similar reverence.  One would think the leaders of the environmentalist movement would be embarrassed to find themselves in the same boat as real Nature Worshippers instead of those folks from the Church of NIPERMM (Nothing In Particular Except Random Molecular Movement).  But that's not really what the leaders of the environmental movement care about.  Anti-capitalism is what drives them.  If any proposed development for human benefit promises to have only neutral or positive benefits for the spotted owl, the mere fact that the proposal is for the benefit of humans means, in zero-sum environmentalist dogma, that it will be bad for the environment.  (Remember, we humans are locked in a life-or-death struggle with other living things, all of whom are unionized against our continued existence.) 

It is not politically correct to note that the environment constantly changes for reasons that have nothing to do with humans, but it is accepted in liberal circles to point out at every opportunity that human presence always changes the environment for the worse.  The theory is that whenever humans deliberately modify their environment, capitalism is at work and must be opposed because university professors have deemed it evil, perhaps because they were turned down for jobs at Walmart.

And that brings me to our old friend who is about as lively as the Mona Lisa, but without the smile:  Al Gore, whom history will remember mostly for his shamelessness in making the most wildly unsupportable assertions that ever bored anyone to death.  His latest bit of twaddle is the assertion that global warming is a much greater threat than Islamofascism.  To believe his own statement, Senator Gore must necessarily believe two things about the nature of "destruction":  The first thing is that "destroying" innocent people because they haven't upgraded their moral operating systems from Christianity 2000 to Islam 1.1 is, as problems go, not all that pressing.  The second thing is that making people slightly warmer over the next century will "destroy" not only the human race but also the entire earth. 

That innocent people are being murdered by Islamofascists today is less of a problem for Senator Gore than that their descendents, if they live to have any, might have to contend with bad weather.  How could someone who markets himself as such a smarty-pants make such a moral equivalency?  The inconvenient truth of the matter is that Senator Gore is not really as stupid as he sounds.  He does not believe what he says about global warming and overstates its severity to get attention.  He is a professional Democrat who says whatever he thinks is necessary to get Democrats elected, though he's gone too far around the bend to be effective.  There are many who uncritically accept what he says, however, because it's easier than thinking for themselves and it gives them something to worry about that doesn't really make them all that nervous.  After all, there are crazed Muslims at large who would actually kill American environmentalists if they had half a chance.

The next time Big Al comes on the tube to tell us about the Next Big Thing in planetary destruction scares, I'm going to change the channel.  I only wish I could get the video feed of the Louvre's security camera that features all Mona Lisa, all the time.  At least there would be some movement to watch.