Man has artificially inflated the carrying capacity of the earth for the human race. We are using oil faster than it can be created. Oil is used for food production in fertilizers and equipment fuel. Someday when we can no longer artificially inflate food production life on earth is going to start to get pretty meager. Look how fast the world's population has grown since we started to use oil for everything.
You're assuming we're going to be using oil for these things forever. We won't, just as we aren't using coal as the primary source of our energy any more.
If you think we can go willy nilly and burn the environment up for the pleasure of man, man's time on this planet will be shorter than it could have been. So yes it is inherently evil to shorten man's existence on this rock because you feel its our destiny to do whatever we please or your just greedy and stupid.
Nobody suggests that we can freely drop mercury into our rivers. But the thing is, we can't stop harming the environment. So the only thing we do is limit it in ways that are not directly harmful to us. In a century or less, we're not going to be restricted to this rock any more.
But that's not the point. The environment is not the point of my argument and really is but a distraction from it.
Humans have been known to do both incredible evil and incredible good in their history. We all know about the evil - the Holocaust, the Congo, the First World War, god only knows what else. There's also been a lot of good – Norman Borlaug, Mother Theresa, Thomas Jefferson, individual rights, penicillin.
The question is, which of these is the defining feature of mankind?
Are we really like the guys in “Lord of the Flies”, trying to kill Ralph with a sharp stick?
Or are we more like the guys in, say, “Tunnel in the Sky”?
That is the question, I think.
