Why do I care about the Environment now? — A Selfish Perspective

I am super diligent when it comes to the cleanliness of my surroundings. I never litter and I always make sure that the sewer around me is clean to make sure that if the rain comes, the water will easily flow through the waterway to the river or the sea or wherever water goes, as long as it does not accumulate in the sewer and resulted in me being drowned in a 1 or 2 meters flood.

So you could imagine how angry I would be to find myself waking up one day to a 3 meters flood that drowned not only me but also my house… And I would get even angrier to find that all my hard work is pointless because 5 km to the west from the environment I took care of diligently, someone else is chopping off all the trees to make some profits, or to get some firewood, or to do whatever they wanna do with all those trees… But I have to bear the consequence of their action!

I will then have to confront these people, and if I win, they will stop chopping those trees. Problem solved? Far from it. What if 5 km to the east of my environment people are doing the same thing as those savages? What about the north-side? or the south-side? Or what about 10 km? 100 km? 1000 km? It will be super annoying if I have to come to every km to my east-north-west-south side of my environment just to tell people to stop chopping trees or do things that would result in my bad fortune and in exchange to promise them that I would not do stupid things that will benefit me but indirectly make them suffer…

That is the same with environmentalism I guess. It’s not because of my love for nature that I decided to become an environmentalist. No. I couldn’t be more careless about the deforestation or the loss of the lives of the orangutan. I care about my well-being. Period. But the funny thing is that my well-being, whether I like it or not, is not entirely in my control, there are parts of my well-being that I shared with others, in this case, the simplest example is the environment. I share the planet earth with 6.99 billion other people, and so my well-being is tied to these 6.99 billion others, just like their well-being tied to mine. Hence I have a duty to keep the shared environment that tied our well-being in order to make sure that no one would mess with my well-being.

This writing is a brutal simplification, that I won’t deny. But it still possesses truth value in its argument. I need to protect myself. Hence I need to protect the environment.