How many spills?

Bill Maher recently asked one of his guests, "How many [oil] spills do you think this planet can take?" (REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER episode 183)

That's the kind of question that feeds right into the willful stupidity exhibited by some of the more populist commentators today, like Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh, according to Maher on that same episode, said that the ocean could handle the oil spill, suggesting that all the concern over the incident is misplaced.

From a certain perspective, Limbaugh is right: the ocean will recover, and life will go on. However, this argument takes an extremely long view of the incident and its impact, and too often, pundits don't tell their audiences that they're taking the long view. The argument would lose a lot of its rhetorical force, after all, if you added, "A lot of ocean life would die, and a lot of people would suffer economically (or starve), before things got better."

It's important not to give the Limbaughs of the world rhetorical ammunition through sloppy phrasing, and using "this planet" as shorthand for what Maher meant is sloppy.

To answer the question Maher asked: the planet can take any number of such spills. Earth will continue to rotate on its axis and to revolve around the sun, no matter how much oil spills.

You might roll your eyes and say that what Maher really meant was "How many spills can the ecosystem take?" That, too, is the wrong question. If life didn't vanish as a result of previous so-called extinction-level events (say, the one 250 million years ago that wiped out some 90% of the life on the planet), spilling every drop of oil ever created wouldn't destroy the ecosystem. It would recover -- someday.

However, before it did, a lot of species could die off. The loss of a species has fall-out effects: its prey can multiply uncontrollably, its predators and codependent species can be decimated or even die off. Humanity is as deeply enmeshed in the web of life as any other species, so it wouldn't take many species' dying before Homo Sapiens started to feel the effects. (Are you worried about honeybees? You see my point.)

Concern for "the ecosystem" ultimately boils down to a sensible concern for our own fate. Killing off other species through negligent damage to their environment, and then trying to address the problem, would be extremely stupid. If we did so and went extinct as a result, aliens that later came to Earth and reconstructed our history would be justified in holding up Homo Sapiens as a prime example of a sentient species that nevertheless was too stupid to survive.

And that brings us to the real question Maher should have asked: "How many spills do you think humanity can afford?"

The planet can, and the ecosystem almost certainly can, weather any number of catastrophes, including the relatively small one of a terrible oil spill ("relatively small" on a geological scale). There is no guarantee that mankind will survive them. That's why this spill matters, Rush. And that's why you need to be more careful what you say, Bill.