As the planet collapses around us, the landscape becomes an extended crater crossed by roads and more roads to accommodate all those friendly traffic jams, litter is accepted by far too many of us as a homely element of social history and planners continue to advise "just build another hotel" to those burdened by cash and no imagination, it's worth remembering that no one is fully without stain. Environmentalists and nature-lovers have to be the good guys, if only because anti-environmentalists and nature-haters are such obvious villains.
Still, let's not get too smug about it. Some of those strictly orthodox campaigning environmentalists, you know the kind who treat you as a killer if you eat a hard-boiled egg or wear leather shoes - I once met an earth-lover who wanted all of us to throw ourselves down on the motorway in a group suicide pact protesting against the use of petrol cars - can be pretty overpowering as well. In fact, headstrong, card-carrying environmentalists who spend their days bragging loudest about how much they worship nature probably couldn't identify a stoat or chiffchaff to save their lives.
That it is easy to protest and profess without knowing all that much is something biologist and cartoonist Gary Larson - the Washington state-born creator of The Far Side, Nobel laureate-in-waiting, celebrant of the profundity as well as the comic potential of cows, chickens, wised up bears - is a human failing he has long been observing.
True, some voices of dissent might be provoked into pointing out that scientists always think everyone else is stupid. During the dark years when Larson, weary of us all, went into self-imposed exile and there were no cartoons, he still felt committed to save us from ourselves. Thus he wrote a dark parable of sorts, and, like all parables, it speaks volumes - well, sort of. There's A Hair in My Dirt! (1998) is a cautionary tale directed to a frustrated young earthworm by his father, who, angered by his son's resentment of his worm lot, decides it is time the child learn some truths about nature and nature-lovers.
It's not easy. Worm boy, having discovered a yucky hair in his supper mud, is in no mood to listen.
"I hate being a worm. We're the lowest of the low! Bottom of the food chain! Bird food! Fish bait! What kind of life is this, anyway? . . . All we ever do is crawl around in the stupid ground. Oh, and how can I forget? We eat dirt."
He sure sounds ungrateful. After all, his parents have tried. His mother is the sort of worm who works at making the house nice. Hell, she even puts knives and forks on the table, "despite the fact that none of them have arms". Dad is stern but fair. "Once upon a time," he begins, and tells worm boy the story of Harriet, a committed nature-lover who crashes her way through the forest misreading everything and interfering - like when she feeds the grey squirrels who are already ruining life for the weaker, timid red squirrels.
She tears the wild flowers, roots and all, out of the earth and eulogises Mother Nature as an artist, oblivious to the complicated reproductive battlefield before her and the flowers ruthlessly exploiting the insects to fertilise them. Then she tramps on, gushing over some cute little ants with their babies, not realising that these amazon ants are the slave traders of the insect world. They've stolen those babies from the ant hill they just raided. She thinks the birds are singing; they are in fact threatening each other, although some may be mating. The fawns aren't playing - they're learning survival tactics.
Up to this, old Harriet might seem harmless, if stupid, but mistaking a tortoise for a turtle she flings the poor land-dwelling reptile into the lake - where he drowns, murmuring: "Oh, the irony". She pushes away a slug and crushes more bugs in her hurry to kiss a toad she thinks is a frog.
On discovering a tiny bird lying on the forest floor, she puts the baby back in the nest beside the sibling that had already tried to kill it by pushing it out. Before old Harriet is back on the ground, Junior has already been re-evicted. Nature isn't romantic, it's survival of the fittest.
As expected, she misses the entire point of forest fires and as she passes by a lake in which someone abandoned their old car, she sees a snake about to eat a mouse. Harriet to the rescue. Having killed a snake, a rodent-eating predator, she kisses the mouse from which she catches a fatal disease and dies.
Father worm's and Larson's point is about the natural order of nature, the life cycle and its survival methods. Larson is not too keen on the environmentalists who idealise nature without respecting its laws and brutal efficiency, and should mind their own business. As for poor old Harriet: you got it, that hair. Well, it's about all that's left of her now. You see worms aren't really losers - they always win, in the end.
There's a Hair in My Dinner by Gary Larson is published by Little, Brown