How David Attenborough and the catastrophist crew have humanity wrong

I've seen documentaries about how clever termites are in building passive solar into their mounds. Well, how about an animal that builds taller and higher than any termite, by orders of magnitude, sometimes using passive solar to keep their buildings cool and warm, but also mining and burning minerals hundreds of kilometres away to make electricity which it pipes down copper networks to run electric engines to compress gases and cool or warm air to a consistent temperature that a termite could only dream about.

What's more, unlike the drab conformity of termite mounds which come in only one design, and a limited range of colours, these buildings are many and varied, encoding aesthetic values – a concept barely known in the rest of the animal kingdom.

It goes on and on. Beavers build dams. And they are puny compared to even the most menial of ours. Lizards can grow a new tail. Well, not only is there prosthetics, but there are transplants, and who knows with further research into stem cells, perhaps regrowth that outmatches the lizard.

When our skin doesn't suit the environment, we have invented various forms of exodermises, be they clothes, or hats, or sometimes a thin layer of sunscreen. When at risk of injury, we have exoskeletons we can use, like the outer skin on an automobile, or a motorcycle helmet.

We augment our brains through storing knowledge, and heuristics, externally. This might be socially through the stories we tell ourselves, or mechanically, via symbols written down manually, printed, or increasingly contained in electronic libraries. Bees and ants may be able to communicate the location of food using dances or pheromones, but Google and GPS can do it for us much more easily and reliably.

Humans are an animal without a specific environment. We can exist in the coldest and the hottest parts of the planet. We can live under the water, and we can fly in the air. We can even venture into space.

Yet when someone is eaten by a shark someone will say "Well it is their environment". Nonsense it is our environment, and we shouldn't tolerate them eating us, anymore than they tolerate us eating them!

"Well," I've been told. "That might all be so, but we're making a mess of the place." It all depends on what you mean by a mess. If by mess you mean that we "modify" our environment, then I don't have a problem with that. Many species modify their environment.

Likewise, if you mean "destroy" I again don't have a problem with that. Many species destroy their environment, at least temporarily, and sometimes permanently. A red ant nest is not particularly hospitable to anything but red ants. Crown of Thorns starfish eat out large areas of reef. Weedy species, like gum trees, crowd out other species.

As Darwin pointed out 160 years ago, nature is all about competition, and some species adapt and survive, while others die out. We wouldn't be animals if we weren't displacing other species. And perhaps we will be the ones to die out, but if we are, that is part of a natural process, no better or worse than any other species. The rest of the planet will be here long after we're gone, and there is no ought in nature.

But this is where we are really exceptional as an animal. Unlike any other animal we are aware of, we have sufficient understanding of ourselves, and our environment, to notice, and measure change, and act to do something about it. And we do have a sense of ought, which means we can imagine purpose, a unique characteristic in the animal world.

Intelligence is the property which makes us worth studying, not apart from the animal kingdom, but as the ultimate realisation of it. And this is where Attenborough, and the environmental movement, goes intellectually schizophrenic, and Malthusian.