When you’re as successful as he is you can say anything you want to say:
Nature doesn’t need people. People need nature. Nature and this planet would survive easily, beautifully without the pressure of the human animal and it would be…it would survive just fine. Human beings need nature. Nature doesn’t need human beings.
I understand his point but I think he’s on stronger ground arguing that he cares about the future he’ll leave his children. The sort of reductive analysis he closes with has its limits. There’s a strain of environmentalism that views humanity as a burden the planet is forced to endure. Ford seems to walk right up to that line here.
Humanity may indeed be a burden on natural resources but it’s also arguably nature’s greatest achievement, i.e. the self-aware being is possibly the rarest commodity in the universe. And it’s no stretch to say that this is how most of us, Harrison Ford included, live our lives most of the time. The universe may one day go on spinning without us but it will be a poorer place for it. I’d prefer the people who spend their free time worrying about such things to keep that fact front and center.
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