Why are phthalates bad? Because they're bad for humans is what Kristof has been saying-but we humans are but one species out of millions.

If the environmental movement is about anything, it must be about reversing the disastrous arrogance described philosophically as "human specialness" and Biblically as our "dominion over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

This purported dominion was what got us in the current mess in the first place: phthalates, global warming, species die-off-the whole modern ecological meltdown.

Let me digress for a moment. For most of the past two centuries, scientists have been trying to figure out what's so special about humans after all.

The first bit of bad news arrived when the Human Genome Project alerted us to the fact that we share 25 percent of our DNA with lettuce.

The real bad news arrived a few years later when Dartmouth neuroscientist Richard Granger published his excellent 'Big Brains' and filled us in on the rest of that answer.

"You can count the number of differences between humans and animals on both hands," Granger recently told me, "and none of those differences actually account for things like our language ability (which is a popular example trotted out to explain human specialness)."

According to Granger, the only real difference between humans and animals is brain size. Put it this way, If brains are computers than we have the same hardware and software as the rest of creation, ours just comes in a bigger box. And because of that bigger box, our neurons have more space to make more connections with other neurons. In the wiring diagram of the brain, we have more wires.

A bigger box, a few more wires. Literally, that's it. The source of our superpowers.

Actually, it's maybe even less than that.

Three million, two hundred thousand years ago lived the earliest bipedal hominids: Australopithecus afarensis. At four hundred cubic centimeters, these hominids had monkey brains and little to do about it. There are only so many calories available and like all animals, Australopithecus spent too much energy on digestion to be able to support any more grey matter.

But a million years later and about two million years ago, Homo erectus discovered cooking. Since heat hastens the release of amino acids from meat and kills off toxins in vegetables, with the advent of fire, Homo erectus broke that caloric restriction and the resulting nutrition spurred an onslaught of neurological growth.

So what is Kristof really saying? He's saying that humans are special because we learned to run two sticks together.

He's not saying we should ban toxic chemicals because they're destroying the soil, the water, the fish, the reptiles, the snakes, the small mammals, the large mammals for sure.

He's saying we should ban them because we learned the secret of friction and I can't be the only one uncomfortable with this logic.

The last paragraph in Kristof's most recent column reads: "If terrorists were putting phthalates in our drinking water, we would be galvanized to defend ourselves and to spend billions of dollars to ensure our safety. But the risks are just as serious if we're poisoning ourselves, and it's time for the Obama administration and Congress to show leadership in this area."

I agree completely-except that I would feel much better if the Obama administration and Congress were defending the whole of the environment, not just one species.

After all, when it comes to phthalates and other toxins and really, every other detail filed under the heading "Destroying the World," we-those very special creatures who learned to run two sticks together-are the terrorists.