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The natural environment is nice to look at, especially the bumpy parts, and I really appreciate the free supply of nitrogen, oxygen and argon. God help me, I do love the argon.

So I’m all in favor of protecting this stuff. But the standards of the environmentalist cause might be moving beyond my reach.

The other day here at work, we received an e-mail that included this note at the bottom (in green letters, naturally): “Please consider your environmental responsibility before printing this e-mail.” Not a problem. The only e-mails I print for my files have to do with a certain wealthy Nigerian widow who just might be my ticket to Easy Street.

Still, it seemed ominous, like finding a Post-it note on your desk that says, “Stop by the supervisor’s office ASAP. And bring your key card.”

Then came news about Congressman Leonard Boswell and his plan to give tax credits to people for planting certain trees and taking other steps to capture carbon dioxide. The guy used to fly helicopters in Vietnam, and now he’s worried about carbon sequestration. If you spot him studying the menu at an oxygen bar, don’t even tell me about it.

At Slate.com, a reader asked for advice about tree-planting – not which fertilizer to use, but which particular type of tree would be the best choice for soaking up carbon. (The answer: A full-grown tree.) Another Web site thinks I should fork over $600 to somebody out there somewhere for carbon credits to heat and cool my house.

Look, I freely admit that the Earth would be better off without me. In the grand scheme of things, my life has amounted to nothing more than wasted electricity and enough Mountain Dew cans to fill the Royal Gorge. It seems unfair, though, that the universe has started glaring at me and tapping its wristwatch.

Until recently I liked to think we rural Iowans were doing more than our part to help out. Ed Fallon and Al Gore together couldn’t piece together a PowerPoint that would do as much good as the trees and grass out at our place do every summer.

But do we expect you to send us a check every month for all of the carbon dioxide we soak up and the oxygen we produce? As a matter of fact, we do. (We thought we had been through this before, and you seemed to understand. What happened? Everybody else’s payment arrived two weeks ago.)

Anyway, things really turned serious when a Canadian researcher launched an attack on small gasoline engines. That’s it; that’s the end of my lifestyle. What’s the point of being outdoors if you’re not operating a small gasoline engine?

We mow, trim, prune, till and mow some more, and all along we thought we were helping the Earth look nice. We saw ourselves as the manicurist, or at least the guy who sweeps up the fingernail clippings, for Jasper County.

Now they tell us that, far from helping the Earth get a date, we’re turning it into the next Mars. Any day now, the police will pull up in a hybrid-electric squad car and haul us off to a LEED-certified jail.

Even when we try to cooperate, we do damage. The government told us to plant trees – and to control the weeds around them. Which means hours on a mower, which means lifelong respiratory problems for dozens of cute little bunny rabbits.

We drive back and forth to school and work, and that’s not helping matters. We burn firewood until the chickadees and cardinals are coated with soot.

But you know what? Mother Nature isn’t so perfect either. Sometimes, especially this winter, you can’t help thinking that her tears are all for show, and that there’s a nasty side to the old girl.

One morning last week, my four-wheel-drive, 5,000-pound pickup truck, guzzling fossil fuel like a 747 on takeoff, wasn’t enough to break through the demented witch’s snowdrifts. I was left stranded on a gravel road. The wind howled in a menacing fashion. No human beings were near to hear my sobs.

And I’m a threat to Ma Nature? Five more minutes, and she would have had me freeze-dried.

We Americans have cut back on our beloved V-8 engines, built wind turbines and started buying compact fluorescent light bulbs. We’re trying to get along.

Would it kill Mother Nature to back off a little?