Why don't we care for the environment?

From E.O. Wilson's book The Future of Life:

The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense. Why do they think in this short-sighted way? The reason is simple: it is a hard-wired part of our Paleolithic heritage. For hundreds of millennia those who worked for short-term gain within a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring -- even when their collective striving left their chiefdoms and empires to crumble around them. The long view that might have saved their distant descendants required a vision and extended altruism instinctively difficult to marshal.

So there you have it. Why don't we care for the environment? Why don't we innately like learning about other people's cultures? The answer obviously has to do with a lack of altruism, but the reason why we as a species tend to look out only for ourselves is explained above by none other than the master, E.O. Wilson.

This theory also applies to all animals, not just Homo sapiens.