Meaning no offense, are you asking that as a serious question? Or is it tongue in cheek and I'm simply not seeing the joke?
No offense taken. It's a fair question. I'm guessing the reason you're asking the question is that you're thinking of the excesses, whose significance has been magnified manyfold by our greens, and trumpeted in our media.
I've lived in the Colorado Springs, Colorado area since the mid sixties. The Rocky Mountain Front Range is just to the west of us. At the eastern edge of the range, fairly close to the city, is a huge "scar on the mountain" -- a quarry out of which came a large part of the material from which the city was built. In the sixties, seventies and early eighties most people in the city were horrified by the scar. But in the middle eighties the quarry closed down, and the company that owned it began planting trees and other vegetation on the slope of the scar. Nowadays if you look up at the scar you can see that the slope of the mountain has been changed, but the "scar" itself has turned green. In another hundred years no one will even notice that there's a scar.
Over the years I've had conversations about the scar with my youngest son, who's an environmental engineer with a large, very successful firm he started from scratch in the eighties. When I'd complain about the scar, he'd agree that it was an eyesore that detracted from the attractiveness of this wonderfully beautiful area, but he'd also talk about the economics of building the city. Without the quarry the history of the city would have been very different and much less desirable for the people who live here.
The bottom line is that unless we continued being hunters and gatherers, we had to make some changes, and often undesirable changes to the environment. If you're going to farm you have to cut down the trees, displace all those beautiful boulders, and flatten the land. If you're going to build cities, the materials have to come from somewhere. In general we do what we have to do. Yes, there are excesses, but they're the exception rather than the rule. We all should condemn the excesses but we shouldn't condemn the system itself. We can't live without it.
