Quote Originally Posted by TurnyBright
In my opinion, you're using adjectives that carry a negative connotation for a phenomenon that is a neutral occurrence. How can something that is an "environment," with all the multitude of different meanings that word has, ever be "hurt?" It can only be changed. It could be changed to consist of less living things (usually by other living things), it could be changed in color or atmospheric composition, or it could be changed in such a way that life (as we know it, obviously) is extinguished, and thus it would cease to be an ecosystem.

This is a thoroughly natural process that has always gone on. Dinosaurs may have been killed by a vast geological event, or a particular bacterium, or maybe they all tripped and hit their head. Whatever happened, they're all dead and no one wastes tears over them. All things are transitory, and I firmly believe that the human race will eventually (or momentarily) cause our environment to be so altered that the physical bodies of humans and other life-forms on earth can no longer live. I don't view this as the "destruction" of the environment, merely as our species naturally running it's course. Our planet running it's natural course.

Even if the earth became a burned-out shell where no earthly life could live for 100 trillion years, that would be no better or worse than the way it is now. Thinking of it, I can't think of anything that carries connotation of "good" or "bad" that actually persists through time but the concept of "beauty." I believe that beauty can be found in anything, and so as long as know that beauty will persist SOMEWHERE even if I'm not around to gawk at it, that's good enough for me.
I know what you are saying, but I think you are being a bit philosophical about something that is also a very practical matter, and taking an objective point of view about something that also has a subjective point of view.

On a geologic scale, it may not matter whether overpopulation and pollution make a world in which we all die or wish we were dead. But since most of us are neither rocks nor glaciers, we don't take that perspective. For most of us, if the ecosystem that supports us collapsed and we started to die of starvation or disease, and everything we knew and loved in life started to collapse, we would say that is "bad." It's great for you that you can step outside of that and say, "all things are transitory," but for most people, if they had to go through that, they would think it was "bad."

For me, the question is whether we are making a world we want to have or not. When I worry about overpopulation and pollution, I don't think so much about whether our existence really matters in the long run. I think more about whether I'll be able to enjoy good food for the rest of my life and whether future generations will be able to do the same. It might not matter to the universe as a whole, or to you, but it does matter to most people.