"The Earth is entirely too fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in." -Robert Heinlein
I don't really have time to get too deeply into this, but this issue is the main reason that I think getting the human race off this planet and out into space - the asteroids, Mars, other solar systems - should be the number one priority of the industrialized world.
Part of the problem lies with wasting of resources, but not all of it. Neither the eco-weenies nor the thoughtless industrialists (NOT capitalists - China and the former Soviet Union are the two worst offenders) have the answer.
Much of the environmental hysteria is based on incorrect, or at best, selective science. For instance, the number of species that have gone extinct in the recorded history of mankind is about 0.0000001% of all the species that have gone extinct in the history of life. In other words, it's pretty much proportional to the amount of time recorded history represents geologically. The worst ecological transgressions of mankind are not a candle in the wind compared to the dozens or hundreds of mass die-offs that have occured before mankind even existed.
Out of the top 20 most vocal 'scientists' who are convinced that global warming will destroy the earth in the near future, about 16 were crying the same thing about a coming Ice Age twenty years ago.
Within the short 200 years of our industrial history, we have started using natural resources heavily, identified ways it is possible to overuse them, and already begun to solve the problems of overuse with ever-more-efficient production and consumption. Technology advances geometrically. Look at what is possible with the efficiency of current technology compared to that of even 50 years ago. Now think 50 years into the future - 50 years when the rate of technological advance is equivalent to at least 150 years at the old rate. Will the Earth be different? Of course. Will it be destroyed, unfit for human life? Certainly not.
Eco-hysteria is just as counterproductive as ruthless exploitation. Instead of allowing selective forestation to be spread over all the available area, reducing the maximum amount of stress placed on any given ecosystem, ecological insistence on closing vast portions of the available forest mean that other areas are totally devastated instead. Being more even-handed would allow the same amount of timber to be cut, but distibuted over a much wider area, meaning much less impact on any given location. For another example, the same people who scream about our dependence on fossil fuels are those who scream against nuclear power. Instead of allowing nuclear energy to support us while alternative generation methods are developed and made efficient, weaning us from oil dependency, they insist that the problem be solved immediately, somehow, without offering a viable solution. It's great to feel self-righteous, I guess, but where does that get us? Think 50 years in the future, not 500 years in the past.
And to add a philosophical angle to this question - what sense, what value, what point does the Earth serve, if not as a setting for mankind?
