We were lucky in the ARPA/PARC communities to have both great funding, and the time to think things through (and even make mistakes that were kept from propagating to create bad defacto standards).
The question you are asking is really a societal one -- and about operations that are like strip mining and waste dumping. "Hunters and gatherers" (our genetic heritage) find fertile valleys, strip them dry and move on (this only works on a very small scale). "Civilization" is partly about learning how to overcome our dangerous atavistic tendencies through education and planning. It's what we should be about generally (and the CS part of it is just a symptom of a much larger much more dire situation we are in).