Basically cargo-culting until it risks our own skin.
I am filled with a deep sense of apology to everything we touch ... very few things we touch are truly better. Its a shame, and a gloomy, powerless conclusion.
I hope .. that we change, and transcend, soon.
Penicillium is a famous example of a fungus that makes toxins to destroy bacteria. On the other hand, the bacterial cultures in sourdough produce lactic acids which make the environment hostile to other, slower-growing things.
Then on a macro scale, look at beavers. They undertake massive ecological engineering for their own sake. They can wipe out countless other small animals and ground-nesting birds with the floods they cause.
It’s another kind of human exceptionalism to think we’re unique in altering the environment to suit ourselves at the expense of other species. We’re not. Perhaps the more distinguishing feature is that some of us actually care about it.
On the other hand, I like your comparison to other species. At an essential level, human culture has lot in common with ancestral life forms, like a culture of slime mould. There's collective behavior over generations, of which individuals are largely unaware.
"Exceptionalism" is an apt word, because not only do we treat other species as our resources, we do it to our own. Humanity eats its children. The fact that we're doing this knowingly, is why we carry shame, a guilty conscience in our collective psyche. We expect better of ourselves, because we should know better.
First of, yes, if you are starving you eat everything. You basically fall back to the level of tribe behavior or below.
However, two things:
One, we are very very far from needing to hunt here in the west. Second: I find it very strange that usually the people who reject the idea that we are coming from and still in many ways are animals are the ones arguing with that it is natural that we eat meat and treating animals like we often do even though it would not be a necessity. "It is how nature does it"
I on the other hand really hope that humans get away from nature (not in the way of disrespecting, disconnecting form it, but in the way nature handles most things like eg. violence, problem solving, cooperation, long term impact vs short term dopamine reward) and really evolves to be a totally different thing not by selection but by intellect, chosen behavior and technology.
I think the concept of anthropocene [0] is a useful one to put in perspective (in millions of years perspective) how out-of-place human activity is.
We are in the midst of an epoch in which Earth is experiencing vast changes due to Human activity, whole eco-systems are being crushed into mass exctinction. We continue to operate as if we are somehow detached from Nature.
You mention rituals and culture but to me it seems that the cronyism and corporate hunger of the extremely wealthy has an overbearing weight on this destruction, more than the average individual, mostly due to having the power to shape governments and policy.
My intuition is that the extremely wealthy continue to pursue wealth as a dopamine hit (it is not out of need at that level of wealth) regardless of ethical consequences. Perhaps, at some point in a more enlightned future, we will treat the Jeff Bezos of the world, as mental health patients in the sociopathic spectrum. Rather than people that have power due to wealth, they will be seen as sociopathic patients in need of help to dissociate wealth from self-worth.
For example, I do not think that "the wealthy" could make slavery fashionable in a medium, lets say two generations time frame.
This is because we have, at least in most places, accepted on a cultural and moral level that slavery is deeply wrong.
I do realize that you can argue with eg. cases in Bangladesh or children in African cobalt mining, but to bring back slavery in Europe or the US would take a massive cultural shift over generations.
I think that example is taking it off-topic from humans' environmental destruction.
Nevertheless, I hope you are aware that US for-profit prisons have a legal framework for institutionalized forced 'penal labour'. [0]
All you have to say is that these are 'bad' criminals and that they deserve it, and public inertia will allow for this to be accepted and slipped into the background. While for-profit prison cronies are allowed to rent out people to business at zero cost. This is not prison 'professional' rehabilitation this is forced labour.
Money shapes policy, outside that, policy only changes when an extremely high social threshold of indignation is reached.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/23/prison...
That sets the tone and the public support for the direct actions to come next. Have increasingly severe punishments for minor crimes. If any politicians speak out against it, run ads describing them as "weak on crime". If necessary, invent entirely new crimes to target the groups that you want to target.
Now you have a captive population, and public support for punishing them. Since the framework emphasizes individual actions and individual "debts", there is no backlash in having that population work while captive.
Slavery is deeply wrong, and exists in the US today through the prison system.