If we REALLY understood it then maybe we would stop doing it. My bet is that we don't really get it.
I sometimes think that it is a valid mental model to think of us as not much different from ants in a hive who think they possess more control and freedom than they do
I think it is the opposite. We are different from ants, and have a lot of control and freedom, so we know that if others will not make the sacrifice, why should we?
In an ant colony, I imagine the orders are being given top down and they do not think about what others are or are not sacrificing.
I'm not a biologist though and also have no experience in what it's like to be a bee or ant
Take our main coordination mechanism - the market. For all that's been said and written about it, it's still basically gradient descent. As greedy as it gets - in the technical sense. It's what's been driving the development of humanity ever since we formed societies. It's what controls the behavior of everyone.
We may think we're smart and have principles - and we do. But the reality still is, everyone is spending most of their lives trying to align themselves to exploit the local economic gradient - because that's how individuals get more of what they want, and less of what they don't want. Nobody is strong enough to single-handedly reshape the larger economic gradient. So while individually, we play complex games, at macro scale, we're not all that different from slime molds or fungal growths.
Maybe one day our economy grows so sophisticated it'll gain sentience. But that doesn't necessarily mean things will get better - much like an individual human being sentient doesn't mean their cells are happy.
Although conservation probably has more to do with reality looking different depending on your own local observations, to a Brazilian cattle rancher or Indonesian logger at the frontlines of the biodiversity crisis, things look different. For a consumer of those goods and materials, they likely don’t realize the connection.
If, on the other hand, you independently decide to stop driving your car because you know the world is getting smothered with carbon dioxide, but see people daily driving modified diesel pickups belching smoke into the sky, you're going to feel a bit like you're pissing in the wind even trying.