I can't help but think, more and more often; how destructive and short sighted human technology has become. I find it fascinating to watch how ingenious we are, but equally or more terrifying. The ocean is our single life sustaining force.
And then I was driving through Phoenix Arizona, looking out at the concrete landscape and concrete riverways, and realized just how right he was.
The parking-lot sprawl is appalling, and should be reversed, but California policies (like those in New York, Boston, etc.) have a lot to do with the growth of the Phoenix-to-Florida area.
The question is what will it take for us all, collectively, to refrain from using whatever is it hand for whatever we happen to desire. Out of respect for what?
Most of the time this kind of self restraint does not really seem conceivable. Instead, in debates like this, we’ll defer to emissions and sequestration data, without ever confronting what what it is that led us to blithely create and deploy machines like this and shrug off the damage.
Evolving to a new species entirely. What you described is one of the most fundamental attributes of homo sapiens.
I'd say the attitudes 50 or 100 years were dramatically more short sighted than today; destructiveness is bit debatable but lets not kid ourselves that the past was some gentle setting. Also take into account the fact that human population has quadrupled in the past 100ish years, and industrialized population growth has been even more dramatic; I don't know if you can say technology has become much more destructive when there are just so much more people partaking in that destruction.
So it might appear you are correct.