> I guess that sort of response begs the question of if there is even anything greater to which humans owe some moral obligation; it sounds like you don't thing there is (though I apologize if this is reading more into your response than is actually there).
No worries, you did in fact read me correctly. I don't really think moral obligations exist at all, and I don't think anything has moral "authority" over anything else either. In my opinion we are all just acting on our own desires regarding ourselves and the state of the world in general, and any appeals to sacred ideas or abstract concepts or moral authorities or moral obligations is just an attempt to project our own desires out onto the world so we can pretend they are objective, to hide from ourselves the fact that everything we do and want is ultimately equally arbitrary and without justification or legitimation. E.g., I'm a moral nihilist, not even a moral relativist. So for me, it would be fine for environmentalists to say that they want to fight for environmental causes because they want to preserve humanity's standard of living and well-being, or because they want the environment to look and be treated a certain way because that's simply how they desire it and it makes them happy — and many environmentalists do phrase things in that way in which case I don't have a problem with them — but it annoys me when they try to project their desires outwards and pretend like they are objective.
> But I suppose it really depends on what you mean by the Earth being "fine" in the end. Obviously, as a large chunk of iron, silicates, oxygen, carbon, et al, the Earth will continue its journey through space for a long time to come. Some forms of life will certainly persist for a few hundred million years until such time as it becomes uninhabitable due to stellar evolution. But if we humans are to wreak our own destruction, we will be far from the first species we remove from this Earth; we've already set about a mass extinction that will register in the geographic record.
This is certainly a very fair point, and a good response to what I was saying! However, I think the thing we have to remember is that mass extinctions have happened before, so if humanity wipes itself out and takes a huge amount of species with it, that's still well within the range of things the Earth has experienced before, even if it is happening faster than it would usually have done. After all, the actions of humans themselves are actions that are part of nature, and so we can consider ourselves fucking up the environment and extincting ourselves and a bunch of other animals as part of a natural cycle of adaptation just like any other species over hunting and starving itself to extinction or something. We just weren't fit to survive, in that case. Furthermore, independent of how we define earth being fine, I do think my point about moral obligations still stands from my perspective. I don't want people to stop caring about the environment, and I'll support that care, and honestly if some people even really want to enforce their Christian ideas of purity and virginity onto the environment then very well — they can continue fighting for that, and I'll just simply ignore them, but at least be truthful!