Because the environment of nature was visited by modern mankind within relatively comfortable mechanized and electro-magnetic transportation supported by a tool kit of artificial, globally produced products the continuing conversion of the ecosphere into a dysfunctional for human and wildlife entropic form was acceptable by degrees and consequently disregarded as consumers products were created in the process named economy.
Social reality prioritizing comfort blinded consumers to union-corporatist costs to humanity in degrading the natural environment. They did not develop methods to utilize the natural environment in a way that would not be degrading and were without concerns for original sin and the lack of humility and neighborliness. Cost factors of competition manufacturing lowest cost consumer products eliminated eco-habitat and exterminated species as an externality to insider profit margins.
Mankind seeks control over each other both for defensive and sadistic purposes. In the world the development of control and technology occur simultaneously. While technology and comfort advance freedom may or may not exist. Some intelligent and creative individuals innovate new technology and appreciate the miracle of the existence of the natural environment, of blue skies and cumulus clouds within the abyssal void of spacetime. Fabulous hydrogen and oxygen water and biosphere upon crustal plates moving on slow convection thermal currents from the heat within the molten, radioactive inner Earth over billions of years let greedy impulse organisms with skewed value theories exist- some with reverence for God and some without.
If the majority of humanity has an understanding of the natural history of the Earth they lack an aesthetic, teleological appreciation for the divine mechanics of it instead concentrating upon controlling one another oppressively and manufacturing control over the whole Y'Earth. The wicked on Y'Earth and beyond seek to rule reality itself with enslaved scientists and technology. The untamed free wilderness is inherently discomforting to humanity, as it is a reminder of freedom from social power and corruption.
An inability to appreciate the terminator line of control and non-control between humanity and the natural environment moves humanity to destroy those aspects of the natural world on which it's own well-being rests. In failing to comprehend the basic dependence of human life upon the natural environment and in assuming an ability for humanity to be existentially self-standing with a bootstrap creation of the grounds of their own existence with classical hubris the political ability to conserve the ecosphere is defeated by the political imperative to control, and destroy the natural environment.
The destruction may be given a use-truth false label such as 'creative destruction', or even reclamation or construction yet control of the natural environment and transformation of it into barrenness with extirpated natural ecosphere is inevitable if the determination to pursue less than full employment, empowerment of the state over the mind and economic liberty of citizens, far too low of taxes on the middle class and rich and ransacking of the environment continues.