system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: The biggest mistake of environmentalists is telling people to "save the environment". Environmentalism is about saving ourselves.

Environmentalists (politically) made a huge miscalculation by framing their goal as humans vs. environment. As if there is a will, and a "comfortable" spot for the environment, and humans are disturbing it the way you might disturb your sleeping parent.

But this just isn't the reality. Environmental *change* of any kind is indisputably bad for many different species, but *the environment* is *everything*. Humans are *incapable* of destroying life on earth. We couldn't do it even if we tried with our nukes in a concerted effort... life itself is so much more monolithic than our society or species, and we don't really understand that point of view well because we don't have any predators, giving us the illusion that we *control* life.

But, back to the main point I'm making: this misunderstanding/paradigm that environmentalists subscribed to and pushed has framed environmentalism as altruism. For some people this attracts them to it, and makes them feel good about doing things like recycling. For other though it gives them the impression, because of the framing, that environmentalism is about doing things which are painful/expensive/difficult because they are "right".

That's a load of shit.

Environmentalism has exactly one goal: to prevent global changes to the Earth's environment that would destabilize our ability to run a functioning society. That's it.

The reason we worry about species going extinct is because 1) we don't understand much about how the species interacts with the systems we depend on and 2) some species we have direct use for. Really #1 is just "this species *might* be part of #2". Look at mosquitos. We have no use for them, and though it might be less than ideal from their perspective, the species that depend on mosquitos it would seem can find alternate sources. So we have seriously discussed *purposely* eradicating the species.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this, but whether it's right or wrong, it is not altruism. Environmentalism is and always has been about keeping the *entire world* in a state that we are comfortable with. To make things easy for us. Every single thing we want to do environmentally is, at its root, about reducing the pain/expense/difficulty that we cannot control.

By framing environmentalism as "saving" the environment, most people have the WRONG impression that we are somehow a threat to life itself, and it's through an act of altruistic restraint that we can redeem ourselves. But it's really that we are a threat to ourselves, and everything else is collateral damage.
gpt
We could have a functioning society with or without green spaces or preserved natural lands. 

And sure, while we ca't destroy all life, we can damage a significant part of it. We can destroy or fracture habitats. WE can remove alpha predators from ecosystems and we can over-fish till there is more plastic in the water than fish. 

I don't have to destroy your house to make it a pretty shitty place to live.