You know Easter Island? The place with the huge stone heads? When James Cook first arrived in 1774, he found an island with plenty of pasture and a population of only 700 with a few canoes created from driftwood. That is completely different from when people first settled there a few centuries earlier. It was originally full of trees and plenty of wildlife. However the people who first populated it introduced rats, which killed off plenty of the native fauna, and they themselves practiced a form of slash-and-burn agriculture, which destroyed all the trees until there were none left. From that day they had no firewood, no method to create canoes and leave the island, and even more of the animal population left or died out thanks to the forest disappearing. From then on, society collapsed and there was plenty of warfare as people fought for whatever few resources that were left. That's why there were only a few hundred left when Cook arrived even though there were thousands previously; they were killed and the population couldn't rise to its previous levels without the resources.

I use Easter Island as an example of how we're all ecologically destructive, not just modern civilization. Although I agree industrialization and advanced agricultural techniques are able to increase the speed of devastation, even the most primitive societies were environmentally ruinous. Occasionally I hear how it's better to return to a simpler time, but how much simpler can you get than a bunch of Stone Age people on canoes landing on an island? They managed to fuck it up too. And I can list plenty of Native American societies who did similar things — annihilation of species, desertification of land — regardless of what Pocahontas tried to say about them. Every animal on earth is like this: horses graze until the land is bare, rabbits just fuck everything up, rats will consume everything in their path. Rather than sneer at our own shortcomings, it's amazing that we humans are the only ones on earth who realize the consequences of our actions.