So let me get this straight

[Random Boomer]

13. No, you didn't get that right

Humans capable of using fire and stone tools have been around for at least a million year. Modern homo sapiens is thought to be approximately 300,000 years old.

And throughout that 300,000 years we have systematically changed our environment and hunted various animals -- from the wooly mammoth and the sabertooth tiger to the dodo bird -- into extinction, or destroyed their habitat as our populations slowly but steadily grew. The ruins of ancient civilizations can be found in every habitable continent, and many (if not most) collapsed due to overshoot of their environment, not to mention wars, that left them vulnerable to the stresses of climate change.

The last hundred years or so have supercharged our destructive timeline, but they haven't changed it. Humans are doing damage on a global scale now instead of a regional scale, but it's not new behavior. This is who we are and what we do, and the thin layer of abstract conceptualization that sits on our animal brain got us into this mess, but doesn't know how to get us out of it.