That actually sums up my view pretty accurately as well. I’ve tried to look back and see where the overall path could have changed. Even if you were to hypothetically remove oil from existence, we were still well on our way to wiping out whales and other fatty sea mammals for the same purposes.

As to the evolutionary pressures leading to cutthroat species, yeah I think that’s exactly what it is. By the time a world altering species can begin to see beyond itself and think holistically about its environment it has already done so much damage.

Random tangent- I highly recommend the Children of Time trilogy from Adrian Tchaikovsky if you’re into sci fi. I describe it as evolutionary biology sci fi, and eventually it goes into kind of a ‘what is consciousness/what is living’ bend. Took a little to get used to the structure of the first book, but man that first one especially I dug.

I’ve always figured that if one day there is a star trek like civilization cruising the galaxy, they’ll come up on our dead planet, see all the shit floating around and say something insightful about the great filter and blip on out of there.

You’d think with humanity’s obsession with killing anything that tries to live here, we’d be taking more notes. We’re catching up though.