The idea in a nutshell: Over the past 4.5 billion years the Earth has dealt with catastrophes of over 90% extinction rates and recovered––even if we tried, nothing modern civilization could do to the environment could compare. If we screw up now, in a few million years there will be thousands of new species around to fill the niches of anything we regretfully take with us on our way out, and there will still be about 5 billion years left for worse things to happen and recover from before sun goes nova and swallows the planet in a big ball of fire.
The one thing that won't recover when we screw up, is us. So the point of environmentalism isn't about saving the Earth at all. The Earth will do just fine; the climate will recover, whales will be replaced by these guys. The point of environmentalism is self preservation. Modern human civilization needs the environment and it's resources to be stable in order to survive. We ruin it, we die. That's a pretty epic fail. Seems simple enough, but we sometimes lose sight of this or think environmentalism is more about keeping the Earth looking pretty and feeling good about ourselves as we save whales. That's clearly the wrong attitude, because khargras will be more fun, anyway. But we must do what we can to survive long enough to enjoy them.
And here's another post he did about how D&D got him his job!
