This is a good article that shows the debate between those who want to save nature for its own sake and those who just think it’s a dumb idea for humans to mess up the planet where they live.  The author (Johann Hari) traces the tension back to the Romantics v. Enlightenment, and I think you can see a similar tension in Catholic environmental work (I wrote about this for America).

American environmentalism was midwifed into the world by a romantic, Henry David Thoreau. His decision to live for two years, two months, and two days alone in the woods—to hear the earth—has become part of American mythology. He scorned the supposed inauthenticity of the city and its technologies: Appalled, he said, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. This tendency ripples on through the following centuries of environmentalism as an ache and a lodestar. You don’t have to spend long among the lead-belching factory-cities of China—or on a snarled-up freeway in Los Angeles—to feel the tug of these back-to-the-trees tropes.

McKibben includes a close-to-parody piece by Alice Walker taking this tendency to its logical extreme. As part of an “intense dialogue” with them, she “feels” the trees angrily shout: “That we are alive and have feelings means nothing to you!” The trees tell her Americans should return to being a hunter-gatherer society: “The new way to exist on the Earth may well be the ancient way of the steadfast lovers of this particular land,” they mutter through their leaves.