Man is No Steward of the Earth
What a vain and ridiculous idea that modern man has, that he's a steward of the Earth, protector of all that is within it. He is the scourge of it.
Man is the most destructive species on the face of the planet. Man has the capacity to wipe out most of the world's living things with weapons of mass destruction, whether conventional, chemical or nuclear.
All living creatures alter their environment in order to survive, but man is unique in destroying the environment for luxury and profit. The world exists for man to despoil, create massive amounts of pollutants and do nothing to prevent the future consequences for these actions. For man, the world repairs itself, or will be looked after by a divine being that will act as clean-up nanny to the spoiled, rotten child defecating everywhere.
Man holds himself to the be steward of the Earth rather than a life form that lives within the bounds of what limited resources there are in the world. What drives man is the desire to control all those forces he was at the mercy of for so long, and his vengeance remains insatiable. Each generation looks at nature and thinks, "Here is a blank canvas that I can do what I want with, which be a testament to our genius." Each generation ignores the layers of what the previous generation has done, compounding the ruin of the world that is dominated by a species intent on despoiling it.
Imagine the millions (or it is billions? trillons?) of animals used as sacrifices to non-existent gods. I can easily understand the need to kill animals for food, tools, survival or other resources. I have no qualm with the tribes that killed whales and used their blubber to keep themselves warm. I have no issues with our hunter-gatherer ancestors who killed animals for necessity or domesticated them to use in the grand invention of agriculture. I have no problem with being able to buy poultry or beef, shrink-wrapped to perfection, from the grocery store. But weigh this against the needless killing of animals in ever more complicated religious rituals: a veritable of sea of blood to appease supernatural beings who must hate animals more than man does to see them murdered on a daily basis. Even as the Romans were overrunning Jerusalem in 70 CE, the priestly sacrifices continued right up to the very end, obviously to little effect.
The better part of civilized man's history is full of the needless killing of animals to satisfy the weird bloodlust of gods. Entire complicated eating systems have been worked out to kill animals in a manner that is supposed to receive divine approval and be "the least painful to animals." What a farce: slit any mammal's throat and it's going to feel pain. It's going to more than likely understand its life is in danger, if not about to end. And to date, no animal has ever telegraphed its gratitude for dying a quick death against a slow one.
Modern man needs to give up the vainglorious concept that he is a steward of the Earth, given the long and increasing destruction of the natural world by human rapacity for control of resources. Man needs to be honest with himself, rather than crowning himself a savior of a world he evolved in to save it from some outside agency's destructive impulses. Man needs to save himself.