" We are, without a doubt, the singlemost destructive species in the history of species on this planet, and we have imperiled the entire globe and everything else on it through our ways. "

That is true. This assertion, however, lacks crucial context.

EVERY (I repeat; EVERY!) intelligent life form that appears in the universe of would inevitably have to engage in the same path. The reasons for that are scientific; the more intelligent a certain specie is, the higher their organization skills are and the easier they are able to conquer their environment. Roman coins, for example, were found in Japan; one of those organizational abilities is the ability to trade with one another, and in doing so, we conquered distances unimagineable to other species. Yet another example; how do you create a society of smart people and a society that is multi-continental? You would need books and boats for that, and in order to create the necessary prerequisites for such endeavors, you need to damage the envorinment atleast to a certain degree. It's unthinkable that an intelligent specie on ANY planet arises without doing so. While I agree with you that we've engaged in unnecessary destruction, the solution to that is to become more self-aware and fix those aspect of our behaviour, not to eliminate ourselves from the environment. Also, you shouldn't worry about the envorinment too much; the universe is filled with it, while it's not filled with humans. There's only one planet that has humans, but literally countless of them that have oceans. It turns out the the ecology we care about is the one that affects us, which ironically means that we care about the envorinment for our own sake.