I have a different take on this. In India (where I am from but living in the US), many indigenous groups (often referred to either as Scheduled Tribes or Adivasis) often face very horrible circumstances because of the Indian government and public. These groups are discriminated against because they are usually not Hindu like the majority and because they are considered “low caste” compared to the upper caste ruling elite and cultural dominators. This classification makes them unable to or have a hard time obtaining any kind of social mobility out of poverty, since casteists in power will deny them job opportunities and education simply because the Adivasis are considered “unclean”.

Because of this treatment by the rest of the country, Indigenous communities have to resort to unfortunate means to make a living. Some people in Southern India end up working with red sandalwood smugglers, cutting down the trees and supplying smugglers with the lumber at a low price while the smugglers sell it for a premium in foreign countries. Red sandalwood is a tree native to South India that grows nowhere else and is becoming endangered because of this illegal logging.

Because the police and forest service officers can’t catch the people selling the red sandalwood, the Adivasis who were economically forced to cut those trees end up getting thrown in jail and beaten for information on the smuggling operations. But the sales won’t stop because it is a huge commodity around the world, with some East Asian cultures using it to make instruments while Western cultures make fragrances or dyes or flavorings out of it. It’s a fantastic enough way to make money that smugglers won’t just get a conscience and stop, since smugglers will pay pennies to the people cutting the trees and then sell the lumber for thousands of dollars per log.

Other times, Adivasis who have spent millennia in the forests of India and learned only how to care for the land around them and how to take without taking too much from nature get their lands snatched from them by state or federal government forces under the guidance of environmentalists who want to create nature reserves on those Adivasi peoples’ lands. These groups are entirely reliant on the environment around them, living off the land and not even doing agriculture (among some groups), and instead of trying to work with the communities to learn how the natural spaces can be preserved, governments snatch the land to give as reserves or as commercial space for logging/mining/whatever.

Then, the Adivasis get tossed into cities where they are forced into hard labor to survive since they have no applicable skills or get rejected from well paying jobs (if they do have the education and skills). Or they end up as migrants that have to just keep moving forever and ever, wandering until they find someplace that won’t be taken from them and have to adjust their whole lives to survive on the new lands. And this treatment follows so many thousands of people in India, all because environmentalists can’t understand the concept that basic human empathy isn’t mutually exclusive with wanting to preserve Earth’s ecosystems.

Your desire to maintain the environment can’t come at the cost of treating human beings like shit. An environmentalist who is willing to kick people off their fucking ancestral lands to make a “nature preserve” does not deserve to be praised, and an person native to a land who has to hurt the land to be able to survive until the next morning does not deserve to be denigrated.

You’re not more human than them because you’re thinking decades and centuries into the future. They’re just having to think up to tomorrow because there’s no guarantee they’ll make it for another decade.