The issue of environmental hazards might just be the most complicated one there is. Nobody wants to hear the truth. That includes people who want to save the environment. So far, economics has shitty explanations for how to deal with the problem, but so does everything else.

Probably what's really going on in civilization is a race between ecological destruction and technological advancement. There is no feasible way whatsoever for people to live the kind of lives they want without destroying the environment, but at a certain point, this will become our own destruction. That's when technology comes in. At some point in the future, we should be able to live rather lush lives that don't depend on ecological deterioration, but that time could only come with enough technological advancement, and the only way we know of that improves tech advancement is through capitalism. It's in the name "capitalism" even i.e. using resources to make more resources.

We are likely stuck in a situation where we have to destroy the environment in order to save the species, because the only long-lasting conservation will come at the hands of technology, and the creation of that technology depends on use of environmental resources. A similar analogy could be how we have to experiment on animals in order to significantly advance medicine