How did we get in this mess?

Joke from the old USSR: "Under capitalism, man exploits man.  Under communism, it's just the opposite."

Human cultures that have historically been more or less in balance with their natural surroundings tend to endure until their ecosystem changes - possibly through their own actions - or until they are conquered and decimated by foreign peoples with superior technology and a believed mission to exploit whatever resources, including other people, they may find.

Put more simply: Live and let live people tend to get overwhelmed by exploit, extract and enslave type of people....

The present day modern industrial nations have all played and continue to play to varying degrees the "game" of exploitation.  They just weren't - we just weren't - interested in reaching a state of balance with the rest of nature.  That would have been unthinkable in cultures where growth for growth's sake is one of the guiding principles.

Didn't we know this was crazy?  Didn't we know we were going to severely damage the earth's environment, disrupt almost all the ecosystems, including the ones we ourselves need to survive?  No, not really.  We always thought that some sort of technical fix or other would save us and let us keep growing...   The vast majority of the human race who has lived in a "modern" advancing society thought this way and still do.  And the ones who knew, the ones like the citizens of the First Nations of the Americas?  Mostly wiped out.  And ecologists like Aldo Leopold and Howard Odum?  Ignored and marginalized for the most part.

Buy why?  Didn't we care what they said?  Did we listen and then conclude that they must be wrong?  No... we may have heard but we didn't really listen.  Why not?  Because we chose to hold ourselves above and apart the rest of nature.  We placed artificial boundaries between ourselves and the natural world that makes our lives possible.  Ultimately, we embraced a dangerous ideology, a deviant spirituality.  We convinced ourselves that we were better than all other life on earth because we had been so successful - so far - at molding life on earth to our own personal, exploitative desires.  We didn't know that when we choose live of exploitation that we exploit ourselves most of all.

And those who did know better, those who knew all along that this approach was radically wrongheaded, that the only way to survive in the long term was to be in balance with the ecosystems where we hoped to live?  They tried, but there were too many of us (and we were quite arrogant, quite stubborn, quite well armed) and far too few of them.  And so they often isolated themselves in hopes that we would eventually seek out their knowledge.  There are some hints that in the presence of the global dangers we are facing, more of "our" people are starting to do just that.  Will it be in time to make a difference?