Space colonies have had their appeal from people like Tsiolkovski, Bernal, Krafft Ehricke, and O'Neill.
For a while, O'Neill even seduced envirnmentalists by suggesting huge colonies would be covered with grass, trees, rivers, a Provence landscape. But then, the reality showed up differently: a colony would first look like a submarine, with grease, oil, smells, tubes, metal, rust, leaks, etc...Not very appetizing unless you like to fiddle with all that.
Those stations would be not too far from the Earth and an industry would build huge solar power satellites and feed our planet with renewable energy. But in the 70's, no one knew the Shuttle wouldn't turn up what it was supposed to be and those SSPS's were far too technologically challenging for our times.

Here's an interesting and thought provoking point of view about colonization of space or the Moon or Mars.

And yet, knowing all this, the argument for Mars is to stay there, otherwise it's flag and footprints.
Meanwhile, I wonder how the Mars Society could do better than the L5 Society.

We're still a long way, if ever, before humans go to Mars unless there's a political motivation.

Raoul