From what we know of "primitive" societies, they seem to share a respect for their natural environment. This isn't necessarily because they are more virtuous than we are, but because exploiting the environment is hard work, and once tribal communities acquire what they need to survive, they tend to reduce efforts at extracting more. There is also less surplus wealth available to be invested in further extractive activities.

In spite of this, even the most unsophisticated hominids exert some pressure on the environment. They burn off rangeland to increase biodiversity, or selectively prey on megafauna, introduce domesticated plants and animals and practices like irrigation for agriculture. Long before the industrial revolution, Man had altered vast sections of the planet, usually without realizing he was doing so.

Still these changes occurred slowly, over generations, and tend to stabilize as the activities are selected for and mitigated by human and natural forces.

It was the introduction of alternative energy sources, such as fossil fuels, that gave us the ability to alter the landscape in short periods of time. And it was the shift from subsistence production, to production for trade, (which occurred much earlier) that gave us the motivation to do so.

A single man or community might be willing to use land management practices that favor sustainable exploitation of a renewable resource; that man or community is concerned about the long term value of that resource for future generations.

But once production becomes an end in itself, a means of accumulating abstract, generic wealth, the producers become essentially absentee landlords, collectivized administrative bureaucracies, with no real personal stake in the resource, who find it more profitable to find new areas and things to plunder than to expend effort and expense in preserving and developing what they already have.

We go from cultivation and husbandry--to mining.