For thousands of years, humans enjoyed being able to pretty much take as much as they could carry out of the environment without too much effect on it (other than freak instances like Easter Island).

Fish until your little boat was full, run the buffalo off the cliff and take what you can carry, hand-harpoon as many whales as you can find, chop down trees until your back is sore, kill off the mammoths, farm the land until it croaks then move to the next chunk of uninhabited land. Burn it off if you have to.

There's a lot more where that came from, and for thousands of years, there was. Note that aboriginal and ancient people did this just as much as the Europeans did, and in a few places they did hit the wall. The Sahara was grazed to its present size. There used to be cedars in Lebanon.

Eventually, technology caught up with the natural resilience of many resources, and it became possible to actually use it up, or deplete it to the point where it didn't become useful any more. While regulations are not always a bad thing in these cases, in a free market, a failing resource increases in cost of harvest, eventually to the point where it isn't practical to harvest it any more. Usually, the latter point is reached long before extinction, but unfortunately subsidies and other non-market elements are often brought in to allow exploitation to continue even at an overall loss.

Here's just one article on the subject. Note the role of governments, foreign and domestic, putting a "thumb" on the market scales.

Bowser, in another post, has also pointed out the negative role of subsidies in U.S. resource management like forestry and mining. Brazil is another good (or bad) example of this.