A great article, and I apologize for the length of this comment:
I think it's easier to understand anthropologically when we are also flexible in what a particular group of people experience as their "environment". Civilization itself (city-based society) is a system of isolation of humans from the environment that spawned us. We build walls (physical and virtual) between our bodies/minds and the resources that we need, then create artificial environments based on money or power within that isolated environment. No amount of education or cooperation within that isolated Petri dish will convince people that the "outside" is more important than their petroleum-fed sugar addictions coming from a child-exploiting advertisers who get a tax deduction for "creating jobs."
I'm basically arguing that modern humans are close to our environment: but it's the artificial environment, just as all previously collapsed civilizations were. The 'scare' stories about climate change won't matter until a significant number of the group lose the perception that society can continue as it is (blind extractive existence) through experiencing serial disasters.
The story of the Garden of Eden is important in that it tells how people made a choice to not follow the rules of the garden. God isn't the important part: failing to maintain the garden is. Yet, some clever marketing makes everyone a pawn in the patriarchal system of aristocracy that teaches children to follow 'authority', even when authority is an idiot war god who can't see that if you keep all of the offspring to pay tribute, you run out of barn space and feed, and have to start a war to reduce populations. Peace lovers (and pro-life activists) exacerbate the existential circumstances with good intentions.
Cities are CAFOs devised by aristocrats.
In order to change that paradigm, the flow of wealth and useful work has to be reversed from our current economic models, so that humans contribute more real net usefulness to the planet than they take from it, regardless of the living arrangement.
The general globalized existence of contemporary humans, along with tools of science could make it happen, but the world doesn't want to be saved: it wants to get richer. (More importantly, it doesn't want to do the work after being accustomed to buying 100 manhours of work for 4 dollars at a gas station).
Making the planet richer (degrowth, regenerative agriculture, planned societies of natural philosophy) is just not in the 'civilized' corporate (limited liability) cards. Our entire economic system is based on placing bets on the competitive moral turpitude of the rich trying to get richer and enslaving our future selves (credit) to work for them.
All overhead of civilization should be visible at the only decision point that matters: the checkouts. All people should be treated equally valid to the future of a place (UBI).
The part about evolution that hindsight too often ignores is the failed branches. Humanity can be traced back to certain bottlenecks when a few survivors managed to not die. Those bottlenecks usually favored shared beliefs, aggressiveness and bullying. Civilization takes it to extremes so that we have evolved to not know the difference between bullies and leaders, but science has managed to feed and sustain 8 billion without a shared survival purpose: only blind desire to use resources and compete for power, encouraged by aggressive bullies for profit. "Reason's got nuthin' to do with it." -Mister Gibbs, "Pirates of the Caribbean"
"You didn't notice that I was trying to shake hands with a car? I thought cars were the dominant species." -Ford Prefect, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
