Modern civilization has detached itself from Nature's real needs and resources by using dollar bills for insulation. We no longer can see and feel anything except through the muffling fluffyness of "The Economy", so what we do feel is mostly a numbness or apathy toward the land and the people closest to it while hanging on every word of those furthest from it. We don't live long enough to fully grasp how we are affecting the world with a system that extracts fuel mostly to waste it and dump things in landfills. What's a city but a vertical landfill built with little green papers?

Nature is just starting its batting practice and we keep hearing people say "If we do X we can stop Y", but the whole history of civilization has been doing Y and keeping people from thinking about X.