> The "Earth mother" or whatever the fuck will be fine, we are doing all of this for ourselves and our own standards of living and aesthetic values and nothing more, so why pretend otherwise?

I consider myself very much on the side of "environmental protection", but it's always been clear to me that our goal is protect humanity, and secondarily, other animal species (and that means protecting the plant species). Why else would we be doing this? I don't think anyone is pretending otherwise other than a few fringe people (there are always some fringe people no matter which way you look).