For though we may be the Earth's gardeners, we are also its weeds.  And we won't get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role - that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.

Thoreau, and his many heirs among contemporary naturalists and radical environmentalists, assume that human culture is the problem, not the solution.  So they urge us to shed our anthropocentrism and learn to live among other species as equals.  This sounds like a fine, ecological idea, until you realize that the earth would be even worse off if we started behaving any more like animals than we already do.  The survival strategy of most species is to extend their dominion as far and as brutally as they can, until they run up against some equally brutal limit that checks their progress.  Isn't this exactly what we've been doing?