They damage in different ways. Tribes of poor people in Java killed all the tigers. Tribes of poor people across Persia (broadly speaking) wiped out the Caspian tiger. Poor people were wiping out the Siberian Tiger until education set in and numbers are starting to increase. Poor people were wiping out tigers in India at alarming rates until education and a slight increase in wealth are seeing numbers increase.
Indonesian tribes were wiping out alarming numbers of birds. We overfish, but fish populations are capable of some pretty dramatic recovery. Nature itself is a machine that can recover from near anything short of total cataclysm.
What we are perhaps talking about is the processes and by products of industrialization. Thinking leads the way. It was taught to me in Geography that the trans-Alaskan pipeline would have made Caribou migration impossible. Education solved that. And we mustn't ignore what interventions in invention we can produce.
Why did they do that? To sell to the richer people in more developed countries. Tiger and big cat parts for medicine in SE Asia/China, Bird of Paradise feathers to Europeans and North Americans in the 19th century. Education is certainly important, but lets not forget that a lot of the time the demand is from "educated" people in rich countries.
3 types of people in this thread:
Nihilists: Kill humans by plague/disease/stop having children (as long as it's someone else dying and not me types)
Optimists: People who know education can solve almost anything (it was impossible to cross the Atlantic just a hundred years ago other than by a long slow process)
Meh: I'll carry on as usual
1 and 3 are wrong. Education and by extension ingenuity can overcome. 1 may need some sensible thought but we could reduce world population down to 14,000 in less than 600years by all having one child.
The problem with your argument is always going to be the means: Who pays, at what price, why them and how it will be achieved, and what about everyone else especially those doing the imposing?
Or two, the "optimists" are just another "meh, I'll carry on as usual". The only difference between two and three is that two believes technology will change things, so they don't have to do anything.*
And erm... there's a small amount of difference between suggesting education and a gradual decline in birth rate/population and suggesting we should kill people that are already alive...
Probably worth mentioning that the reason we have so many "immigrants" in the developed world is because population replacement rate is below 2 in in a lot of those countries. The only reason populations are not going down in much of Western Europe, for example, is because of the immigrants arriving from other locations. Japan is taking the opposite approach, no immigration but trying desperately to persuade people to have more kids. The thing you are advocating the most (education) is the thing that is making birth rated decline.
Education and increased standards of living in Africa and Asia will naturally reduce birth rate and, all things being equal, create a natural population decline.
*Technology is one of the reasons we're in this mess in the first place. Things like better intensive farming techniques, better medication and the ability to build bigger and bigger things (dams, roads etc) are what is causing the massive population increase in places like Africa in the first place. It did the same in Europe in the 19th century.
