what causes the environment to be destroyed?

[GARY H]

The "environment" of the earth is not being destroyed, it is being changed. The earth will continue to exist and have an environment long after humans are gone. From the limited perspective of certain species, yes the environment has been changed and is continuing to change in ways that are not good for those species. Humans are having a huge impact on the environment because there are so many of us and because we involve a lot of the environment in what we do. There are many more individual grass plants and bacteria and ants and rats and krill, etc than individual humans but those other living things do not impact the earth's environment in the way humans do. One aspect of this is that, for example, bacteria have been around for a very very long time compared to how long humans have been around. I would guess that, when bacteria first appeared on earth, they probably had a huge impact on the global environment. Over the billions of years that bacteria have existed, the earth and the bacteria have reached a "steady state". Humans have not reached that "steady state" and our population is growing exponentially.

From the point of view of some species, humans have been good for the environment, consider dogs, cats, rats, cockroaches, etc.