Environmentalism for existentialists?

I came across an interview with a transhumanist who worried humans might squander our potential in our dutifulness to nature. First I found his ideas really uncomfortable, and then they made me wonder quite what sort of concern about the environment I have, if not his transhumanist kind but not the misanthropic kind either.

In this post I deal with ideas too big for me to capably handle. People who actually know about these things might shake their heads at me.

I have an Earth Day 2015 shirt, though
no Existence Day 2015 shirt to
complement it

I'm inclined to existentialism, and I hadn't really thought being environmentalist might be a problem for existentialists. I want to be both! But with further reflection, might the idea of cooperation with natural systems be at odds with "man has no nature?" I'm not denying that humans are animals, but to say man ought to occupy his proper role in the ecosystem seems kind of like insisting that man ought to obey his nature. It might not be an essence implanted by a divine force, but it's still an essence implanted by nature.

There's also the religiously-inspired view that we are put on Earth to be its stewards.

At the least, I don't think an existentialist can say we have a responsibility to function ecologically as nature intended, nor that we have a purpose among other members of the ecosystem to care for it all— I'll try to be careful about implying those things from now on.

Those sound like pretty significant environmentalist tenets to rule out. But there are probably reasons for fitting in with or taking care of nature other than having been meant to do so. I realize there are those environmentalists who advocate fitting in with nature in a low-impact way, and others who advocate co-existing by means of technology. It is indeed in our power to take care of nature from above if that's what we want, and occupying our original role in the ecosystem would surely be healthy for the ecosystem, in the same way that eating a diet for which we are naturally adapted would be healthy for us.

Whether or not man is a low-impact creature by nature, it's in his power to make himself so. And if that's the way man decides to go with this, each person should maybe live with the amount of impact they want everyone to have, which is what those ecological footprint calculators remind us in more practical terms when they tell us how many Earths it would take to support the world's population living in the same fashion as ourselves.

So it comes down to whether the environment is worth saving. It probably doesn't have the same 'freedom' that must be respected in the same way human freedom must be respected in existentialist ethics. And the environment doesn't feel, as I discussed in my forest fires post; it is individual animals that feel, so it's not like saving the environment is preventing everyone's pain. So I would think that if the environment is worth saving, which I tend to think it is, it would have to be because of its value to humans in some way, whether its many services to ourselves and to many of the organisms whose well-being we care for, its meaningfulness to us as life-giver, or its nigh-irreplaceable beauty.

—This post is just me figuring out how I feel. If you've come across this post looking for what position to take on the issue yourself, or actual scholarly discussion, you should really not take my word on these things!