This is not correct. Picture a caterpiller eating all the leaves on a branch -- the only home it has ever known. That animal is eating it's environment and we

This is not correct. Picture a caterpiller eating all the leaves on a branch -- the only home it has ever known. That animal is eating it's environment and we might consider that irrational and unsustainable -- right up until the moment where it emerges from a cocoon and flies away to a new world.