An Iain Banks Culture Orbital is optimal, yes. But "perturbs" is a weasel word. You can 'perturb' the environment without destroying it, or you can 'perturb' it

An Iain Banks Culture Orbital is optimal, yes. But "perturbs" is a weasel word. You can 'perturb' the environment without destroying it, or you can 'perturb' it and leave a desolate wasteland where nothing grows. I'm hardly an environmentalist, but for a personal example, my home happens to have a well for drinking water, a perturbation of the environment that's perfectly sustainable, we use less water from this well than the watershed on my property restores to the aquifer. This is an acceptable perturbation IMO. That well is contaminated with polyfluoroalkyl substances from Scotchgard-treated leather scraps. It was too expensive to dispose of them safely, so Wolverine leather buried truckloads of the toxins in a local swamp. This 'perturbed' the environment, turning the place into a Superfund site, making the entire aquifer toxic for decades to come, and should not have been done. If underwater mining just makes a depression in the seafloor with little other effects, that's probably an OK perturbation. If it releases heavy metals into the water that travel with the currents for miles and miles, killing much of the wildlife, that's an unacceptable perturbation.