The reason my original argument works and your sarcasm doesn't is that extracting resources from the ground is much easier then putting them back in. Mining is

The reason my original argument works and your sarcasm doesn't is that extracting resources from the ground is much easier then putting them back in. Mining is easy - that's why we have gigantic mega mines. Building things from the mined materials is much harder - that's why we don't have anything resembling the same scale of buildings compared to the largest mines.