The human environment is a lot better today than it ever was before. That era that you could catch and eat fish out of the river? It's the same era where medici

The human environment is a lot better today than it ever was before. That era that you could catch and eat fish out of the river? It's the same era where medicine was primitive (no antibiotics, no anesthetics, no chemotherapy), food was comparatively scarce (and most of the population toiled to produce it), etc. Everything was much harder to do, and life was generally shorter on top of all that. You say "before we populated the Midwest, you could actually catch fish..." But that presupposes that I exist in the first place. If you somehow repealed the industrial revolution, I and millions of other people would not exist. Without modern industry to transform it, the natural environment could not sustain the majority of people alive today. (So there might be lots of fish, but not many humans to catch and enjoy them.) Nature as you hold it does not represent any kind of ideal, because under that view, I (and nearly everything I hold dear), do not exist.