Post-Christian Environmentalists

“Many Europeans, as well as leftists in America,” Dr. Silver says, “have rejected the traditional Christian God and replaced it with a post-Christian goddess of Mother Nature and a modified Christian eschatology. It isn’t a coherent belief system. It might or might not incorporate New Age thinking. But deep down, there’s a view that humans shouldn’t be tampering with the natural world.”

Taken from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/science/20tier.html

Although the article is not about environmentalism, the statement above makes (in my opinion) a good description of their belief system. For many far-left environmentalists, it's not just about developing a sustainable economy so that we're not dependent on non-renewable resources. They seem to want no human modification of the environment, which is fundamentally at odds with any measure of prosperity above what animals are capable of. Given this belief system, would it have been best if humans had never existed?