Conservation and the law of unintended consequences

Steven Den Beste comments on a paradox that should puzzle all conservation fundamentalists and 'noble savage' freaks: primitive peoples, who supposedly live in 'harmony' with Nature, were and are actually responsible for species extinction (through hunting for a variety of purposses), deforestation ('slash-and-burn' agriculture), and related phenomena on a pretty massive scale. Go read the whole thing --- it's quite short by Den Beste standards.
Oliver Kamm makes a related point, namely that the relation between economic development and pollution generally follows a "inverted-U"-type curve. That is, industrial development initially leads to increasing pollution, until a turnover point is reached, after which it decreases. Two main reasons: (a) more sophisticated technologies, which become affordable only in an already fairly developed economy, tend to be 'cleaner'; (b) People who have to struggle for the basics (food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare) generally will not pay attention to any environmental issues short of mega-disaster. As their standard of living rises to the point where they can start paying attention to 'quality of life' issues, they start exerting environmental pressures, starting with matters that concern their everyday lives (air pollution, urban congestion, garbage dumps near inhabited areas). Environmentalism in the Western sense, for instance, only took a foothold in Israel after its per-capita GNP started approaching Western levels in the 1990s.