From gracious guests to looters and killers

I recently read somewhere in ancient India, whenever you took something from earth you said a prayer to Mother Earth that whatever you take grows back and enriches the biosphere. Just compare that with what is happening now. Human civilization has become a group of exploiters, digging ever deeper into earth to keep their greedy lifestyle going - from iron and oil to natural gas and even heat! Someone who is accustomed to the many economic theories and geological sciences will ask, what is wrong with that? The only trouble, they would argue, is that we may run out of many resources such as iron and oil, but we can either dig deeper or even spread our search to the neighbouring planets in the solar system.
The only problem with that argument is that we don't recognize earth and even the whole Universe as a living entity, which feels and reacts to changes around them. Such a shift in our viewpoint would mean a lot: for example, if we think of Earth as a living being much like us, it would follow that we are just robber barons trying to loot whatever she has. But if you advance the logic further, we could say we are staying on Mother Earth and enjoying whatever she offers us. In that case, we need to be gracious guests and not parasites. Because if we observe Nature, we can see that in most cases it is only a matter of time before an host organism gets tired of creatures in a mutualism, or symbiotic relationship, that turn parasites and kick them out.
We have turned parasites from guests, and we are plundering our host. But we forget that our host is immensely more powerful than all of us combined. If she just shakes her coat a bit violently, all of us will be no more! We are plundering on merrily as if there is no tomorrow. And we have created so-called sciences to backstop our greed. How long can this continue?
Every day, when I see the destruction around me cause in the name of development, I wonder where all this is going to end. I pray to the Himalayan masters, Divine Mother and Mother Earth to protect us from any calamities that are coming our way, and to show us the right path forward.