As I see it being sad at 'the world' is a waste of time. It is not the world's fault that it is being raped by mankind and some of the other life-forms that inhabit its land and sea-surface. But it is not the techne nor the technicians that we should rail against, but humanity in general [aside that is for people like you and I and many others who are appalled at this vandalism.]

Man floods a valley or redirects a river for his own purposes. The elephant uproots plants and bushes, whilst other fauna chew at and remove the bark of trees and by doing so kill them. By and large we do not criticise the animals for the destruction of nature they cause, nor do we criticise the bindweed which chokes the orchid. What man is doing - his violence, his despoilation, his reification - is natural to man, for man is a natural violater, a natural despoiler, a natural reifier.

If there is anything to be sad about it is humankind, not 'the insensate world,' nor is it the animals which crap in our freshwater ponds towards which we should attribute our angst. We should keep things in perspective. Which is worst, a suicide bomber killing 50 people [who are also a part of 'phusis'] and destroying half of a historic mosque, the escape of chemicals in India poisoning, killing and maiming thousands, or the 'act of nature' or 'God,' which is a tsunami killing thousands and destroying the landscape for thousands of square miles?

In my opinion the worst of the major acts of pollution and major environmental damage are caused by particularly greedy and obnoxious people, but the masses who remain quiescent and let it all happen are in a way similarly guilty. Most people only demonstrate about environmental vandalism if it happens on their own doorstep and the moon is far away. Those who DO demonstrate against such things need to be praised and not vilified as they are often treated by the media - particularly if the media magnates involved have financial stakes in developments which they often do.

As far as the moon is concerned - it is already a dead world, so does it REALLY matter if they strip-mine certain areas of its surface. We can't even see it anyway without the assistance of high-powered telescopes or camera-bearing satellites? If one is to be sad - better to be sad at the propensity of man to reify and to objectify moral and intellectual concepts, principles, actions and ideas as encumbering dross and to take them and hold to them as absolutes. 'Reification,' then, is what one should be sad about if one must be, and it is indeed sad that those who are prone to sadness are usually those sadsacks who are the worst reifiers of what is unreal into a putative
'reality' - which may be classified as follows:

There is no such thing as 'Being.' Yes I KNOW the so-called 'continental philosophers'  never make the claim that: 'Being' actually exists, but transcendentalists often talk about and introduce the concept AS IF IT DID and 'concepts' do not exist either - only the human conceptualiser exists.

     The existential claim: 'Field-mice exist,' for example, can be understood as making the instantiation claim: ''The concept fieldmouse is instantiated.' Accordingly, the sentence does not predicate the existence of individual fieldmice; it predicates the instantiation of the concept 'fieldmouse.'

     Regarding negative general existentials which is exactly what the transcendentalists always claim when they deny the actual existence of 'Being' and say: 'Being does not exist.' they generate a true sentence that cannot possibly be about 'Being,' for the simple reason that as they continually claim: 'There isn't any 'Being.' On a generous syntactic analysis of the claim by assigning a constituent structure to the sentence (parsing) it is about the concept 'Being', and it says of this concept 'Being' - that it has no instances.

    Given the truth of the sentence: 'Being' does not exist,' 'Being' cannot be taken as naming 'Being.' Since 'Being' has meaning, imparting as it does to the meaning of the true sentence, 'Being does not exist,' and since 'Being' lacks a nominatum, the meaning of 'Being' is not realised by its reference: it retains a sense whether or not it has a referent. So, with Lord Russell we may analyse 'Being does not exist' as:

     What we have accomplished in fact,  is to treat the abstract nominal 'Being'' as a predicate and read the negative general existential claim as a denial that this predicate applies to anything.


       But do not be sad and don't lose hope - 'The Aunt Sally Man' commeth!

When I was a lad in Liverpool, an old man with a wheelbarrow used to come round the streets selling 'Aunt Sally' [a caustic liquid soap which the women used to wash their steps] 'Aunt Salleeeee! he would cry, 'Aunt Salleeeeee! The Aunt Sally was used with an oblong, brick-like, abrasive stone, for the working-class women of those days used to scrub their front steps right down to the edge of the pavement. The poor ones who could not afford the 'step-stone' used to pinch cobs of sandstone from the spoil of recently dug graves in the local cemetery.

Some of these poorer woman used to ask him if they could have some Aunt Sally 'on tick' ['on account' until his next visit]

It was said that he had experienced terrible scenes of slaughter in hand to hand combat in the trenches of WW1, and had in that way got his priorities right.

You would, and I say this not unkindly, have benefited too if you had met 'The Aunt Sally Man,' and he might have helped you to get your own priorities in order of importance. Was he some natural philosopher down on his luck? A failed academic perhaps bitterly expounding his nominalism as a ontological excuse for withholding credit? Whoever he was he was a wise man who, perhaps after living in the trenches filled with the rotting bodies of the dead, or perhaps in the same dugout as Wilfrid Owen himself, had realised the insult to his intelligence of such vile reifications of 'patriotism' as the old lie; 'Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.' But then the parents of the British, Iraqi and American dead already know that don't they?

Having said all that - I realise that you are genuine about the violation of our beautiful world, and in that I support and commiserate with you.