The same logic should go towards developing our understanding about the natural world. We need to use what we know not to control what we have, but to preserve it, to nurture it.

Why? What point does it serve?

even if at some point we become mature enough to think that it's a good idea, we're talking about the whole planet here. It's too big, it's too important, to take that risk.

Nobody will just get up one day, no nation will just "decide" to do this. It will happen due to necessity. We will find ourselves in a world where nature has failed, has collapsed, or has begun to screw us over, and we will have to "take the wheel".

The world isn't stable, the environment isn't stable, less so now that we are around. Global warming, ice ages, supervolcanic eruptions, meteors. Nature/natural events are primed and armed to wipe us, and most species with us, off the face of the planet.

We take control, or we die.

Imagine we had stayed a little, agrarian, society. Imagine we never started burning coal, causing global warming, and using forests at such paces as we do now. All we do in taking that course is have "safe" existence of a few hundred million for a couple hundred thousand years before we die off just as the Dinos did.

Instead, we chose the more risky, but the only potentially successful path, the one that leads us off planet, and with power enough to influence the planet's entire environment to suit our needs, and that was the best choice.

We have a long, long way to go until we consider ourselves mature as a species.

We will never be a mature species, we will always face issues, and never be satisfied, it's human nature.

We know where our behaviors lead to, both through past experiences as well as deductive reasoning. We know what we can do, should do to change, but we often don't do it

I would argue that, as a collective, we do not know these things. Society is the sum of it's parts, no the thoughts of it's smartest indaviduals. The decisions it makes are based on the decisions of everyone, not just those well educated and aware of the issues of global warming, rich enough to not have the emotional attachment to that global warming means you lose what made up your whole life.

I live in a coal town, or used to. Every last one of those people tend to be against clean coal, the thing that killed their town. There is more to the decision than just the "clear" answer.

The thing is though, through flaws such as greed, selfishness, apathy, cowardice, and negligence, we let this behavior happen way more frequently than it should.

Could we stop it? Look at twitch plays pokemon for a prime example of this. Look at the reddit "hivemind", look at how so many human-systems work. It's not that simple.

How do "we" just suddenly change course, how do you just suddenly shift an entire system so drastically in a short time? You can't. Selfishness, apathy, cowardice, and negligence are all things humans do, and things we have to learn to deal with, not things we can simply decide away with. Problems to be fixed, not problems that we can decide to no longer cause.

We, as a collective whole, tsk our tongues and shake our heads saying "something should be done about this" and then go about our day

An indication that the issues we face aren't important enough to change our lives to fix, in other words. People are reactive more than proactive. Fossil fuels began their big decline after prices went up, not after warnings that oil would run out. Expecting humanity to act proactively on things isn't honest. That's not how society has ever worked.

Biodiversity means having ecosystems with as many numerous different organisms as possible. The more, the merrier. The more vital, the better.

This may be true, but the purpose of biodiversity is to prevent diseases and genetic single-ness that causes all sorts of issues. By ensuring sufficient genetic variation between a crop, you create the diversity needed to ensure safety of the crop, and of those who eat those crops.

When we study plants and animals, we often gain new insights that help is everything from medicine to agriculture to industry and design to, once again, environmental preservation.

And as our knowledge of the genome continues to increase, we may see the day where human inspired changes, recorded through time, becomes a greater source of knowledge than observing creatures created by way of evolution.

The fact that we have gone through multiple mass extinction events in our planets history and yet we always somehow bounce back to a diverse ecosystem with niche species illustrates that natural mechanisms not only favor diversity, but encourages it.

This does not indicate that such a system is the better system, especially considering those multiple mass extinction events. I'd prefer change from that particular status-quo, and mankind is the only species with the power to drive that change.

Look at what is of value here though. The OP feels good about what he did, allowing him to further value himself.

People are looking at a small problem, something that could stand to be changed, and are promoting it.

And these are the mechanisms that drive progress, I agree. While I don't entirely agree that the feelings of a fish should really matter very much, this is a massive indication of why exactly mankind is so unique, and why our society constantly seems better than the ones a generation ago. The constant discussion, the constant refreshing of new ideas. These have to happen for progress to be made, and they need to happen on a scale that strikes the majority of 300 million people to drive appropriate change in only one nation.

The scale of these conversations, the impact they have to have, is massive, and they will have that impact in time, when most people are having that discussion, when the thing effects most. Until then, we can't expect change to appear, we can't expect perfection to come from every moment of every person's life. We have to give it time. A hundred years from now may seem a utopia, but I guarantee they will tell you a hundred absurd problems you may react against in a negative way, just like a republican senator clutching onto a snowball..