Are you familiar with Michael Tomasello? You might like his "The Evolution of Agency." One of his ideas is that the thing which distinguishes humans is our ability to subvert individual desires and projects in order to serve abstractions: God, democracy, money, free enterprise, the fatherland, Donald Trump (who is now an abstraction. His followers don't care what he actually says or does.) As such there is no limit to the size of the projects we can undertake, which is at the root of our planetary dominance. Only in these latter days do we preceive the peril we have wrought. This explains the widespread fall in rates of reproduction. All animals do this when the future looks bleak.
Are we too late to save ourselves? I'm not sure I want to live long enough to find out.