Don't confuse being unable to dominate the world with a conscious choice not to

I'm not doing that. I am pointing out that in the natural world, there is an innate balance at work, a mutual give-and-take, that has somehow gotten perverted in humans. I live amongst an array of huge ant colonies by the way.

It is not human-centric to note that the ants' activity of collecting its tasty food source happens to serve a purpose in tidying up dead and rotting stuff etc. There is a balance that occurs in the natural world, and human-centricism has pushed that way out of wack.

Yes, termites will eat your whole house, so the insect analogy is perhaps not worth arguing.

Perhaps in cosmic time, our misguided behaviors are like those weird moments when there is a plague of locusts, or wildfires. An imbalance to reset the balance afresh. In that way maybe our folly is also a natural manifestation--but the difference seems to me that we are (ostensibly) capable of making a conscious choice.