We did. People used to spend more time outside, more time walking. Older novels seem to mention animals and plants modern people wouldn't recognize.

And of course there just existed more nature. We are destroying our environment and are losing many species. It's getting harder and harder to just enjoy a carefree joke about it...

I often think a lot about this, incidentally when taking long walks when not playing video games in my free time, and continue to arrive at the same conclusion: humans are merely evolution's self-brewed extinction event. A couple of severely consequential, yet random mutations led to an overtly destructive species.

Keep in mind that evolution is just the name for the mechanism that allows DNA to continue self-preservation by means of replication and recombination, allowing it to persevere in altering conditions.

So in a (sad?) way it is merely natural that many species die off as a consequence of our actions, as it was when the Permian-Triassic extinction hit. After all they are the result of our biology. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try everything to prevent extinctions and counter-act climate change. We do know that permanent loss of life is absolutely a possibility on this planet.

While we might cause Earth to become more akin to Venus with our behaviour, the apparent evolutionary disaster might also pay off for DNA by allowing it to become interplanetary.

Back when I was a lad, we used to get up before we'd gone to bed to go down the mines!