Well Umair, I think you're right about the way we should go - extending our definition of personhood to every part of life on earth, living as part of the enormous connective tissue of the Earth organism.
The trouble is, we can't go backwards because there are too many of us, and industrialisation is a one-way gate.
We have to go forwards - we have to improve our technology, especially power sources, to create the life we want for everybody.
However the fact remains that we're the walking ape that started altering the climate by burning trees around 500,000 years ago. We like moving around. We also like our hierarchies and our territories. Some of us really like violence and fighting - and some of those do martial arts to find a place to put our violence (me) and some of those create vast deadly corporations or become powerhungry conmen or just burn and destroy the rainforest because we can.
It makes us feel happy and buzzed.
Personally I feel that the crucially important person in all this is the Earth organism herself. I call her the Lady Earth (I tried Lady Gaia but autocorrect kept changing it to Lady Gaga...).
The Lady Earth is ancient - around 3.5 to 4 billion years old. Most of her is microbial: bacteria, fungus, viruses, protozoa. That's about 90 %. Multicellular life is like the foam on the cappucino - there for decoration. We're like the cinnamon.
The Lady Earth is also immensely tough. She has come close to death twice - the Permian mass extinction killed 95% of the life on earth, probably by vulcanism. She came back slowly but she came back better.
The second time was the asteroid 66 million years ago. The destruction from that was instantaneous and hideous.
She came back from that too. (There have been 3-4 other mass extinctions, mostly from flood basalts. Read "The Ends of the World" by Peter Brannen for further details.)
Now she's letting a jumped up bunch of walking apes wreck her? Why?
This is assuming she's conscious of course. A lot of people say she isn't and you may agree with them. However I believe she IS conscious through us. We each have a couple of kilos of microbes inside us which produce a lot of neurotransmitters.
Why on earth (literally) is she allowing us to destroy her?
She isn't. Really we can't destroy her, she's too tough. We can damage her and we can easily wipe out ourselves, but we can't kill her. Any time we get near to that, we'll all be dead and she'll start to heal.
I believe that the Lady Earth has a plan and that the plan is to reproduce - as all organisms want to.
Except it's hard to reproduce if you're a planetary organism. Space is full of hard vacuum and ionising radiation and life on earth is quite squishy.
Knocking bits off and hoping they'll eventually land on another planet where the bacteria can survive... Excuse me, that seems a tad random.
Or you can evolve a technological species, encourage it to go into space and live there and carry the Lady Earth wherever it goes.
Maybe this accounts for our unhappiness and violence. We think we're the crown of creation when really we're the Lady Earth's... er... reproductive tissue.
I see the human race splitting.
The nasty ambitious violent humans will go into space and have a wonderful time exploring the solar system. They will take DNA and RNA of Lady Earth with them. Our space habitats will be full of forests and meadows, watered with comet water, with companion animals.
The more peaceful gentle humans will have a wise long-lived civilization that is part of the Lady Earth and understands this. At least half of the Earth will be wild.
And if something bad happens to the Earth - another asteroid is always possible - the space humans will be able to help, just like the Americans helped the Europeans after WWII had laid waste the continent. And vice versa.
At the moment this is just a vision.
But it could become true.
