Yes. I think you're correct - though I still don't think you've quite clocked what trouble we're in.
I see what you call "nature" as the planetary organism - the living biosphere. I call her the Lady Earth - mainly because typing "Lady Gaia" into Google got me a lot of hits for Lady Gaga!
What does Lady Earth want from us. Two things: firstly that we desist from trying to destroy her and that we give her credit for being conscious. She is not blind or stupid, although she is largely bacterial or smaller, but she does think very longterm.
I believe she wants a third thing from us and this is why she has tolerated us and our appalling behaviour for so long.
The Lady Earth wants to reproduce. It's hard to do that if you're a planetary organism - there's a hell of a lot of hard vacuum and ionising radiation between where she is now and all the other places in the solar system that might just possibly support her life. We're really too squishy to dare interplanetary space without technology.
So what you need is a technological species to get her into space. And we're it (sorry, Lady!)
A species that can build the spaceships and launch them; that can start figuring out how to build habitats for us on the Moon and Mars and Venus.
A species like that is going to cause some damage anyway - but we're causing stupid amounts of damage. She has to take action to protect herself from runaway global heating. She has to save her root species from her reproductive species.
Yes, we are the Lady Earth's reproductive tract. Yes, it's a bit of a come-down from The Crown of Creation. In a way, she's pregnant with us and she doesn't want to die when she spawns.
She is struggling to keep us in balance and at the moment it's on a knife edge.
And yes, if she decides to abandon the attempt at reproduction this time around, she is not sentimental - though I'm sure she'll be annoyed at the waste of effort.
She will wipe us out within a decade. We already know how. A virus with R=15 like measles, a fatality rate of 95%.
We won't even have time to squeak.
