I like her observation that chimps firstly have a slow reproductive cycle, having only one baby every five years, and because of this, put a lot of energy and care into their babies and secondly,stemming from that, don't destroy their natural home.

Even if 100 years ago, our ancestors had one child every five years, instead of one every year for their reproductive life, our populations would be nothing like they are today.

I don't think I buy her argument that they don't destroy their environment because of long gestation periods. It seems vastly more likely to me that they don't 'destroy their environment' (a phrase which should be more strictly defined when we talk about these things than it is in the video) because they CAN'T destroy their environment. They don't know how. The chimps are not intelligent enough to destroy their environment in any serious way, they just don't have the knowledge to do so. This I think, explains why native cultures (aboriginals, inuits, native americans etc.) also didn't destroy the environment they lived in nearly to the degree that we do today. This is not because of some mystical reverence that they may or may not have had for nature though. But rather they didn't destroy their environment because they couldn't. The reason they couldn’t isn't of course that they weren't intelligent enough to do so, they were just as intelligent as anyone else living at the time, but they didn't have the knowledge to do so. They didn't have science, they didn't have engineering etc. So I think a culture's ability to destroy its own environment varies directly with its ability to beneficially exploit and modify its environment and these abilities both scale perfectly with the scientific understanding of that environment. Monkeys, having virtually no knowledge or intellect to speak of (relatively anyway) have a commensurate DISability to shape/destroy their environment; native human cultures have much more knowledge and intelligence and they start "littering" the landscape with adobe huts and septic pits, more knowledge still with modern humans and you get unintended global atmospheric modification through fossil fuel burning. Each level of development solves the problems of the previous one and simultaneously opens up new opportunities for us to live healthier, longer and smarter lives.

Huge populations of any species put greater stress on the natural resources, thus contributing to the environment's deterioration. In the natural world, the result of huge populations is usually some kind of culling on these numbers, be it through food becoming scarce, disease or some other event. We have protected oursleves to a large degree from this natural balancing act and continue to reproduce and live our lives as if the world was immune to us.

I don't dispute that. But the thing that enables those large populations to exist in the first place is science. Also, I don't see that there is any reason that we can't continue to shift this "natural ballance" so long as we teach ourselves how to do so while minimizing the environmentally destructive effects.