You are of course welcome to your opinion Professor. I will respectfully disagree.
A healthy environment provides what we call ecosystem services (pollination, water regulation/flood defence, disease regulation, water purification, regulation of atmospheric gases - including oxygen production etc etc). If you were to do all of these artificially the global cost has been worked out at $125 trillion. Which is more than global GDP. Which means, there is not enough money in the world to do the job that a healthy environment does for free.
Just look up the Catskill mountains outside New York for one example. It's an area that purifies all the water for everyone living in New York City, and having already been through the cycle of letting the habitat decade and then realising how much it was going to cost them to clean their water artificially, it's now heavily protected.
A healthy environment is the one thing we all absolutely depend on, unless you have no desire to drink clean water or breathe oxygen. Don't forget, we are not separate from the living environment. We evolved in it, and as much as we think we are better than it now, the things that are good for it are often good for us too.
I agree conservation is often a luxury. I've been to areas in the world where people are dirt poor, I've met people from even more countries where conservation is hard because people have nothing. Madagascar, for instance. But if the environment goes down the drain, so do they. You cannot farm poor quality soil. Soil quality is improved when you have the biodiversity in it (microbes etc) to recycle nutrients, and when local forest cover is protected to ensure flood defences and to prevent soil erosion. So in the end conservation becomes a necessity.
In this country, we have enough land devoted to arable. What we also have is a culture of surplus. Surplus on an individual level, throwing things away because we bought too much and didn't use it, and surplus on a national level when the supermarkets reject fields of a crop because they over-estimated how much they would need and don't want to sell it now, or because it's the wrong shape (and then we won't buy it, apparently).
And we haven't even started on the benefits that a healthy environment brings in terms of enjoyment to millions of people.
Feel free to dismiss the environment. But it is not a panacea. It underpins all living organisms, and until we have learnt to live without air, water and food, then it is kind of important.