I have tried to get my mond around this for awhile, I have always assumed that conservatives just have an irrational fear of wildlife but maybe the urge to destroy wild animals and the places they live is more ingrained than just fear:
Whatever the ostensible excuse the Taliban had for destroying the Buddhas, outsiders can clearly see that they’re motivated mainly be a petulant unwillingness to engage or regard anything that makes them feel smaller or less important. Pleasure and beauty offend fundamentalists, because these things are out of their control and present a threat to their death grip on power. Art reminds people that there’s something more than the tightly controlled, colorless existence offered by fundamentalism, and so the fundamentalists are wary of it. In Afghanistan, they just destroy amazing pieces of art that remind you of the long history and imagination and diversity of humanity. Here, Christian fundamentalists fight against pop culture by replacing it with weak replicas that are meant to satisfy the urge without giving too much of that dangerous pleasure.
The struggle between environmentalists and wingnuts has a similar flavor to it. Wingnuts mock and deride environmentalists for their awe at the grandeur of nature, for their desire to let it exist uncontrolled and unexploited by humans. Nature can quickly make a person feel small and mortal. You look over vast ecosystems clipping along doing their own thing indifferent to you, and you realize that this was all here before you were, and will all be here when you leave. Unless, of course, you level it, take all the resources, and leave a wake of destruction in your path. A lot of environmentalists use rape metaphors when describing what polluters do to nature, and a lot of feminists criticize them for it. But it’s hard not to think of it in those terms when the pro-pollution side glories in the same kind of metaphors.
I think conservatives really do hate the idea that the earth existed without them, hence they insist the earth is only 6000 years-old and only the creatures we see today ever existed. The earth was probably a pretty cool place without people and it will probably be a pretty cool place after we are gone; I don’t get why that bothers some people.