This is the premise of Warren Hern in a new book called Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth.

The basic premise is that humans have the capacity of developing culture, and that has millions of manifestations, everything from language and speech and mathematics to constructing shelters, building weapons and having medical care to keep us alive. These adaptations have allowed us to go from a few separate species of skinny primates wandering around in Africa a couple of million years ago to being the dominant ecological force on the planet to the point we’re changing the entire global ecosystem…

These cultural adaptations have now become maladaptive. They do not have survival value. And they are, in fact, malignant maladaptations because they’re increasing in a way that cancer increases. So, this means that the human species now has all of the major characteristics of a malignant process. When I was in medical school, we had four of them that were identified: rapid, uncontrolled growth; invasion and destruction of adjacent normal tissues — in this case, ecosystems; metastasis, which means distant colonization; and dedifferentiation, which you see very well in the patterns of cities.

Salon.com

I don’t want to believe this. We know the universe is ultimately tending to random disorder. Somehow, physical forces are able to buck this trend and create small pockets of order like stars, planets, solar systems, and complex chemical compounds. And then on only one planet that we know of in all the universe, something called life has arisen from these chemical compounds, which has an extraordinary ability to construct ordered systems in our random universe. And then in only one species we know of in all the universe, something called intelligence has arisen from that life with the ability to create hitherto unimagined complex ordered systems. I don’t want to believe that this process has come to its conclusion and that the conclusion is one that ends the entire forward progression forever. Of course, if we are not the only intelligent life in the universe and if intelligent life is in fact common, then the situation looks much less bleak. Our particular malignant form of intelligent life can destroy its host and thus itself, and in fact this can happen in the vast majority of cases, but somebody somewhere can carrying on with the project of creating order and beauty in a cold indifferent universe. This, in my view, is the meaning and purpose of life. It just isn’t looking at the moment like we will be the ones to do it. And if in defiance of all reason we are the only intelligent life that has arisen or ever will arrive in the universe, then the future is an eternity of cold indifference, and we will be the ones who blew it.