I realize I’m preaching to the choir a bit here, but I always thought about the economy as a bunch of objects and things that people are doing with them, but I just realized that actually, growth of the economy will always somehow impact the environment (not always necessarily to its detriment though). It really is a zero sum game and I was making a mistake of not always thinking about the two in concert.
The usual analysis is that the economy is a subset of the environment. In other words, the human economy is a (small, fragile, entirely dependent) part of the wider natural economy.
Unfortunately, orthodox economists have still not received the memo.