Up until the time industrial revolution really started to get going, it was true. If you look at the literature, poetry or philosophy of most any culture before 1880s it’s easy to see an unwavering belief of the invincibility of Nature against mankind. Humans have always been able to alter nature, but their ability to alter Nature with the capital N is a very new thing on a geological time scale.

Read the book "The Golden Spruce" to get a really good understanding of how quickly we decimated the trees in the West.

The rate of forest destruction accelerated so quickly with machinery I don't think it's possible to grasp.

It's a story as old as humanity. There's many examples of humans exhausting their nearby resources because they thought they were effectively infinite. Whether that's a forest, a food stock, a water source, or something else.

And every time it's happened in the past, the solution has been to leave. There's always been somewhere else to go.

Not every time, or at least the solution doesn't always result in everyone surviving. The Mayan civilization, for instance, is thought to have exhausted their local resources and fallen apart as a result.

Easter Island is another example.