In this article the point is made that some things that we think of as environmentally bad are in fact environmentally good.
An environmentalist gets lunch
This article has some merit, but doesn't totally get it right. Often these things look better in some metric but often it relies on looking at a single environmental problem and forgetting the others. For instance industrial arable agriculture can be better in terms of land use and GHG emissions, but the trade off is collapsing natural ecosystems as the insects get decimated and the hedgerows and habitat get grubbed out.
It seems to me like if you don't reduce your affluence or population you're just pushing environmental problems around the plate, one environmental problem trades against another and if you change your way of doing something to improve some metric, a corresponding negative effect pops up in another place. Coal emits green house gases, solar panels require lithium mining and large tracts of land. Plastics do not bio degrade and cause problems for wildlife, paper bags require plantation forest (land use).
Sustainability has become myopic, it focuses on greenhouse gas emissions without seeing the full picture. Probably because if we took environmental problems (in their entirety) seriously we'd have to change our lives, reduce our affluence and our population. Mostly we don't want to, or we can't because we are trapped in the system - the machine.
Take some time to notice the trade off in various environmental solutions, we should at least be conscious of them and state them so we're clear about what we are doing.
I think if you do they might stop looking like solutions.