We read in Holy Scripture in Exodus 20: 3-4 "You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourselves an idol…" and further we read in Romans 1: 25 "who exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator…" Of which, these scriptural passages nicely sum up the religious truth that there is no other legitimate god but God, as well as that it is a mistake to worship and idolize what our Creator has created, over the Creator.
This so indicates that while it is one thing to appreciate the beauty that this world offers us, which certainly would include our rightful respect of mother earth, it is though a wrong belief, to take earthly things and to thereby treat those objects or creations as superior to the Creator of it all. While this world has many things that are worthy of our admiration, it is an error in judgment to see those things, outside of their context, that somehow makes those objects as something that is noble in and of themselves, for they are, in the scheme of things, only material objects, though they may be quite beautiful, they ultimately, in one form or another, are still subject to the law of entropy, decay, and disappearance, for each of these created things have a beginning and so too there will be their end.
When it comes to our human relationships, while it is right to honor our mother and father, and to do right by our spouse and children; all that we have in a material sense, will ultimately depart, leaving only the lessons that we have taught and the love that we have given out. To believe otherwise, indicates a false belief that the reality of this visible world, trumps the reality of the invisible world, but it is that which is invisible that actuates the visible.
Any good scientist wants to keep on searching until they find the ultimate truth, for to do nothing less, means that they have not done all that they could do to comprehensively understand what it is that is being studied, so that the very purpose of great creations is not so much to study that creation, though that has merit, but to find the Creator behind the creations, for to settle for something less than the full truth, cannot be the full truth, and there is only that One truth.
The biggest deception that humanity suffers from is having the belief that what they see is what they should believe; but without the unseen nothing would be seen. The very cycles that human life deals with, generation after generation, as well as the cycles of life and death in the world of fauna and flora should indicate to all of us that the merry-go-round of material life is circular and repeatable, but unable to ever generate enough velocity to escape into the world beyond this world. So that, to the degree that idolatry distracts people from the reality that our highest mission is to find our way back to our Creator, this then means that that distraction is at best, a very small reflection of what the reality of the Creator actually is.