Mind furniture- and Grief

Many years ago, at least twelve, my business partner and I decided we wanted to travel to parts unknown. And for many years we went somewhere pristine each year. She had lived in Peru as a child and I had recently traveled there as a spose on a business trip. So we had to go.
Our first trip was to a romote part of Costa Rica - and it was so incredible, hot, miles of hiking through the jungle, swimming in rivers.
The next trip was to Peru, Puerto Maldonado, canoeing up the Madre de Dios River to Tambopata. These were not tour guided trips. Just us, adventuring alone, with one guide. We'd look at each other periodically and breathe, "We're here.." So amazing.
Tambopata might have been the most amazing and magical of all our trips. After many hours of navigating the river we came to the dock of the biological station we had come to visit. There was no sound of anything manmade and we walked up the long trail to the lodge carrying our backpacks, totally in love at first sight with the sounds and sights and smells of everything we had wanted to know for our whole lives.
We spent the next ten days or so in a primitive lodge whose beauty cannot be described. Our room was open to the jungle, we had bed nets to protect us from whatevers. We had never been more perfectly happy.
The scientists living there were pleased to show us their projects from the cultivation of certain plants to the incubation of Macaws. We got up at dawn to hear the howler monkeys and go to the clay licks covered with dozens of parrots. We hiked miles in the rain forest and found tarantulas, tapir tracks, huge snakes, monkeys, so many birds. We saw bioluminescents at night in the forest, we saw many bats. Our minds were thick with new knowledge.
Tonight I heard a report on T.V. that as gold has been discovered in that area, much of the forest has been stripped, Puerto Moldonato is now a gold mining town, Tambopata is no more as we once knew it. I wept.
Our children and grandchildren will not know what it is to be in the Amazon Rain Forest, alone, where there is total silence and even an agnostic can find a sort of belief in seeing a harpy eagle on the nest. They'll never have the chance to feel the total darkness in the Amazon forest at night.  Perhaps they'll have to do with a harpy eagle ap on their phone.
I grieve for the lack of natural habitat that is coming from having such an abundance of people (SEVEN BILLION!)