For much of history, large human effects on the outdoors have usually been negative, so it's not surprising that people have adopted rules that amount to worshiping undisturbed aspects of nature. Non-consequentialist rationalizations for important rules seem wrong to me, but they don't seem any more surprising here than in other contexts.

Animals dying due to human action get more attention than animals dying for other reasons, so it's not surprising that availability bias causes people to overweight the harm currently being done by humans to animals. And it takes a fair amount of imagination to foresee technological changes that could reduce or abolish the suffering and death that routinely happens to wild animals.

I find your aesthetic reaction to nature strange. To me, the outdoors seems like the kind of environment I'm evolved to feel at home in. Most other environments seem to sacrifice some aesthetic value to achieve other goals (such as minimizing the effort needed to get food). Maybe if there had been computers in homes when I was growing up I'd have different aesthetic senses.