The problem is that change is bad.

It's bad for ecosystems and inasmuch as humans still depend on their ecosystems, it's bad for humans.

Conservatives once upon a time fundamentally understood this point. It's hard to get a society to work. There are a lot of ways for a society to fail. So if you've got something that works pretty well, don't muck it up every time one bad thing happens!

But it's the same thing with ecosystems. We like our waterfront houses. We grow crops that will survive the historical local microclimate that we know, not the future local microclimate that we are at best so-so at predicting. We build industry around existing resources including water. We build parks with nice landscaping. We invite tourists to see the local attractions. Any change is massively disruptive, especially in those places where the change is to greater extremes. We know how to handle the expected extremes. Anywhere that gets new extremes is really in trouble.

But somehow this issue got tacked onto the right and left absolutely upside-down. You have leftists making arguments about purity and sanctity, and they have dreadfully little practice with it so the arguments have a tendency to sound dumber than the positions are, and the positions tend to be dumber than they need to be. And the right is all, "Yeah, this has been working for tens of thousands of years but lets bust it all up cause of course we can do soooooo much better now because we had some new-fangled ideas over the past couple decades!" and they have precious little practice thinking through the consequences of drastic changes to complex systems.

From what you've said, Epstein has fundamentally missed the point about the damaging consequences of change. This point is so central that if one misses it, basically everything they say is irrelevant. I haven't read the book, but the description doesn't sound encouraging.