Your descriptions of our present failures are poetically accurate, and the scale of destruction because of innate human avarice has advanced to a global disaster in this time of fossil fuel energy and societal complexity. But any complex civilization (western or otherwise) with the harnessed power of diesel engines and a playhouse filed with the toys of science would be pushing their advantages across civilizations. Western culture certainly ran with it first, but I think the type of failure we are in now would have happened (be it western or eastern initiated) regardless as knowledge and complexity in human affairs advanced. I don't know if we have an opportunity to move beyond our current failures, probably not. And that is the brutality of life itself.