Environmental systems are complex: realistically, given the proportion of land in private ownership, care of the wider environment needs to take into account private property. For instance, a river and lake may be publicly owned and subject to regulation, but the water in them comes from the surrounding area. If a private owner chops a forest down around the river, it may make management of the water hard, even unmanageable.
And what I can say for sure, is that if you fuck an environment up, it's potentially going to create a great deal of hardship and be extremely hard to fix. In the above example, for instance, the result could be increased vulnerability to flooding events causing misery for thousands. At bare minimum, I'd think it reasonable for those who have their homes flooded to sue the guy who chopped down the forest - except of course that the law has little or no provision for that sort of liability either.