Indeed. I lost the plot from my original comment, so I'll try to refine it here. I had brought up pollution and exploitation, a broad survey of negative features of our civilization because I think people don't weigh positive and negative things remotely fairly. All things have a social/ideal (as in ideas) backing. Space exploration is positive and hopeful; throw money at it and there are plenty of people who would be enthusiastic to join in. Fixing the environment, the economic system, and other woes is negtive, large scale, and nigh intractable. In a perfect world, people would probably have enough time, resources, and innate motivation to work on many different things and advance them all. In reality, we seek bright, hopeful pursuits like space exploration and push aside the environment. My original criticism of Walter Bright's attitude is that it exemplifies how we as humans have poor psychological balance of issues. It's why throwing money at environmental causes isn't comparable to throwing money at space exploration: we simply have far less collective will to actually fix the environment, especially not with corporate propaganda that shifts the blame and whatnot.
You're right that these pursuits are entirely orthogonal. Unfortunately, whether or not space exploration is in the picture, we are far less enthusiastic about doing what actually matters to fix the environment and whatnot. It's just that I myself only realized this imbalance from seeing Walter Bright's blatant positivity on space exploration. I will maintain that, not only is the negative pursuit a nightmare to work on by itself, but introducing the positive pursuit will be a psychological distraction, like how some people scoff at negative effects of capitalism and focus on the positives. Because we love feel-good stories and gravitate to them.