Look to the past to see many examples of where we were headed towards destruction and avoided it by more progress, growth, and so on.

We were running out of food, about to hit massive famine, before agriculture advanced.

We were going to run out of copper for telegraph lines before fiberoptics became a thing.

We were going to run out of oil before fracking, oil sands, and many other techniques became worth the money.

We were going to pollute the whole planet, before we shifted from an economy based on "more and larger" to "smaller and more advanced".

At any point in history, humanity has been on a crash course for destruction, and only through the work of thousands of scientists, the research of many dedicated and hardworking people, do we keep managing to swerve away from it.

Without an ever higher population required to solve harder and harder problems, without relative wealth and luxury these people need in order to be able to peruse their interests, without demand for more and more that inspires them to innovate, we would find ourselves stagnating. With that stagnation comes the end to the engine that shifts our demands and destruction to a new, clean, undestroyed area.

As for the world being an infinite resource, it certainly isn't. However, there is still a massive number of ways to create more growth, to find new resources that provide as much value as before, but with more common things. Eventually, humanity will have to create a massive, self-enclosed system that is totally self sustaining, and runs on the sum of the resources on earth that are used in as efficient a way as possible. That day is "very" far from today, however.