The Quran

ظَهَرَ الفَسادُ فِي البَرِّ وَالبَحرِ بِما كَسَبَت أَيدِي النّاسِ لِيُذيقَهُم بَعضَ الَّذي عَمِلوا لَعَلَّهُم يَرجِعونَ

Muhammad Asad

[Since they have become oblivious of God,] corruption has appeared on land and in the sea as an outcome of what men's hands have wrought: and so He will let them taste¹ [the evil of] some of their doings, so that they might return [to the right path].²

The prefix Ii in li-yudhiqahum does not indicate here a purport or intent ("so that" or "in order that"), but is a lam al-'aqibah, i.e., a prefix expressing a factual consequence (best rendered as "thereupon" or "and so").
Thus, the growing corruption and destruction of our natural environment, so awesomely - if as yet only partially - demonstrated in our time, is here predicted as "an outcome of what men's hands have wrought", i.e., of that self-destructive - because utterly materialistic - inventiveness and frenzied activity which now threatens mankind with previously unimaginable ecological disasters: an unbridled pollution of land, air and water through industrial and urban waste, a progressive poisoning of plant and marine life, all manner of genetic malformations in men's own bodies through an ever-widening use of drugs and seemingly "beneficial" chemicals, and the gradual extinction of many animal species essential to human well-being. To all this may be added the rapid deterioration and decomposition of man's social life, the all-round increase in sexual perversion, crime and violence, with, perhaps, nuclear annihilation as the ultimate stage: all of which is, in the last resort, an outcome of man's oblivion of God and, hence, of all absolute moral values, and their supersession by the belief that material "progress" is the on~ thing that matters.