Not all increases in economic growth are at consequence of ecological exploitation. Some economic growth happens while also reducing ecological impact. These two things are not that tightly bound, especially in developed knowledge-based economies.

The problem with zero growth is that we would also need to have zero population growth. There are two ways of achieving this: the nice one, where we get everyone out of poverty and people naturally stop having so many kids because they're not poor any more, or the nasty one where we impose limits on how many kids people can have. The nice solution would definitely require lots of economic growth to lift all of us out of poverty (without reducing the living standards of the people currently having no kids to the point that they start having kids again). The nasty solution has only been tried by China so far, wasn't that successful, and has lead to all sorts of demographic problems for them.

We do have a problem with income inequality which should be a lot easier to fix than stopping growth.