Well, yes and no. Because you do get animals who not only adapt to the environment but who adapt their environment to their needs -- in other words, "intelligence" is a trait that raises the odds of survival and, whoever wins at the survival game wins at "evolution." And that's not just a popular representation.
[WS:] Interesting point. However, the ability to change the environment to needs does not necessarily increases the chances of survival. It can also be detrimental in a long run.
For example, long time ago I saw a documentary about !Kung bushmen's predicament brought about by the ability to shape the environment. !Kung could survive in the Kalahari desert thanks to their well developed foraging skills, rather than the ability to shape their environment. Specifically, they developed the skill of tracking an locating desert plants that store water in their roots, which they used as the main (if not only) source of water during the arid season. However, when some do-gooders, touched by the harsh living conditions in the desert, installed a Diesel engine powered pump pumping underground water to the surface, the !Kung switched to that innovation and stopped using their previous method of water acquisition.
This worked fine for them until the pump broke. This deprived the !Kung village of the only source of water they had, since they could no longer obtain water the old ways (that required constant surveillance of the desert, which they stopped doing when they got the pump). The whole group almost died of dehydration, but luckily a group of anthropologists who wanted to study them discovered their predicament and trucked water supply.
This example tells us that even unambiguously useful and benign ways of modifying environment can backfire under certain conditions and decrease the chances of survival. Needless to say that less benign modifications - such as the mega-wastefulness aka "the American life style" - have much greater potential detriment to our survival as the species. Jared Diamond makes that point quite clearly in his book _Collapse_.
The argument that the ability to modify the environment in unequivocally advantageous to the survival of the species can only hold on the assumption of omniscience i.e. the ability of that species to foresee all potential consequences of the modification. That assumption is clearly unrealistic.
Wojtek