I’ve known people who hold to the romantic notion that humans came into equilibrium with nature about the time Indian tribes were the only humans on North America. After that, they feel, it was all about destruction and exploitation. As wacked as that belief is, it’s nothing compared to what this guy imagines and, it seems, hopes for:
Imagine that all the people on Earth – all 6.5 billion of us and
counting – could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a
re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. … Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to
reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and
forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads
and cities crumbled back to dust.
I’ve got news for him. You don’t have to rid the planet of humans to get fields to revert to forests. My wife’s family has a chunk of land in Virginia that was pasture just a few short years ago. It’s all pine and oak trees now. And we didn’t have to go extinct for that to happen.
UPDATE: Go here and toggle between the 1864 photo of the Spotsylvania Court House battlefield and the present-day battlefield for a good example of how the people don’t need to move out of the way for “fields and pastures” to “revert to prairies and forest.”
