But it only matters to us. The Earth is a hunk of iron in a carbon candy shell that has no particular affection for the state it is in now.
replyEven if the Earth has emotions, who are we to assume it would prefer to be covered in throbbing life rather than to have a surface that was burnt to a cinder? Maybe we itch. What we're doing when we talk about a long-term forest recovery is projecting our fantasies about how we would feel if we were the Earth. If we destroy it for ourselves, we've simply destroyed it. We were the ones who assigned value to it.
This is us burning our own house down. The ground that the house is on does not care that we are obviously suicidal.
Sure, from a deep time perspective it's maybe no big deal, but the loss of the forest affects all of us including future generations significantly in the meantime.
replyYes but people seem to expect recovery around the order of decades, not millennia.
replyIt's because they care not about the ecosystem, but their own enjoyment of its fruits. Nothing wrong with that, but it tends to be couched in language as if this is for the good of the planet or animals or something. No, it's good for us.
replyRight. Even currently-living trees can live for many multiples of a human lifespan. We just have trouble thinking about time spans more than a hundred years or so. We're also all accustomed to the contemporary pace of technological and social change, but for most of human history things changed very little from one generation to the next, and most of nature is still that way (except when humans interfere).
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