The first Aussies walked from New Guinea when it was all known as Sahul 65-70 thousand years ago.....from Rainforest into Rainforest....you could walk to Tassie from Victoria. From Rainforest into Rainforest....
Then the climate began warm, change around 14 thousand years ago and sea levels began to rise...the land bridges finally flooded over in the North and South around six thousand years ago.
What science has been doing is trying to find out why the climate changed rapidly over this period.
Since humans left their birthplace through every continent they've basically burned to keep warm, burned to create farmland, burned to clear land to create grazing land and burned for the sake of burning over thousands of years...humans are firebugs.
But where did the replantings of those lost forests...rainforests burned or destroyed ever take place, anywhere?
What science, common sense is discovering is that burning the ground cover regularly and deliberately exposes the soil to drying out and erosion, has affected the climate and monsoons of Australia, kills off flora and fauna, soil microbes in forests which depend on mulch cover for the soil to remain moist....
The forests of the land work with the water in the oceans to keep everything in delicate harmony....take one of those away....severely damage it in the life cycle of the planet and it all begins to fall apart.....it's been happening over thousands of years...and to fix it is not going to be millions of wind turbines....millions of electric cars, millions of dams or billions more people.....
It will be millions, billions of trees to replace those which have been destroyed. Simple, inexpensive and common sense....but hey, no money to be made for billionaires, tax concessions from governments, billions of dollars in grants by governments to private enterprise......by everyday people planting trees.
The mechanism you d scribe by which we humans have wrecked the planet is obviously correct. Be to change direction will I think be far more difficult than just planting "billions" of trees. Don't get me wrong, I worship trees and have for decades; I hug trees (hugging a Sequoia was one of my peak lifetime experiences); I have planted many trees, I have a bonsai collection.
But in many areas of the planet, there are so many people that finding a place to plant enough trees will be a challenge; we need the land not just for housing, but also for food production, energy production (solar arrays and wind farms for powering cities will require huge expanses of land), and transportation infrastructure.
We are so overpopulated, so consumption focused, and so numb to the consequences of our actions that it's hard to think of any solution other than a worldwide epidemic that would get us to change sufficiently.
The visionary architect Paolo Soleri published an amazing book in the 1960's that contained elaborate drawings of massive densely packed cities that we're meant to miniaturize the ecological footprint of human civilization. By packing us closely together, Soleri wanted to eliminate suburban sprawl and major highways. The cities were designed to (for example) bridge canyons or rivers, float on the ocean, provide shelter from heat in deserts, provide passive solar heat gains in colder climates.
We need visions and goals like these if we are to succeed in healing the planet, and yet...Even a visionary like Soleri can't sustain the idea over time. Several years ago, I toured Arcosanti, Soleri's experimental "city" in the Arizona desert; it's been under construction since the late 1960's. There, in the desert, Soleri was missing his native Italian landscape s so much that he had planted a large expanse of lawn and a row of Lombardy poplars. His staff kept the plants alive by using sprinklers. I was furious at the betrayal of his ideas. If Soleri can't be steadfast in his resolve, how can the great quivering oblivious mass of humanity succeed?
