Maybe I saw too many Disney movies as a kid, but it took me a very long time to consider, “There’s nothing inherently good or right about what would have happened in the absence of people.” There’s nothing kind, nurturing, decent, or fair about natures course. It’s a thing without direction, not a “one true course of events” that we interrupted.

It makes those kinds of situations much harder to evaluate than the simple worldview, but I think it’s more honest.

And yeah, the hazard is in thinking the opposite is true. Lord knows we’ve done some objectively dumb shit, too.

Being such a wildly powerful species is a burden.

It’s not taking back historical desserts but rather reclaiming more recent desertification or simply stopping the advance of desertification.