The Earth has a natural ability to heal itself. It is very good at naturally fixing problems caused by us humans, if you give it enough time.
Life After People
About a decade ago, the History Channel featured a television show entitled Life After People. The show centered around what would happen to Earth, and all remnants of human civilization, if the human race were to suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth. What the show reveals is that if we are not here to maintain our structures, and control natural growth, nature would soon overtake everything that we built and hold dear.
Our former farm fields would quickly be overrun with forests, as were there before we cut them down to make way for our agriculture. The houses in our neighborhoods would eventually become dilapidated and fall apart, and would also be overrun with trees and grass growing everywhere. The asphalt streets in our cities would break down, only to be covered by grasses and trees also. Nature would have reclaimed itself from humankind.
The Mayan Civilization
We see this example perfectly in the remains of the Mayan Civilization, which existed in what today is southern Mexico, and the nations of Belize and Guatemala. Once a thriving civilization with tens of millions of people, competing empires and city-states, and a heavy footprint on the land, today it’s very difficult to see much of the remains of that civilization because nature has almost entirely reclaimed that land. Tropical rainforests cover basically everything, and very little remains.
Much of that previous civilization has been lost, hidden by a thick forest canopy. The use of a modern technology though, such as LIDAR, allows us to peer through that thick forest canopy, and see the size of their human footprint, hidden from view for more than a millennium. What we see is tens of thousands of structures, that stretch for hundreds of miles, that make it clear how massive their human impact on the land was. Eventually, due to some reasons we haven’t quite yet figured out – maybe because of some type of climate change such as a years-long drought, or because of overuse of the land until it wasn’t productive anymore – they decided to – or were forced to – abandon their cities and civilization, and this allowed the forests to grow over and reclaim their once great civilization. Today, nature has healed from all the destruction wrought by the Mayan people on that region of the world over the long course of their civilization.
What This Means
So, we know that if we humans disappeared from this planet, nature would reclaim the planet and the Earth would heal itself. We see an example of this taking place in the past with the Mayan civilization. In the same way, the Earth can heal itself from all of modern human civilization’s supposed mortal sins against the environment.
When it comes to excessive amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we already know that plants, especially trees, as well as much of the algae in the oceans, will naturally extract all the excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and replace it with oxygen, thus solving a problem that we created – if it really is a problem. It will take some time – decades or centuries – but it will manage to bring down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to pre-industrial-revolution levels.
In other words, Earth has a natural ability to heal itself from all the harms that we have imposed on her.
Of course, I could very easily make the argument that we can use the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to our advantage, and to Earth’s advantage. And if that is the case, we wouldn’t need to go “all out” to control and reduce our carbon footprint because it could actually be beneficial.
