alt Hacker NewsDue to our very short lifespan, "thousands of years" seems like a big deal to us, but it's quite a short time to the earth. Forest recovery in a couple of thousand years would be "bouncing back" in that perspective.
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Yes but people seem to expect recovery around the order of decades, not millennia.
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.
Even 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.