The recovery has already begun via /r/accountt1234

What I'm going to say here won't be popular, but it needs to be said nonetheless: Civilization has already collapsed. There's nobody out there who can stop it, no Silicon valley invention that will revolutionize everything, no energy source that might change things. Civilization is already on the retreat and the void it leaves behind is rapidly being swallowed by the natural world.

The reason you don't see this, is because nobody has any reason to tell you this. Anarcho-Primitivists are too depressed to be susceptible to positive information. Environmentalists depend on donations by virtue of people thinking of nature as being in perpetual retreat. Finally, liberals don't want to admit this simple reality because they identify strongly with civilization and think of it as perpetually expanding. Here's the painful reality: You've been losing ground for decades now!

If there were twenty rats ten years ago, spread out over two islands of equal size, but today there are a hundred of them, surviving on just a single island, we would recognize the rats as being in retreat. Similarly, there are vast landscapes once dominated by humans, that we can no longer afford to dominate. This reality is hidden from us because of how we choose to define human influence.

Consider the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon rainforest is perpetually on the retreat, but why is that? The answer is, because we define the Amazon rainforest as those plots of forest that have existed undisturbed by human influence for thousands of years. In other words, our method of defining the Amazon rainforest inevitably leads to the result that the rainforest will forever be on the retreat. Nobody wishes to consider the possibility that the rainforest could be in recovery.

Rainforest can in fact regrow very rapidly. Estimates are that for every acre of rainforest cut down, fifty acres of new rainforest are growing on land that has been abandoned by humans. Changing economic conditions mean that we can simply no longer afford to dominate the world to the degree we once did. High oil prices force us to change our dietary patterns and move into the cities, where we don't have to travel long distances to gain access to services.

If we look at our dietary pattern, we notice something very pleasant. Pounds of beef eaten by Americans peaked in the late 80's. Since then, it has declined from around 80 pounds, down to less than 55 pounds today. This represents a rapid and significant decline of an economic sector that is responsible for occupying vast portions of the landscape. What has replaced beef is the rise of boiler chickens, kept in small factory farms and fed cereal grain. From an ethical perspective this is not particularly desirable, but chickens are much better at converting food into animal protein than slow growing cattle.

We often hear that in China, people have started eating large amounts of meat. This is true, but China is different from the Western world, as it took longer before entering an economic growth spurt. Still, even there the seeds for mass retreat are apparent. Consumption of bivalves increased 400-fold between 1970 and 1997. As oil prices have risen drastically, we can no longer afford to live the type of lifestyles we once lived, where we could once travel large distances and thus make use of large plots of land that were not highly economically productive. As a result, we're dependent on food that takes relatively little space to grow. Shellfish can be cultivated to produce 200 times as much protein as a similar plot of land.

Similarly, we can grow 70,000 kilogram of protein per hectare with mushrooms, compared to 80 kilogram per hectare of protein with beef cattle. In China, the annual growth rate per year of mushroom cultivation has been 10% for the past thirty years. It's estimated that the global growth rate of the mushroom market is 9.5% per year.

If you look at these processes that are underway, you may come to understand why I look at civilization as a phenomenon that we should attempt to phase out. Civilization to me is an aberrant and dangerous form of existence, that has the potential to do vast amounts of damage to the natural world. However, like everything else it is subject to the laws of physics. If the resources that it happens to extract are in severe shortage, the degree to which it can impose its influence on the natural world is restrained as a consequence.

This is what has happened to us. We can no longer afford to be as needlessly wasteful as we once were. Thus we witness a transition in the type of food we eat and the type of lives we live. This transition won't per definition be very pleasant. It's not very pleasant to live in a large city, in fact, people who live in a large city tend to have relatively few children. However, this transition is nonetheless necessary, as it ensures that vast swathes of land are opened up for the natural world to reconquer.

The vast plots of land that were once cultivated by humans but now harbor young eager trees are responsible for a phenomenon that explains where all of our carbon emissions have gone. There is a large unidentified carbon sink equivalent to more than a third of our own annual emissions. In reality, this carbon mostly enters the forests that regrow on land we don't pay attention to. In a period of perhaps twenty years, tropical rainforest can regrow faster than forest in New York. As the Earth warms in Northern latitudes, forest there will probably be able to regrow faster than it does today as well.

What will happen in the decades ahead is that we will find ourselves sequestering far more carbon dioxide than we anticipated we would. The reason for this is twofold: Our economy will contract faster that we expected, which has the effect of restricting our emissions. At the same time, our inability to utilize so much land will enable forests to regrow on the plots of land that we find ourselves forced to abandon.

In addition to these two processes, there will be a decline in the emission of other greenhouse gasses, as a result of our economic contraction. Livestock accounts for 65% of the ozone that is emitted by humans, but most of our livestock will disappear. Similarly, methane emissions will decline, as will emissions of black carbon. Finally, the regrowth of secondary forests on soils abandoned by humans will have the effect of changing the Earth's albedo, all of which will combine to ensure that temperatures will eventually stabilize.

This does not somehow magically ensure that everything beautiful will be preserved however. Coral reefs are very vulnerable, as are our megafauna. This is the crown of the creation and it would be unfortunate to lose these animals. There are two solutions to preserve these natural treasures. The coral reefs can be protected through use of sulfate aerosols, which should be sprayed during brief periods of severe heat. This will prevent the death of the coral reefs, while causing minimal harm.

Similarly, the Earth's surviving megafauna have to be evacuated. Hippopotamuses are thriving in Colombia and the Amazon rainforest is in severe need of new megafauna to replace the megafauna that went extinct. What has to happen is for new colonies of Orangutans, Gorilla's, Elephants and other animals to be introduced to the Amazon rainforest and other places where they can found new colonies for themselves. Africa can not be trusted with preserving all of its megafauna, so these animals have to be given better opportunities where they will hopefully manage to sit out this strange period that lies ahead of us.

How much of the wild world will survive the era of civilization depends on how willing we are to question and challenge our preconceived notions about how the world has to work. All life has value, not just the life that manages to persist in pristine undisturbed conditions without any symptom of human influence. In Europe today, Redwood trees are growing that have not seen this continent for millions of years. Future generations hundreds of years from now will come to witness enormous redwood forests that make it seem as if we were born onto Middle Earth. Who could be opposed to this?