The Wildwood

Abstract

The three grave environmental threats that we face today are those of climate change, mass extinction, and pestilence. To mitigate these threats, the most important things we can do are (1) stop eating animals and their products and (2) afforest wherever and whenever we can. The first course of action makes possible the second. By no longer eating animals, we make available large areas of land suitable for afforestation. These twin policies will go a long way toward solving our three environmental threats. Afforested land will sequester significant amounts of carbon dioxide, arrest the changes in land use that are the most important cause of extinction, and provide a suitably undisturbed home for animal reservoirs of disease. In afforesting the land, we must let the past be our guide: restore the land to what it was before humans arrived and ruined the neighborhood.