That's the thing about nature. It has immensely complex programming that we don't understand. Often a "plague" of one thing exists to rebalance another thing.

That's the thing about nature. It has immensely complex programming that we don't understand. Often a "plague" of one thing exists to rebalance another thing. If unmanaged nature does run wild with one or a few species, at some point they overstay their welcome and get rebalanced. Of course the final equalizer is fire. And that's something that we as humans really dislike, because it burns our work (and homes and sometimes even us) down. So we prevent it. But completely left to itself, nature does tend to stabilize after some period. As for western Europe, I live in Netherlands. The nitrogen problem is entirely manmade (animal farming waste). Were we to stop ranching at such high densities and producing unnatural levels of animal waste, the nitrogen levels would not be nearly so high. I have also lived in plant farmland areas in the south of Holland, and we have plagues of burning weed that grows. But it turns out, that plant grows in places with excess nitrogen. It feeds on it and eventually draws it out of the soil. After a few years, that "weed" stops growing and the soil nitrogen levels are more normal. At this moment I am in central Portugal trying to grow some trees. The thorny vines (blackberry brambles I believe, but I just don't keep up with the names) are a huge problem. However, they provide benefits in dry soil because they grow very well, provide shade, provide food for foraging animals, and help prevent soil erosion when the rains finally come. Nature doesn't seem to be concerned with human comfort. I f*cking hate the vines, but I do see their purpose. After some years of study of permaculture and actual experiments, plus a decent amount of reading, I think our best hope as humans is to develop high efficiency vertical farms and to keep our actual earth footprint low... and to start devoping subterranian habitation. On the last point, it's really a wonder to have a home which stays around 68F all year. Heat it up just a little and it is cosy. It is fire-proof, ultra efficient, and it can still be light with skylights and a south/west facing opening. Honestly, for a fraction of the mental energy we spend on designing scalable software systems, we could make livable earth-friendly human food ad habitation systems. This is not rocket science; after all, primative civilizations already figured out some of these things.