Oh, I think something will regrow there even if humans die off. It's more likely that the planet will continue to live, and some other intelligent lifeform aris

Oh, I think something will regrow there even if humans die off. It's more likely that the planet will continue to live, and some other intelligent lifeform arises as a successor. This isn't really about saving the planet. Over a large enough timescale, the planet will recover just fine -- as a living system, the global ecology can and does regenerate. Instead, what we're fighting for is a place for humans within the global ecosystem. "Human intervention" need not be destructive. It has been destructive because we came to see ourselves as apart from the ecosystem, rather than being part of the ecosystem. There have been cultures, to one degree or another, see themselves and conduct themsleves as part of the ecosystem, and tended the lands as such. Wastelands can be remediated. In India, there are people working with marginalized castes and ethnic groups to restore wastelands. It's not something that works over a single season, but it is something that starts yielding stuff useful to humans within a single generation. The work that these people do ends up restoring land from bare rock eroded by poor land management practices. These were land no one wanted, and now they are both productive (yielding something useful) while at the same time, a fertile, active ecosystem beyond the human-centric view of the world. There doesn't have to be a dichotomy between "human intervention", and "leaving nature alone". We're a part of the natural ecosystem -- how could we really ever "leave it alone"?