Sooo for the last few hundereds of millions of years, which included a much warmer periods than the current one, trees somehow always managed to regrow, and chose this very moment to cease doing it?
It does sound contradictory when said like this imo. Isn't plant growth the whole point of a greenhouse?
Logging practices over the past two hundred years have had big impacts on how the forest ecology works: what trees grow, what animals and insects live there and how much floor litter there is. All of this has an impact on whether a fire comes through and sterilizes the soil or leaves it fertile.
There was immense pressure for the forest service to support logging and grazing, both of which dramatically alter the landscape.
Another complication is that the native Americans in the area had their own silviculture practice that optimized for their own needs (by and large not lumber), so pre-white historical guides aren’t necessarily “natural” either.
So the forests always regrew, but then we changed them (and stopped allowing fires). In the meanwhile the environment changed as we pumped more carbon into the atmosphere. Now when we reintroduce fire the results are different.
The fire intensities are much higher due to various factors. This kills more of the mature trees and alters the soil nutrient composition such that it become water repellent.
The same effects have been noted in Australian mega-fires over the past decade.
So what I'm saying is that we won't even have been the first species to have done so.
Under your given time span of “hundreds of millions of years” I assume essentially square inch of land underwent desertification at some point, if it wasn’t buried beneath the sea. I mean, there weren’t even trees before 385 million years ago.
Could be that we were just wrong about how quickly growth restarts after a fire.
Uh, no. Egypt was desert when the Pyramids were built. Egyptian civilization existed (and still does) in a narrow ribbon along the Nile; the Pyramids of Giza are only about five miles from it. They're certainly not in the middle of nowhere, that's just the camera angles working. (See https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Giza-pyr... for an alternative view.)
Pictures of the Pyramid of Djoser (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Saqqara_...) look like it's in the middle of nowhere, but it's four miles from the Nile, too, and only two thousand feet away from fertile farmland.
Meidum? Again, four miles from the Nile and 800 feet from farms, despite photos looking like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/02_meidu....