The past was amazing. One example: Trees predated organisms that broke them down, so at some point there were just piles of trees, many tens or even a few hundreds of feet, on land, and that's why some trees are theorized to grow so tall so fast.
Just on the face of it though, you're a layperson, but you find soil, coal, peat, lots of biotic mass almost everywhere, what do you think put it there? Deep, deep soil. It's trees. You drive through California or Illinois or Texas or New York or wherever you live, and you see all these farms. Single stands of weird trees. There were forests. You can look at Google Maps and see how parts of the Amazon today, which are obviously being poached, look like the fringes of the US too.
Not only was land mass covered in forests. You know there were indigenous Americans absolutely everywhere when Europeans arrived in the Americas. Not only that, but climate change predated the arrival of settlers. There were forests completely cleared of brush, that the settlers commented you could run horses through, because indigenous Americans had been using wildfires to manage the land as game parks. There were indigenous people everywhere in Australia too.
The oceans were full of life. Just like preposterous amounts of fish before industrial fishing. Romans would routinely describe the Mediterranean as boiling. They weren't being stupid, they were describing the colossal number of fish in there. If you go diving in a genuinely protected area like the Galapagos, it's insane, there are just an incredible amount of fish. You look at a deep sea trawler, it pulls out just an insane amount of fish. It was like that everywhere.
I don't know how laypeople get this idea that Earth was always as sick as it is now. It was like 10-100x more filled with life 250 years ago. It's ridiculous. People aren't wrong about the bugs. There is a far longer and stubborn cultural heritage of documenting nature, long predating Republicans, so it couldn't be just politics that has led people astray. Maybe they're just stupider.