One interesting way to view our current predicament is through the lens of ecological succession.
The study of succession is really just the study of a certain ecosystem within a given slice of time, with the observation that the ecosystem will progress, regress, persist and hold in a balance, change, or collapse in a certain way. As such, a succession will have a certain marked off beginning and end.
The beginning typically occurs after a significant enough disturbance, such as a wildfire, volcanic event, landslide, severe storm, human development, or even mass extinction - ends in their own respects - which free up space and resources for new ecosystems to form. Or else an existing system is colonized by invasive species, which alter the balance of the system and pull in new and disruptive elements.
At the beginning, you have your pioneer species come in, and their ongoing actions on the environment set out the conditions for subsequent species to emerge, and then so on in groupings or waves until the system stabilizes and becomes a climax community. At least until that climax community undermines the conditions for its own existence, is colonized, or is wiped out by some powerful and catastrophic force.
One of the implications of this is that everything grows together and supports each other - at least until power concentrates, which we will get to. So if a forest or field is left to its own devices, it takes the action of the totality of the current grouping of life forms to create the conditions for certain types of life to flourish.
A certain species of tree for example may need a lot of sun exposure, and so requires fertile and clear land to grow tall and remain exposed, and as that species' density increases, its propagation slows in that given area, but then creates niches for other types of species which can form something like an understory of small trees and shrubs which require less light, and in which the new soil composition is favorable.
And then the selection of those trees and plants depends on the local availability of their seed, and their modes of propagation, and the composition of the wildlife that is also feeding on and propagating those plants.
So of course we can see that this can take a long time, and really whatever thrives just happens to thrive given the vagaries of the natural forces within a given slice of time in a given ecosystem's lifespan.
We can also view the simple clearing of a plot of land for a garden as a small process of succession - and then the existence of the human settlement and the human organism itself as part of a larger process of succession.
When you clear forest land and then fence it off and dig up the ground to plant a garden, if that clearing is large enough and traumatic enough, which it usually is, you won't just have another section of forest spring up from the soil if you stop the process and just let it go. That would be rather preposterous and miraculous.
This is the case even though you're in the middle of the forest and surrounded by forest. No, what you get is the proliferation of "weeds," plants that are well suited to that cleared space, which tend to be undesirable and which don't have enough nutrition or body to be thought of as suitable food. Who knows what you might get in a couple of generations? But that's more than enough time for starvation to set in.
If you could simply tear up the land and then scatter a bunch of desired seeds for food crops, and then have an ecosystem of desired food species spring up and flourish without any intensive human labor, why, we'd have our mythical Eden ages ago. But this is simply not the case. A thoroughly altered landscape will take off in all sorts of wild directions away from the interest of the entity doing the altering, and it could take generations to produce desirable food again, so it takes labor and knowledge following the altering to set the conditions in place to maintain the desired food crops.
Which is why you typically see large-scale agricultural systems requiring enormous amounts of human, animal, and mechanical labor and concentrated resources. Even no-till and permaculture methods require a fair amount of labor and much care.
There might have been something approximating an Eden some time ago, in which human activity was low impact and the ecological era allowed for an abundance of usable and desirable food as a matter of course. But much has happened since then.
There is a lot of interesting stuff to get at within that progression: say, the nature of indigenous communities and the nature and origins of civilization and extreme human expansion, and why those things happened.
But I only have the time and energy to get to my central point: that we have this situation in which power is concentrating and human activity is perpetually intensifying and expanding. As a result of this, to grow a whole mess of desired foods taken from all different parts of the world over the surface of vast expanses of land alters the land in profound ways that sets all sorts of chaotic living forces in motion.
There is a relationship between organized destruction and creation in which the more concentrated power is present, the more propensity there is for that power to affect the environment around it and ultimately undermine the original generative forces of that thing's power, in which that thing concentrated its power in a distinct ecological time frame forged over generations upon generations of succession.
And to maintain that power, and to continually produce the objects of desire which are to maintain and expand that power, a constant stream of labor and technological application must be applied to hold in place that given mode of organization, which of course faces diminishing returns in the form of soil degradation and disrupted external ecosystems, which requires further expansion and intensification of activity, until there is no more space to tear up and exploit. And then?
