As one who has seen the transition from Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring to today’s climate change debate, I don’t see a lot of general hope. However, as a teacher (at times) I still teach, sometimes by example. For most of us, one person can’t change the world. I’ve heard the bible quoted as saying somewhere that god will “destroy those who destroy the earth” so the “dominion over” aspect has been over emphasized by some perhaps. The best slave owners treat their slaves well, so the best stewards of earth would also treat earth well. However, the only one I can change is me and I even find that difficult. We just have to do the best we can. The land here is forested but in 1812 it was prairie; the understory needs to be burned. While teaching English to a small group of students in China, I did my best teaching without realizing it. That is, after a bus trip one student mentioned, “I was really impressed. You were eating peanuts but you didn’t just throw the shells on the floor of the bus like we do.” I put them in a bag. I’ll end on a positive note. As for snakes, I leave debris in my yard to give them a place to live; we have abundant non-poisonous garter and other snakes despite the neighbors killing all they can catch. In the last 50 years, I find the roadsides in the US have less litter, the town of Yellville has a sewage treatment plant instead of using the Town Branch creek for sewer, the town no longer operates a dump that is constantly burning because people always burned their trash, and the Buffalo River became a national park instead of ending up being dammed like the other two rivers nearby. I had no role in those improvements, so perhaps there is hope for society as a whole. Here in Baxter County (Arkansas, USA) we put a land fill upstream from our water source and accepted trash from several Arkansas counties nearby until the company went bankrupt. People whose trash was hauled are now whining and complaining about paying $18 a year to pay for landfill management that was not written in stone in the original landfill permit. Such is life. Sometimes we learn the hard way.
Short notes are not my specialty.
:) nor mine, but yours was an easy and welcome read - my experiences echo yours, with the same result i think… no idea what will happen but realise the only person I can change is myself.
Ignorance is evil.
Talking about religion it started with Sumer and Ancient Greek civilizations, when people were separated from nature and became something higher, closer to anthropomorphic gods, and nature became an opposite, low level. And Christianity is a product of Ancient Greek and Roman influence.
In Canada, Indigenous peoples have spoken about how, when they agreed to share the land, they were surprised to find out what happened to it. I am not Indigenous, but got a bit of a taste of their surprise when I went to an area where I grew up. It was being converted to a Bus Rapid Transit route. My first though was ‘what the hell’, followed by ‘I didn’t give permission for this’. It was grassland, and was a place I could almost call sacred to me. But that “waste land”, home to a number of life forms, was ploughed up and ‘developed’ for the ‘greater human good’. People can enhance environments, but more often they just destroy them. And don’t talk to me about the Parker Wetlands…
There’s also a weird lack of knowledge, even around people who mean well. There was a Facebook meme showing sheep crowding into the shade of a windmill. It was captioned something like ‘we hope this awakens awareness of the importance of trees’.
I had to point out that the area the sheep were in looked to be craggy prairie, which would be full of yummy grass. So, yeah, no trees there, but the sentiment is genuine. I got a comment about how ‘trees can be planted’.
I think in this case, my first warning sign was that ‘i’m a young(er) person on FB talking to her elders’. It’s hard for me to abstain from correcting misinformation, but picking my battles is probably for the best. 
I don’t know how that all turned out, but as an ‘older person’ I welcome the viewpoint of ‘Younger’ people. Often you open viewpoints that I had not thought of. Planting trees in that pasture may be a good thing, but the farmer may not want to disturb the pasture for the sheep. I don’t really see how it could make that much difference, but these days, farmers have to maximise output to stay alive. Perhaps they felt that trees would degrade the pasture, but why not? The damage to pasture should not be too great as long as they have adequate rainfall.
Talks about sheep are complicated and we should start with how enviroment was changed by people and sheep and how these “pastures” were created, actually, by killing thousands of trees and countless organisms that were attached to them, so those pics with philosophic captions may do good job helping some people realise it, and we only can hope they choose local species.
I think as you said that it is a really complicated topic. I just want to remind that some of those pastures originated so many years ago that there are actually species specifically attached to them; or maybe some pastures were there even after humans first evolved, and humans helped them to stay through the course of climate changes or/and another kinds of changes that might have happend through history.
One of the most diverse ecosytsems in Europe are mediterranean pastures, with one of the higher Shannon and Margalef index of biodiversity registered until this moment (or at least my ecology teachers told me so). Those pastures might or might not be originally created by humans, but they are maintained thanks to the presence of human livestock; and due to rural abandonment those pastures are dissapearing, and being replaced with other kinds of ecosystems, like bushes or even forests, that have nowhere near the same number of species, and are also very different ecologically. One clear and very used example, the Great Bustard (Otis tarda) is known to depend directly on this pastures for its courtship and survival; and its IUCN conservation status is Vulnerable Globally.
This is obviously a well known example, but there are many species attached to those ecosistems, and maybe there are some that we just do not know yet. The plantation of trees might also kill thousands of organisms and even threat the survival of some species, so we have to be careful about how we manage the enviroment, and take in account all the options.
And when institutions are those that are considered “ignorant” towards living beings?
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sebastiaan_Luyssaert/publication/306250692_Current_European_policies_are_unlikely_to_jointly_foster_carbon_sequestration_and_protect_biodiversity/links/59cd0fe9aca2723578d9c7af/Current-European-policies-are-unlikely-to-jointly-foster-carbon-sequestration-and-protect-biodiversity.pdf
Two other examples:
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Here many people, also among those that deal with forests management, are convinced that forest cuts are beneficial to the wellness of the woods themselves. By the way, are there any papers dealing with the impacts on fauna made by forestry?
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Common ivy (Hedera helix) is a weed that inevitably leads to the death of trees. So sometimes willing “environmentalists” cut the climbing trunks of the ivy just to save the trees.
Talks about sheep are indeed complicated. I don’t like sheep (I like wool, though). I believe sheep are one of the most damaging grazers as they cut the plants off at a very low level, so are more damaging than, say, cattle. It has taken me a very long time to accept that humans are part of the environment, but what humans have done has also created opportunities for other life forms. It’s cold comfort, but as mentioned above by @pdfuenteb, it’s something we have to acknowledge.
There are many papers - go to google scholar and type in “impacts on fauna made by forestry” and go from there.
Talking about Europe even the oldest forests we have now, that were considered “original” have pollen of Wheat in the soil, so everything already was transformed and we already got forests on first deforested land. Choice needs to be made what we need, original habitat or something that is established there for centuries.
Bustard is in danger now not because of damaging in only some pastures, the whole reason it started declining is using steppes as fields, smashing eggs with machines. But we also should think where Great Bustards were before those steppes appeared, where they done with human participation or not? Appears, almost everything in Europe was transformed by humans with creating new habitats for new species.
Oh wow, now I feel like the ignorant one! My area doesn’t really have a sheep industry, so I’m learning from this conversation as well. 
BTW, for context, here’s a screenshot of the facebook post. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the actual source for the photo itself.
In retrospect, I think I was being nitpicky, hehe.
Unfortunately I don’t have much online time, but just quickly: I don’t agree that Hedera inevitably leads to the death of trees. It can make a tree more top-heavy and so liable to fall in a storm, but it doesn’t directly harm a tree. And trees that fall in storms are rarely killed: they have just changed their orientation and will often put up new trunks. On the other hand, there can be a case for cutting ivy off a tree if the tree has rare lichens or mosses on the trunk. As someone says above, it is all very complicated.
Don’t feel bad. My area (Canada) does not have a large sheep industry, but somehow, not sure how, I found about them. I’ve also been to New Zealand (where there are lots of sheep) and seen mountain and hill slopes all brown from sheep grazing. I hiked up a mountain in Wannaka, and had to dodge sheep ‘crap’ most of the way up. There was nothing around but dry grass and thorn bushes. I finally thought I was away from the sheep, but when I got to the top, there they were again! The picture you posted is a very good approximation of what I saw.
Looks as if it could be in South Africa. Have also had that discussion around trees on FB.
The location seams to be Portugal, I just searched the image on the internet https://rr.sapo.pt/2019/05/11/pais/ha-risco-elevado-de-incendios-devido-ao-calor-extremo/noticia/150908/