Wasn't every nation? Europe and China have lost almost all their forests. Pre-European New Zealand natives exterminated the giant flightless moa. There was a powerful ancient African civilization that died out because they used up all the artesian water. I'd say nobody cared about conservation until rich people we comfortable enough to stop worrying about their next meal and look at broader issues.

I don't understand why you are being downvoted. You're 100% right.

I specifically mention the West because it is the West (the EU) who are pressuring the Philippines to better regulate their fishing industry, as per the fine article, and also because it is the West who are now comfortable enough to worry about the tragedy of the commons since they are done exploiting it.

BTW, elsewhere I just read that the amount of forests in England has now recovered above the levels recorded in Domesday Book (William Conqueror's land survey in 1086).

Same's happening in many countries in Europe. I have a picture of my birth home, taken in 1903 from a nearby hill. The landscape is mostly bare, almost everything except the actual fields is used for cattle. Now you can't take a picture like that. Almost everything is covered by a forest, but you can't see it from the trees growing on the hill.

Surprising! But now it sounds like rich people are regrowing the forests that the poor people of earlier centuries destroyed. Evidence that rich people help the environment and poor people harm it. Still no sign of the harm that the grandparent claimed rich people are doing to the environment.

England might have been lucky enough (blessed with rain and all). Southern France and Greece, not so much, and will probably never recover pre-roman empire forests.

If there's not enough rain to sustain a forest, then even should they have been left untouched in antiquity they wouldn't be there anymore now either right?

Where I live, you can't really destroy a forest. You can hack it down and lay concrete over the ground; if you then leave it there, in a matter of decades or centuries it'll be a forest again, if you don't regularly weed it out and hack it down again.

If climate changes - as it has changed in the Mediterranean, prior to industrialisation - that's then different.

I don’t know, so their children and grandchildren will have fish to catch and live off of?

As opposed to eating today? As per the fine article, legal fishing methods net 0-6 KG of fish per day. Explosive fishing nets 15-45 KG of fish per day.

...because the area has been overfished.

> In the Philippines, stocks have declined precipitously. According to a report by the Philippine national statistics board, the average daily catch in 1970 was 45 pounds. By 2000, that had dropped to 4.5 pounds.