I guess it depends on the location. Some have cattle and deforestation. Natural reseeding can be slow. Though in England if you leave a bit of land alone it'll pretty much be woodland in 30 years or so.

If anyone fancies donating to plant a few 100 or 1000 trees https://donate.trees.org/campaign/trees-for-the-futures-eart... does good stuff for about 15c/tree. It doesn't take very much to cancel out your personal CO2 load that way. I donated I think $100 for 1000 trees a while back.

At that rate, Bezos could offset 5 years of the entire world's CO2 emissions?

Unfortunately it relies on volunteer villagers with unused land so there's a limit to how much capital could be deployed that way.

> what is stopping nature doing this

My money is on humans.

Most often its grazing livestock, they like to eat seedlings.

It's pretty easy to mitigate this on a farm by roping or fencing off a patch of seedlings.

Livestock actually enriches the soil by their poop.

Livestock eat to extract nutrients. Their waste is not more nutrient rich than the stuff they eat. That would be impossible.

Manure is fertilizer.

https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/composting/manures/cow-manu...

Humans.