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How? By making use of abandoned farms.As the market for food is globalized,infertile land becomes uncompetitive.Farmers in barren places can't compete with people growing crops on better land elsewhere.As a result, farming has started to retreat from many regions,and trees have started to return.One estimate claims that two-thirds of land in the US that was once forested but was cleared for farming has become forested again.Another estimate suggests that by 2030,an area in Europe the size of Poland will be vaccated by farmers.

The American pronghorn can run so fast because it evolved to escape the American cheetah.The surviving animals live in ghost ecosystems adapted to threats from species that no longer exist.Today, it may be possible to resurrect those ghosts,to bring back lost species using genetic material.For instance, there's been research in to cloning woolly mammoths from frozen remains.But even if it's not possible,we can still restore many of the ecosystems the world has lost.

There were armadillos as big as small cars,an eight foot beaver,and a bird with a 26 foot wingspan.Almost everywhere, the world's megafauna were driven to extinction, often by human hunters.Some species still survive in parts of Africa and Asia.1 In other places, you can still see the legacy of these great beasts.Most trees are able to resprout where their trunk is broken to withstand the loss of much of their bark and to survive splitting, twisting and trampling,partly because they evolved to survive attacks by elephants.

We all know about the dinosaurs that once roamed the planet,but long after they went extinct,great beasts we call the megafauna lived on every continent.In the Americas, ground sloths the size of elephants pulled down trees with their claws.Saber-toothed cats the size of brown bears hunted in packs,but they were no match for short-faced bears,which stood thirteen feet on their hind legs,and are likely to have driven these cats away from their prey.

During World War I, one of the horrors of trench warfare was a poisonous yellow cloud called mustard gas. For those unlucky enough to be exposed, it made the air impossible to breathe, burned their eyes, and caused huge blisters on exposed skin. Scientists tried desperately to develop an antidote to this vicious weapon of war. In the process they discovered the gas was irrevocably damaging the bone marrow of affected soldiers— halting its ability to make blood cells. Despite these awful effects, it gave scientists an idea.