Makes me think of some research one of my botany professors was getting started. It involved discovering what goes on in a typical acre of oak savanna in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. First, of course, they had to do a literature survey in order to establish a workable definition of “typical”, but then came the process of deciding how many and which parameters count for considering several plots sufficiently similar to qualify as both “the same” yet independent. One parameter that got argued about was slope, as a result of which they did a topographical analysis of the entire Willamette Valley which was oak savanna at the time settlers first arrived and determined an average slope! Then they had to exclude a substantial portion of the existing oak savanna because early settlers often planted fruit trees in among oak groves so that there were apple, pear, crabapple, cherry, and other trees growing essentially wild all over.
In the end they could only find three sites that qualified, but noted for the eventual papers to be written that more sites should be studied that deviated by specifiable aspects from the original three plots.
I think what really impressed me was just how much research went into just getting the study set up, including the above topographical survey but also an examination of historical records to try to distinguish between existing oak savanna that was successor to original oak savanna and which was on land that had been used for other things but then returned to the savanna condition (of course students got to do the work of sifting through land records at the several county courthouses while grad students did the various statistical analyses).
Substitute “everglades” for “planetary” and you have pretty much what I explained to some parents when teaching in Miami! (They were parents of a kid who said in class that it was “obvious” that we could kill all the snakes in the 'Glades and things would be fine, and I corrected him.)
The nothing happening could be knowledge if something was expected to happen, though not very useful knowledge unless multiple such empty corridors were also observed.
Or even ten days from now quite often. Where I live the input for forecasting has increased by a factor somewhere towards two hundred over the last three decades, but the accuracy of forecasts hasn’t improved proportionately.
The impact of humans on this globe is extensive, there is practically no place on Earth that has not been affected by human activity. Truly pristine forest is very rare. If you go back in history long enough, even apparently natural forests have been used by humans or grow on sites used by humans.
For me, it was an illuminating moment when I read about the wild rainforests in South America. Some wild forests in very distant places that had not been even visited in hundreds of years, were growing on ruins of ancient towns. The sites were abandoned when Europeans (Columbus and others) reached the coasts and brought deadly diseases to America. The locals in the general region believed the sites were cursed and therefore, did not use or visit the sites. 500 years was a long enough time for the vegetation to return to a natural-looking state.
This is one more example of how the appearance can be misleading. We make our conclusions based on what we see and maybe read from our records. That is not the whole truth and may sometimes lead to fallacious conclusions.
Botanists even into the 1980s thought that the Willamette Valley oak savanna was its natural state. Then they discovered from test plots that if you start with one oak grove and let nature do its thing you end up with an oak forest. The solution came from anthropologists: the natives had annual game drives using fire: light the autumn grasses ablaze and wait a mile away for the game animals to come fleeing it. It turns out that a grass fire kills off almost all oak seedlings and saplings except those growing where the shade of an oak grove kept the grass greener so it smoldered rather than burned. Of course they didn’t bother to put out the fire after they had the game animals they needed, so the fires kept going. IIRC the estimate was that any given portion of the valley was burned down to the soil once every three years with exceptions when storms interrupted the spread of the flames.
The only pristine forest I’ve ever seen was in a wilderness area in the Oregon Cascade Mountains. On an ordinary map it was hard to see why this one large area hadn’t been logged like the rest, but when we reached that on the third morning of a backpacking trip it became clear: the terrain was just too rugged to be able to get any of the huge logs out, so that forest section was left untouched. Its borders showed evidence of fires that had burned right up to it but not continued, though there were streaks of ashy soil where burning material tumbled in among those trees.
We were told that native lore considered the area to be the realm of a guardian spirit who kept fire and pestilence out, so apparently the forest outside it had undergone change historically, not just in the last couple of centuries.