Rezwan wrote:

Yes, this is fantasy speculation. But when people speculate about anthropogenic environmental impacts, they tend to specluate in the direction of catastrophe. I’m just speculating in the other direction. It’s more of a psychological thing. Although I think there is potential here. After all, plants are big climate regulators. Photosynthesis is what turned the planet from toxic ball of chaos to…well, without algae and then grass this would be a much different world.

All life-forms have an impact, there must be ways for them to tune into it, and leverage it towards bringing about an environment in their favor. Again, I refer back to the holistic management folks, the gardeners of eden folks. We’re just out of touch with our micro and macro-climate regulation feedback systems. Some links: Animal impact and environment;
A slideshow on water cycle;
Great book on human role.

This assumes that we can get a handle on population growth. Thus far, the only way we have managed to do that is to industrialize our societies and that consumes copious quantities of energy. What we are faced with now is industrializing the two largest populations on Earth. There is about to be a huge spike in energy consumption that must be dealt with and there is no single solution to the problem. Conservation IS the single most important measure, but conservation alone will NOT do the job.