Help me to rehabilitate millions of acres in my region.

See Hes wrote:That's a challenge for many Generations by focusing first on your climate and average grow.

It will maybe even take longer than the time needed to destroy this huge habitat.

First you should get a hand in hand system where every farmer should start with alley cropping as much possible.
(Remember, the nature will always return to a forest landscape.)

With alley cropping (if all work hand in hand, and all farmers would pull the same string) you would have made a huge step ahead and many hands (all farmers and landlords) would be joining in.

Details you write down here is in my point of view completely impossible (moneywise and also see the workloads)...

Then reintroduce animals on small areas, where they can live their habits and let them do restauration works by expanding.
Look at Allan Savory's projects where he supports holistic regenerative management by using animals- even domestic ones, where the roaming big herds are lost...  

Absolute too big for my little 8 acre retirement food forest mindset, but I would think this way:
What can be done in 8 acres can be done in millions of acres, as long the whole population builds and the will and the interest is there.
(which is in my case only the family needed)

Imagine, just every household would plant 2 pots with trees how much could be changed in just a few years. Also in a climate of BC.

Some of the destruction will take a lot of time to see the beneficial results of the various processes, and in other the places on the territory, I think the changes toward the positive will much more quickly be apparent.  I agree that if many people that live on the land were to put the focus on these sorts of ideas than we will accomplish great things in a short time.  I did mention some of the things you discuss here in my opening post:  

And in cattle and horse areas, initiating rotational grazing, silvo-pasturing, and alley grazing, and combining these things with coppice and pollarding of deciduous species on contour or keyline to capture water and nutrients.  

In this region there is not so much a landlord/peasant economy though the colonial model might lead one to think that.  There are people who are not indigenous who have settled on and occupy the land and have (in a colonial sense) legal title to it, and these would have to be approached, again with an idea to support common interests (such as water scarcity/fire risk and low animal weight) and approach with statistics and research and (hopefully) and an increasing amount of local examples of how processes can be to their benefit.

Jay Angler wrote:I've been thinking about the entire concept of Economics:
a) sustainability
b) is the whole greater than the sum of the parts
c) is it realistic to look at economics as "constant growth"

Trees grow until they die. A resource is only renewable, if it stays near where it was created. When we export a whole tree overseas (which is being done in North America) we are exporting carbon, which will return to us as air moves all over the planet. But the phosphorus, and many other minerals in that tree will only return to the valley through means such as volcanic action locally, or dust from the atmosphere. Trees, with the help of mycorrhizae,  can and do bring many minerals from deep in the earth to the surface, but reading books on coppicing, tells me that this is not necessarily a speedy process - even coppicing needs to be done with sustainability in mind.

The local people need livelihoods. Most humans given the option, will not want to live the way people did 500 years ago. So figuring out truly sustainable local employment needs to be evaluated carefully. To me, the first step is truly sustainable energy. Much of modern technology/farming/housing etc is completely dependent on fossil fuels directly or indirectly. For example, if the area develops the tourist trade, how many of those tourists will arrive by plane or car? If they arrive by electric car, where will the electricity come from to recharge those cars? Where will the energy come from to build the roads used to take tourists to the places they want to see, or hunt, or fish, etc? What are the natural resources which would allow the people to produce a net energy gain when you subtract all the embodied energy that many "green" energy sometimes seems to gloss over? I believe there are ways. Yes, some "damage" may result from installing sustainable power generation, but Nature has shown tremendous capacity to heal damage if give the support she needs to do so. But I think that an important first step is to look at the resources available and determine how energy can be captured responsibly for a very long time.

A resource can be renewable with export but I think that the modern export process is so completely out of whack in volume and in time scale with the reality of sustainabilty that your statement sadly rings very true.  And it is true that the closer a resource stays to its source location, the easier it is to close the loops of sustainability and create actual regenerative ecosystems and economies. The phosphorus issue is one that many don't discuss or don't know about, and it is serious for agricultural nutritiional crops.  I'm pretty sure that the trees will adapt with their genetics to phosphorus-poor soils, but in the end, if ecoystem health is our priority (as the provincial government says it is heading toward), then we should not be exporting anything.  Our mutual province, British Columbia, is guilty of exporting massive amounts of trees in current decades and is still doing so; this is being done completely unsustainably as far as ecology is concerned.  In most cases, it is done in areas which have hundreds of years of replacement time for the same volume in others where the climate is more conducive (like on Vancouver Island) the volume is being much more rapidly replaced but the ecology is diminishing with each harvest cycle.

Energy is going to be a huge need.  And the way those needs will be met will likely involve a lot of small-scale hydro projects, with some solar, wind, and gasification.
 

I believe it was in this thread (but I could be wrong) that the subject of beavers came up.

Roberto had recommended the book, "Eager, the Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why they Matter," by Ben Goldfarb to me and I'm 2/3rds of the way through a copy I got from my Regional Library (shameless plug: encouraging your library to buy good books like this is *really* important, because instead of just me reading a personal copy, lots of people will get the opportunity to do so who might not otherwise be able to afford it).

I'm convinced! Anything that can be done to reintroduce beavers to the watershed will only help with ecological resilience, water retention, carbon sequestration and more. Chapter 7 is about Cattle Ranches - which have tended to kill beaver on sight in many places - and how much more quality grass grows on beaver meadows than on dryer land. Of course the cattle *have* to be rotationally grazed to accomplish this, but they've been proving in areas of Africa for more than a decade that rotational grazing is critical to habitat restoration and stream recovery.

That said, it does have to be done with care - the book describes beaver dam analogues that may be needed to repair severely damaged stream beds in preparation for beavers to move in and beaver baffles to prevent road flooding in places, so there may need to be compromises made, but I've known for some time that BC *needs* more beavers, and this book supports that in spades!

In the forth post of this thread I mention and link to a CBC article about growing fungi insulation.  One of our Permies staff members created a fungi insulated door at this year's Permaculture Technology Jamboree.  Paul and team held an amazing event, filmed it, and made a movie.  This youtube vid is one of the trailers for the movie that is all about Beau's project:  

So cool that this is being done by people at permies!  I have high hopes for the future!