The US baby boom is not really meaningful on a global scale

Uselessness can be useful for a different context. For example, the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge is flourishing today in part because on account of the sand it was considered agriculturally useless land that farmers struggled to do anything with during the Great Depression. So it was easy for the government to buy out the stakeholders and begin protecting and recovering that special ecosystem.

In the case of pine plantations, they are quite useful to people because they fairly passively produce a vast amount of wood that the owner of the land can sell at their leisure.

However, in the course of optimizing the pine plantations for economic benefit, the benefit to the wildlife is reduced. More densely packing the trees means that you have more wood growing in the same area rather than leaving unused space. But in doing so that means less sunlight hitting the ground. That energy goes to making more wood rather than to supporting the groundcover, and the groundgover is the more important of the two for most animals.

Exactly lol you called it

Land that has no buildings on it is not necessarily in a natural state… there are grades to “undeveloped land” with some having much more ecological value than others. If I look at the side of the road by the local interstate yes there is technically a “forest” but it’s mostly like loblolly pine plantation with the trees densely packed to each other to maximize the amount that can be cut and invasive privet growing in what little space remains between them. All those leaves trunks and stems in close proximity choke out the sun reaching the ground (preventing forbs, legumes and grasses that need that sun from growing and making food for the rest of the foodchain) and puts impassable woody thickets between the pine trunks that block most anything from moving though the area unless they can fly or climb above it.

Looks wild enough to the uninformed but ecologically useless to the majority of animals adapted to what was once open and parklike easily navigable longleaf pine savanna with insanely diverse groundcover supporting many animal diets and providing shelter.

I live in a rather xeric sandhills environment with blazing sun and this year has had more drought than typical, so indeed a good number of my less well adapted or more poorly positioned plants have been crisping up. Even so, summer is a season of fruiting and growth for many. Ex. partridge pea barely germinates at the end of spring. It was July-early August for it to blossom gloriously, mid-August for the cloudless sulphur caterpillars to appear en masses to devour those blooms and leaves, and at present the caterpillars are undergoing metamorphosis while the partridge pea bereft of blooms now pushes out the eponymous pea pods. Beautyberries have only just now turned their delightful purple color, the black-eyed susans grew in the spring but did not flower until the summer. I can’t take a step anywhere without the grasshoppers fleeing and despite the dry conditions there are tree frogs taking shelter in the shadows of my house’s siding and toads singing, anoles basking in the force of the sun.

Hard disagree. In summer plants are doing a lot of cool things as are the insects and all that activity invites many interactions with larger animals also. Whereas in the winter almost everything closes shop and goes dormant which makes invasive ne’er-do-wells like Youngia japonica and Lamium amplexicaule more prominent.

Yeah your soldiers eventually want to retire and spend all that loot they got to live in luxury rather than run the risk of dying in more war. They’d been at it continuously constantly for over a decade and India looked like a tough nut to crack with massive forces like the Nanda Empire up ahead and even relatively petty king Porus had put up a stiff resistance that killed a decent number of Greeks.

Later on one of the prominent warlords (Eumenes) was betrayed by these men because, even though he otherwise came off better in a fight against rival warlord Antigonus, the all important baggage train containing decades of booty, wives and kids was captured. So the veteran silver shields who are mostly old farts by this point mutinied and delivered him bound to the rival warlord Antigonus to ensure their long years of war would not be in vain.

There’s a VR game that models the cave so you can climb around it, though they don’t actually let you go down into where he got stuck. You can see it though, insane crawl getting down there and then you see the hole in the ground he plunged through headfirst. It’s at ~19:00 in this video made by one of his attempted rescuers who explains some differences between the model and the actual cave.

EWUUnsolved got some actual footage of the rescue attempt released by the Utah County Sheriff’s Office and put it up in this video which also shows some of the cave although the old camera footage is blurry and it has a ton of watermarking on it. Still insane footage and honestly amazes me how they were able to come up with so many ideas to try on such short notice