Yet still, the effects of a forest fire are not the same as logging - there are plants that actually require fire, and are poised to spring up in its aftermath, in ways that logging does not support. Again, this is because fire has been a constant force for millions of years. Even fire itself is not what it used to be, because fire suppression has made fires less frequent and more intense.

There really is nothing, short of meteor strikes, that compares to the human influence in ecosystems. Even straight erosion is now a human dominated phenomenon, with correspondingly unprecedented effects.

Again, I don't know for sure if untouched ecosystems are systematically, aesthetically different from human-influenced ones - it's hard to know because there is so little left - but I have a pretty strong sense that they are. I'd love to figure out a way to test that hypothesis, because I think that un-touchedness actually IS the aesthetic we crave; historically it is what wandering humans perceive immediately before a population boom, as they expand into uninhabited territory, so that people with a great yearning for this aesthetic might be exactly the ones that tend to found new populations. If there were (implausibly) a gene that made people seek that, it would experience enormous positive selective pressure.