9. Nature Is Over

Little is left untouched by humans—and that demands a rethink of environmentalism

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Johannes Mann / Corbis

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Humans have been changing the planet ever since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens began altering the land--and the plants and animals growing on it--rather than simply living as hunters and gatherers. Agriculture enabled humans to proliferate and literally changed the face of the planet; today 38% of the earth's ice-free land has been cleared and cultivated for farming. But it wasn't until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution around 1800 that human growth and its impact on the environment began to explode, and that's the moment when many scientists believe the Anthropocene truly began.

Since then our ranks have ballooned from 1 billion to 7 billion, a rate of reproduction that biologist E.O. Wilson has characterized as "more bacterial than primate." Today the total human biomass is a hundred times as great as that of any other large animal species that has ever walked the earth. That growth has been aided by the use of fossil fuels as humans have learned to tap coal, oil and natural gas, which has steadily warmed the atmosphere and further altered the planet.

After World War II we added nuclear power to the mix--making radioactive fallout one more physical mark of our presence--and global population and economic expansion went into overdrive. The change has been so rapid that scientists have dubbed the past half-century the Great Acceleration--and this period shows little sign of slowing as economic growth and improved health care extends the life spans and turbocharges the resource use of billions of people in the developing world.

That's why the Anthropocene demands a dramatic change for environmentalism. Since the days of John Muir--the 19th century Scottish-American naturalist who founded the Sierra Club--the goal of environmentalism has been the preservation of wilderness. Muir fought to create some of the U.S.'s first national parks, in Yosemite and the sequoia forest, with the aim of protecting untrammeled nature from human activity. People were seen as a threat to wilderness and to naturalness, and isolation was regarded as the solution.

By some measures, conservationists have succeeded. There are more than 100,000 protected areas around the world, compared with fewer than 10,000 in 1950, and approximately 13% of the planet's landmass has some form of legal protection. But we're still losing old-growth forests in Africa, Asia and Latin America, while species are going extinct at a rate that is beginning to compare to the great die-offs of the past. Nearly one-fifth of existing vertebrate species are threatened, and if climate change continues unabated, that number will surely grow. In other words, conservationists may be winning the battle for protected areas and losing the war for wildlife.

The reality is that in the Anthropocene, there may simply be no room for nature, at least not nature as we've known and celebrated it--something separate from human beings--something pristine. There's no getting back to the Garden, assuming it ever existed. For environmentalists, that will mean changing strategies, finding methods of conservation that are more people-friendly and that allow wildlife to coexist with human development. It means, if not embracing the human influence on the planet, at least accepting it.

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