Contra the “humans are a virus” discourse that’s popular among eco-fascists and, unfortunately, a sizable segment of the left that likes to imagine other people (but never them) are The Problem, humans have a long history of sustainably and often *beneficially* interacting with their environments.
“Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth’s land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as ‘natural,’ ‘intact,’ and ‘wild’ generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural.”
In other words, much of the wilderness we imagine as pristine reservoirs of biodiversity is in reality the product of human effort.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023483118
HeavenlyPossum /
npub1s0…rzz9t
2024-07-14 16:01:33
Author Public Key
npub1s029r5gtznh06wkxnae2yud5rps7c2ny9re68xakczxfh9w3pfysfrzz9tPublished at
2024-07-14 16:01:33Event JSON
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"content": "Contra the “humans are a virus” discourse that’s popular among eco-fascists and, unfortunately, a sizable segment of the left that likes to imagine other people (but never them) are The Problem, humans have a long history of sustainably and often *beneficially* interacting with their environments.\n\n“Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth’s land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as ‘natural,’ ‘intact,’ and ‘wild’ generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural.”\n\nIn other words, much of the wilderness we imagine as pristine reservoirs of biodiversity is in reality the product of human effort.\n\nhttps://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023483118",
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