Embracing our history as Earth transformers

An interesting article from Erle Ellis here. Erle is visiting here this semester so we have plans to connect – which I am greatly looking forward to.

Here’s a snippet of the article, Conserving a Used Planet:

“Humanity and the planet are in crisis, the result of industrial societies that are destroying Earth’s ecology at an accelerating pace. The only hope is to end our reliance on advanced technologies and go back to earlier ways of living in harmony with natural ecosystems.

That’s the typical narrative of environmentalism — one of crisis and renunciation. But is it truly the best hope for the biosphere? Is it even historically accurate?

Not according to a global assessment of human use of land across the Holocene that I co-authored. The most recent evidence indicates that humans have been transforming the terrestrial biosphere at globally significant levels not just for the past century or so — but for more than 3,000 years. And that human use of land per capita has been declining over most, if not all, of that period.”