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Humans Have Been Transforming the Planet for the Past 5,000 Years

If we are going to survive then we need to dissuade ourselves of this notion of separateness.
Photo: dvs/Flickr

Human activity has sent atmospheric CO2 concentrations to levels unseen in millions of years, and we've learned that this will harm two-thirds of all plants and animals. But as it turns out, this is nothing new. Fred Pearce, writing in Yale e360, brings up what is a crucial point in coming to terms with the havoc we're creating: We've been seriously modifying the planet for far longer than is commonly thought.

There's no doubt that modern climate change moves human modification of the ecosystems in which we live to an unprecedented scale, but Pearce points out that new research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows at least 20 percent of the Earth's land has been transformed by humans going back 5,000 years—a degree of transformation that is commonly assumed to have occurred only over the past century or so.

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For example, Pearce notes that at least 10 percent of what appears to be "pristine" rainforest in the Amazon is actually growing on soil made by pre-Columbian farmers. It's regrown forest, taking over what was farmland. Similar conditions exist in West Africa and Borneo. In the former case, Pearce writes, "studies have found oil-palm nuts over wide areas… suggesting that the place was covered in palm-oil plantations 2,000 years ago."

In a much more recent example, Vermont's iconic forested Green Mountains were largely cleared of trees just a century ago, except for areas essentially too rocky or steep to be cultivated. They only grew back when Europeans took land from Native Americans in the middle of the continent, and from the Spanish and Native Americans in the West.

This shouldn't be taken as an easy way to ignore deforestation or biodiversity loss. These are serious concerns, without a doubt. Rather, it lends more evidence that we do have an impact. For nearly all of recorded human history, there has been significant human influence on the world.

We've long thought that the world was so vast that human activity couldn't possibly influence it on a global scale.

Taking it further, I think this offers a glimpse at part of what has gotten us to this place in natural history, as well as how we may be able to get ourselves through it.

Part of the reason we've let climate change happen is that we've long thought that the world was so vast that human activity couldn't possibly influence it on a global scale. There was always someplace to go. The key difference between historical human influence and its current form is that there is no mountain range to move past, no fresh fishing ground, no place to dump waste that doesn't already have waste in it or isn't occupied in one way or another.

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We now know that humans have always been influencing our environment, to a degree much larger than we supposed. Today the scale is even greater, to the degree that we're creating an extinction of a scale unseen in millions of years that could claim the environment as we know it.

For far too long humanity has operated on the assumption of human separateness: that we are fundamentally different from all other animals; that there is hard separation between humans and nature; that there's wilderness untouched by human activity, and then there's civilization.

This is just delusion and ego and hubris. Humans are different than other animals in degree, certainly, but not in kind. We cannot substitute human invention for the most critical aspects of the world around us, such as clean air, clean water, and functioning (if ever-changing) ecosystems.

If we are going to survive then we need to dissuade ourselves of this notion of separateness. We need to replace disconnection from natural cycles with connection, independence with dependence. We need to work with the assumption that the only static, pristine thing is change. We need acknowledge our influence and then expand our circle of concern so that all that we influence is encompassed by it.

This isn't reclaiming some golden age—for every past culture that lived within ecological limits there are several that ignored them entirely, to their doom—it's creating a future that still includes humans.