Anthropocene is defined as the significant impact that human have on the environment. According to Vitousek, it is clear that “all organism modify their environment, and humans are no exception.” Organisms are closely tied with their environment. Some organisms have the ability to adapt to their environment, while some are constantly changing their environment to fit their needs. Human are the most influential forces in the earth; it has the ability to change their environment in both positive and negative ways.
Human populations are constantly increasing, therefore they need more lands and foods to sustained their life. As a result, more forest are being cut down to build homes, and the species that live in the forest will lost their home, and eventually some of them may died out. This is related to the concept of land transformation. Land transformation is the use of the land to produce goods and services in order to benefit human kind. While human are constantly burning fossil fuels for industrial developments; more and more CO2 were emitted into the atmosphere. The accumulation of large percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere forms greenhouse effect, which is also known as the global warming. Human activities also have a direct effect on aquatic species. According to Vitousek, “many of the fisheries that capture marine productivity are focused on top predators, whose removal can alter marine ecosystems out of proportion to their abundance”. In addition, this article also suggests “as of 1995, 22% if recognized marine fisheries were overexploited or already depleted, and 44% more were at their limit of exploitation.” Because of human activities ecosystem lost many of its species, and a lot of them are now endanger.
In the article “Conservation in the anthropocene”, Kareiva argues that even though we may protect certain area, and reserve as parks, the rate of destruction will keep accelerating. Changing certain area into parks doesn’t really help to protect ecosystem, sometimes it may have an opposite effect. More species are lost because of conservationist’s effort of trying to change the landscape. Kareiva holds a different view from Vitousek, he believes that nature is stronger than what most of people thought, in which he address “nature is so resilient that it can recover rapidly from even the most powerful human disturbances.” While conservationists are trying to create parks, local people are forced to move to other places. Kareiva suggests that conservation shouldn’t just be about creating park and keeping human away from the nature, instead human are part of the nature.
Both articles agree that human has a strong influence on nature; every human activity will have a significant impact on the nature. In Kareiva’s article, “nature was described as primeval, fragile, and at risk of collapse from too much human use and abuse.” Human converted many places for its economic purpose, resulted in enormous loss of species. Some of these extinctions cause the whole ecosystem to lose its balance. In order to protect ecosystem, conservationists must find a different way to approach conservation not just by keeping human away from nature.
