The world is constantly changing due to human involvement. The overall health of our planet has recently been under much speculation due to the exponential increase of population and human economic development. Its is apparent that human interaction with the environment has brought on numerous negative effects causing changes the planet’s biochemistry resulting in phenomena such as global warming and the disappearance of many species.
Scientists have called this geological period as the “Anthropocene” which is literally translated as the human era. Anthropocene is defined by Kareiva et al. as a “new geological era in which humans dominate every flux and cycle of the planet’s ecology and geochemistry.” Similarly, Vitousek et. al see this era as a time of global transformation driven by human involvement. In fact, Vitousek et al state that human influence is so great that “even on the grandest scale, most aspects of the structure and functioning of Earth’s ecosystems cannot be understood without accounting for the strong, often dominant influence of humanity.”
The article “Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems,” by Vitousek et al presents the world as a fragile and sensitive area that is greatly affected by human influence. They explain the affects of land transformation, deforestation, alteration of the marine ecosystems, and many other forms of human influence cause great unbalance to the earth’s biochemistry by providing scientific and statistical analysis. The explained that it is estimated that 39-50% of the land had been transformed or degraded by humanity and that land transformation has gone far beyond affects to the land, it also “contributes about 20% to current anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and more substantially to the increasing concentrations of the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide.” Although they provide a ton of concrete scientific data, they do little about explaining how it can be fixed or what our possible future might look like.
“Conservation in the Anthropocene” by Kareiva et al, on the other hand, presents the world as a tough ecosystem that is able to “fight back” and adapt to the harms that are brought its way. Right off the back, Kareiva et al state, “By its own measures, conservation is failing.” They explain that over the last 30 years, conservation practices involved evicting indigenous groups of people from their native lands, which often led to human vs. nature resilience from the side of the indigenous. Essentially they are saying that recent efforts of conservation have led to more harm than aid.
“Conservation in the Anthropocene” also gave several example of how, contrary to belief, when a particular specie of an ecosystem becomes extinct, the ecosystem can still continue unaffected. I addition they gave evidence of more resilience from the earth by explaining that after the Chernobyl meltdown, “wildlife is thriving, despite the high levels of radiation” and after the hydrogen bomb explosion in Bikini Atoll, which caused the water in the area to boil, the number of coral species have actually increased.
In the end, the question that has to be asked is, “If there is no wilderness, if nature is resilient rather than fragile, and if people are actually part of nature and the original sinners who caused our banishment from Eden, what should be the new vision for conservation?” (Kareiva et al) I believe it is imperative to understand whether we humans are causing the end to the world or we are just one of the many influences causing changed to happen. If wildlife of the world was able to withstand the first global warming after the Ice Age, than they should be able to withstand and adapt to the changes brought on by us.
