Is Embracing Change Our Best Bet?

摘要

Restoration ecology and conservation biology are both under pressure to adapt to accelerated anthropogenic global change. Pristine areas free from human influence no longer exist and, arguably, have not for thousands of years (7). Major land-cover transformations for agriculture affected vast territories more than 3000 years ago (2). Large mammal extinctions in the late Pleistocene (circa 12,000 years ago) were related to human expansion (3). And relocation of now-widespread naturalized species was already happening 4230 years ago, when domestic dogs (dingos) were introduced into Australia by way of southeast Asia (4). Thus, human-sculpted landscapes are what we have been mostly managing for millennia. Because the rate of alteration has dramatically increased over the past 200 years, those ancient localized impacts now affect most of the world. Additionally, other indirect impacts act at a planetary scale—e.g., increased carbon dioxide concentration and nitrogen deposition.