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By Root 734 0

Unsustainable land-use change has been associated with the collapse of entire civilizations, from Easter Island in the Pacific to the Maya of Central America, as Jared Diamond documents in his book Collapse.4 The European continent’s landscape changed dramatically between A.D. 500, when it was still four-fifths covered by swamp and woodland, and A.D. 1300, when half of this natural land had already been converted to agriculture. This transformative process fluctuated in lockstep with human population growth: When the Black Death killed a third of Europe’s population in the early fifteenth century, forests stopped their decline and began to regrow. To this day, many of Germany’s most valued “natural” woodlands owe their existence to the depopulation wrought by the medieval plague.5

Appearances can be deceptive: terra preta (black soil) deposits along the Amazon River testify to large-scale cultivation and settlement by long-vanished civilizations, and suggest that large tracts of today’s “virgin” forest are probably regrowth across previously managed areas that were abandoned after diseases introduced by European invaders devastated the native population.6 As with the English Lake District, national parks and other designated “natural” areas around the world are mostly still under heavy human influence, particularly given the sheer numbers of people who visit them in search of recreation. The Fuji-Hakone-Izu Park in Japan is visited by 100 million people annually and includes spas, golf courses, hotels, and trams among its supposedly natural landscape.7 Even where minimized, our effects can sometimes be quite surprising: One U.S. study found that birthing female moose use visitors to Yellowstone National Park as “human shields” by choosing calving grounds near roads, which traffic-averse predatory brown bears avoid.8

With so little of the Earth’s land still pristine and unaffected by humans, the idea of the “wilderness” has less and less meaning in the modern world. Indeed, if pollution and climate change are taken into account, no part of the planet’s surface is any longer truly wild. This does not mean that we must gloomily accept the continuing diminution of semi-wild areas and the erosion of the vital ecosystem services they provide. It does mean though that we need to challenge some orthodoxies that are no longer useful in this new era of near-total human planetary dominance. “Getting close to nature” or going “back to the land” will generally not be good for the environment, however psychologically fulfilling these objectives may be to individuals seeking escape from industrial living. Instead, we need to intensify agriculture and other human land uses in existing areas as much as possible, and encourage as an environmental boon the growth of the world’s major cities that already successfully concentrate today’s enormous human population onto only a tiny proportion of the world’s land. The most positive trend of all in allowing us to minimize our impact on the planet’s surface is one more often bemoaned than celebrated: urbanization.

LAND AND FREEDOM

Let us get one thing straight at the outset. The human transformation of land has been extremely good news for our species overall, allowing a population now approaching 7 billion people to be supported at ever rising standards of living and comfort. Each of us now lives like a medieval king, offered choices of sumptuous foods from around the globe and surrounded by machines that wash our clothes and dishes at the touch of a button. I know many well-intentioned people who claim to despise the modern world for environmental reasons, despite themselves owning two cars, centrally heated houses, and a dishwasher. I think we should celebrate what modern humans have achieved through industrialized civilization, for its benefits in terms of quality of life are overwhelming for the vast majority alive today.

Often I find thinkers on the political right put this truth best. As the self-styled “rational optimist” Matt Ridley—with whom I disagree about a great deal—writes: “The