Why there’s no such thing as pristine nature
A growing body of research shows that people have been shaping the planet for millennia — muddying the very idea of wilderness and prompting calls for a revolution in ecology and conservation.
12,000 years of Anthrome Culture
Ever since Navin Ramankutty and I introduced anthromes in our 2008 paper, “Putting people in the map”, I’ve been working to shift global thinking on people and nature. Today, our PNAS paper “People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years” presents evidence supporting a new paradigm for global ecology and conservation. Our work confirms, through a […]
Welcome to the New Anthroecology Site!
After more than 20 years at ecotope.org, we now have a new home at anthroecology.org. We are now The Anthroecology Lab, changed from the Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology. The old site served us well over the years, but it used old web technology, and though we still study the ecology of anthropogenic landscapes, our focus on anthromes and anthroecology […]
Anthroecology: A New Synthesis
Why did behaviorally modern humans and no other multicellular species in the history of the Earth gain the capacity to transform an entire planet? Biology alone cannot explain this – Homo sapiens is just another species in the genus Homo with a few distinctive traits- not including stone tools (common to all species in the genus) and fire (common to […]