Natural versus artificial, part trois (with maps!)

An awesome piece from Wired, this time with some pretty stellar maps, that further call into question the divide between the natural and the artificial. Titled "How Mankind Remade Nature," the article is a summary of two ecologists' proposal that we're really entering a new era, that the Holocene age has passed and that we're now in the Anthropocene age.

To illustrate their point, they have produced a series of maps that are similar to the biome maps you can find in geography textbooks (that classify the earth into rainforest, grassland, desert, and whatnot)—except that they have classified the earth based on actual land use patterns. Two such maps, one for 1700 and the other for 2000, show how much we have transformed the earth in just three hundred years. South Asia is especially vivid on this map. In 1700, it was covered mostly in semi-natural woodlands, which were certainly being used by humans, but only lightly. By 2000, though, almost all of the region was covered with agricultural land. The ecologists have called these new kinds of land uses "anthromes," because they are anthropological biomes.

Such a profound change in the nature of the vegetation and land use (coupled with the staggering loss of ecological diversity that is natural (no pun intended) when woodland is cut down and converted into monoculture cropland), the authors argue, is just as radical than earlier geological transitional periods.