Used planet: A global history

Abstract

Human use of land has transformed ecosystem pattern and process across most of the terrestrial biosphere, a global change often described as historically recent and potentially catastrophic for both humanity and the biosphere. Interdisciplinary paleoecological, archaeological, and historical studies challenge this view, indicating that land use has been extensive and sustained for millennia in some regions and that recent trends may represent as much a recovery as an acceleration. Here we synthesize recent scientific evidence and theory on the emergence, history, and future of land use as a process transforming the Earth System and use this to explain why relatively small human populations likely caused widespread and profound ecological changes more than 3,000 y ago, whereas the largest and wealthiest human populations in history are using less arable land per person every decade. Contrasting two spatially explicit global reconstructions of land-use history shows that reconstructions incorporating adaptive changes in land-use systems over time, including land-use intensification, offer a more spatially detailed and plausible assessment of our planet's history, with a biosphere and perhaps even climate long ago affected by humans. Although land-use processes are now shifting rapidly from historical patterns in both type and scale, integrative global land-use models that incorporate dynamic adaptations in human-environment relationships help to advance our understanding of both past and future land-use changes, including their sustainability and potential global effects.Anthropocene | environmental history | holocene | niche construction | agriculture

When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal

“…(1) There is increasing awareness of early human impacts on the landscape, in terms of habitat modification (Kaplan et al 2011;Ellis et al 2013), terrestrial biotic change (e.g. Barnosky, 2008;Ellis et al, 2012), marine microbiotic change as a consequence of land use changes as early as 3700 BP (Wilkinson et al, 2014) and, partly related to this, a hypothesis that early agriculture altered carbon dioxide levels sufficiently (raising them from 260 to 280 ppm over several thousand years : Ruddiman, 2003: Ruddiman, , 2013 to maintain stable Holocene warmth and prevent or delay the transition into the next glacial phase.…”

Challenges for Social-Ecological Transformations: Contributions from Social and Political Ecology

“…Further, 12% of this land area is covered permanently by ice and snow, and hence only~130 million km 2 of land is potentially usable. Also,~75% of the ice-free area are already used for infrastructure, housing, cropping, livestock grazing and forestry, although with widely varying intensity [72,73]. Most of the remaining~25% is dry, rocky, steep or cold, and hence unproductive.…”

Conservation opportunities across the world's anthromes

“…Responding to a need for biogeographical frameworks that incorporate human processes, an increasing number of researchers and practitioners are promoting the use of integrative global-scale models of human-environment interactions (Rindfuss et al, 2004;Ellis et al, 2013), including 'anthromes' (anthropogenic biomes) (Ellis & Ramankutty, 2008;Vaclavık et al, 2013). Recently, the anthrome framework has been used to understand global ecological patterns, including the rate of landscape change over centuries (Ellis et al, 2010) and patterns of plant diversity .…”