Looking further back we see that humans all over the globe have been actively managing our environment successfully and sustainably for many millennia, which reveals falsehoods embedded in the Lockean (white, European, patriarchal) view of humanity, history and land use. From the research article "People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years":
"The current biodiversity crisis is often depicted as a struggle to preserve untouched habitats. Here, we combine global maps of human populations and land use over the past 12,000 y with current biodiversity data to show that nearly three quarters of terrestrial nature has long been shaped by diverse histories of human habitation and use by Indigenous and traditional peoples. With rare exceptions, current biodiversity losses are caused not by human conversion or degradation of untouched ecosystems, but rather by the appropriation, colonization, and intensification of use in lands inhabited and used by prior societies. Global land use history confirms that empowering the environmental stewardship of Indigenous peoples and local communities will be critical to conserving biodiversity across the planet.
"Archaeological and paleoecological evidence shows that by 10,000 BCE, all human societies employed varying degrees of ecologically transformative land use practices, including burning, hunting, species propagation, domestication, cultivation, and others that have left long-term legacies across the terrestrial biosphere. Yet, a lingering paradigm among natural scientists, conservationists, and policymakers is that human transformation of terrestrial nature is mostly recent and inherently destructive. Here, we use the most up-to-date, spatially explicit global reconstruction of historical human populations and land use to show that this paradigm is likely wrong. Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth s land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as "natural," "intact," and "wild" generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural. The current biodiversity crisis can seldom be explained by the loss of uninhabited wildlands, resulting instead from the appropriation, colonization, and intensifying use of the biodiverse cultural landscapes long shaped and sustained by prior societies. Recognizing this deep cultural connection with biodiversity will therefore be essential to resolve the crisis."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023483118
Those in power have been telling us that *we* (people in general or "human nature") are the problem. Popular narratives insist that humans and agriculture of any kind are intrinsically and inevitably destructive to the biosphere.
The actual evidence tells us otherwise:
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social on "Tells" (archeology):
"And here these farmers sat, year after year, millennia after millennia, in one place. These were people working with the same Neolithic agricultural package, growing the same sorts of wheat and raising the same sorts of sheep, in the fields around their tells.
They did not die out. They did not exhaust their soils to extinction. Many of them — especially the tells in the Danube Basin that constitute “Old Europe” — developed no states, as some people believe is inevitable from wheat cultivation. If they did leave, they left for reasons unrelated to the success of their way of life. But, as I noted, some of these tells are still inhabited, like the central citadel of Aleppo in Syria."
https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/113367947919067023
On Navajo Lands, Ancient Ways Are Restoring the Parched Earth
https://e360.yale.edu/features/navajo-natural-infrastructure-dryland-streams
Traditional protection proves more successful for clams in American Samoa
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/03/traditional-protection-proves-more-successful-for-clams-in-american-samoa/
The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?
-Across the globe, vast swathes of land are being left to be reclaimed by nature. To see what could be coming, look to Bulgaria-
Many of the landscapes people now tend to think of as untouched, from the savanna lands of equatorial Africa to the deep Amazon rainforest, have already been deeply transformed by human presence. “The essential role that people play in ecology is the critical thing, and it’s been ignored,” Ellis says. “The most biodiverse places left on Earth – this is almost universally true – have Indigenous people in them. Why? Well, they conserve a lot of that biodiversity and actually produce it. They maintain that heterogeneous landscape.”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/nov/28/great-abandonment-what-happens-natural-world-people-disappear-bulgaria
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