If I ask you to conjure up a vision of “nature”, what comes to you? For most of us, I think our minds go to the pristine. Untouched rainforests, vast savanna grasslands, deep thickets, inaccessible mountains. Somewhere remote, somewhere uncontaminated, somewhere free of the touch of humans.
But those visions only represent a tiny fragment of the world’s biomes. The vast majority of the natural world – including more than 90% of temperate forest – has now been occupied by humans for thousands of years. We’ve radically reshaped nature with our presence, often in catastrophic ways.
