10 Percent of the World's Wilderness Has Been Lost Since 1990s (livescience.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Live Science: Wilderness areas around the world have experienced catastrophic declines over the last two decades, with one-tenth of global wilderness lost since the 1990s, according to a new study. Since 1993, researchers found that a cumulative wilderness area twice the size of Alaska and half the size of the Amazon has been stripped and destroyed. The shrinking wilderness is due, in part, to human activity such as mining, logging, agriculture, and oil and gas exploration. The researchers said their findings underscore the need for international policies to recognize the value of wilderness and to protect wilderness areas from the threats they face. Central Africa and the Amazon saw the most wilderness decline, the researchers found. Of the roughly 1.27 million square miles (3.3 million square kilometers) of global wilderness lost, the Amazon accounted for nearly one-third, and 14 percent of the world's wilderness was lost from Central Africa, according to the study. The researchers determined that only 11.6 million square miles (30.1 million square km) of wilderness is left, which equates to just 20 percent of the Earth's total land mass. The study was published online in the journal Current Biology.

Comments

Re:What's "wilderness?"

[PopeRatzo]

I once saw a racoon and 3 cubs walking down Market St in San Francisco. I once saw a coyote on the Embarcadero. There is a family of possums living in the shed in my backyard.

Do you know what "wilderness" means?

Re:Humanity is a parasite species.

[penguinoid]

An invasive species is a plant, fungus, or animal species that is not native to a specific location, and which has a tendency to spread to a degree believed to cause damage to the environment.

I hear an invasive species which escaped from Africa has been causing unprecedented damage to the environment.

Re: Humanity is a parasite species.

[WarJolt]

The solution is simple. Birth control and education. In almost every nation where that's available we have negative population growth(not accounting for immigration) or they are headed in that direction.

We Are Made of Wilderness

[BrendaEM]

We forget ourselves, and what we are made of.

Our value system is totally fucked: the new housing index. Apples building new buildings in a Silicon Valley of empty buildings. We've used so much raw materials and fuel for pointless wars. We don't turn off the lights when we leave the room. We have too many instant on appliances with no regulation. Our government hasn't asked us to watch energy usage since the 1970s.

Perhaps we ought to be extinct.

Re:Not running out of wilderness...

[Anonymous Coward]

as a species - we have to stop saying as a species.

Re:Stop breeding already

[thinkwaitfast]

The current population of human beings on this planet is unsustainable.

If that were true, then wouldn't the population be decreasing instead of increasing? It's like saying you are in a plane and you slow down to below stall speed and say the lift generated by the wings cannot sustain the weight of the plane yet the plane continues to fly. Until populations decrease, all the evidence shows that the population is sustainable.

Re:Suspicious figures

[sonamchauhan]

Maybe you got a point and they didn't include Antarctica.

On the other hand, Antarctica has little foliage. And ifs not green, it won't absorb CO2 and generate oxygen.

If the last wilderness left remaining is Antarctica, we choke to death, pretty much.

Re:Suspicious figures

[mrbester]

"The researchers determined that only 11.6 million square miles (30.1 million square km) of wilderness is left, which equates to just 20 percent of the Earth's total land mass"

So, not including Antarctica, humans occupy 80% of the total land mass of the planet? Doesn't look like that from the light pollution pictures that were recently released. The taiga (boreal forest) alone is larger than 20% and as they are including other areas like deserts and prairie / veldt in their "calculations" they must have missed some decimal points or the planet would look more like Coruscant.

Re:Whatever

[guises]

Well of course you could do something about it, virtually all of the driving force behind this is either economic or due to the expanding population... but it would require something from you. It would be more expensive and less convenient than doing nothing, and it would not entail solving the problem by yourself. It would mean contributing to the solution in a small way for which you wouldn't receive any praise or gratitude, and for which some people would dismiss and insult you.

Maybe the parent was intended as sarcasm, but this is one of those cases where it's hard to tell.

Depends on how one defines "wilderness"

[blindseer]

Once wilderness is gone, it cannot be restored because the ecological processes that underpin the ecosystems are destroyed, the researchers said. The only option, they said, is to proactively protect what is left.

This is true only because they define wilderness so narrowly. I've seen what happens when people no longer inhabit an area, wilderness takes over. The ecosystem can grow and restore itself. If we define "wilderness" only as areas undisturbed by human activity then, by definition, wilderness can only shrink or stay the same. Which then leads one to ask, how did that ecosystem get there in the first place? The answer is either it grew there naturally, or some deity wished it into being.

I don't know if I should assume these people are Creationists or that they didn't think this all the way through. What I really think though is that they are trying to simplify the problem to the point it has become a lie. They lie to us hoping we don't think it through.

They also assume that "wilderness" is always better than what human activity can create. I've seen many great gardens, animal habitats, parks, arboretums, etc. where there was just barren land before. If allowed to occur naturally it would have taken thousands of years for so much plant and animal life to spread like that.

Do these people think humans can only destroy? People create things too, beautiful things even. People can even make the world better. Preserving wilderness at the cost of humanity's ability to grow, learn, and explore is beyond wrong, I believe it is a mental illness.

Re:Suspicious figures

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention basically all of Canada. More than 85% of Canada's population lives within 250km of the US border.

The rest? Tundra. Forest. "The North", beyond the tree line. That's 10million square kilometers right there, minus about 1 million or so.

Outside of a couple of bigger cities, in that 9M remaining, you'll find a town of 2000 people, 200km from another town. You'll find roads where there are houses (cottages) every 10km or so.

Even where I live? I have a 1 acre lot, there are 49 other lots like it, and surrounding it? Preservation land, and Gatineau Park. Houses stuck in the middle of the forest.

I can tell you that there are bears, wolves, cougars, coyotes, badgers, deer, moose, and about 100 other easily viable wild animals in the area.

I think they ignore the fact that 'rural' areas wilderness too. Animals have *always* lived with man around, for we ARE an animal. Only recently, the last few hundred years, have our cities become so large, and so non-rural.

The bear, the coyote, they are USED to 'oh, that is a man home'. Because man lives someplace, does not make it 'non-wilderness'.

Is it suddenly not nature, because of beavers building a beaver dam? Like this?

http://www.seeker.com/largest-beaver-dam-seen-from-space-1765052359.html

Beavers build homes, just like man, from wood.

So, to really define that 'wilderness is lost', one should define the destruction of wilderness that really isn't for the purposes of living in it. Co-existing in it. Rural housing does just that. Small, population 2000, or population 100 people villages do that too.

So I contend that they are including 'any place man lives', instead of 'these areas have man in them, but left most of the trees and wildlife alone'.

There are trees all around my home, trees on my land, wildflowers in my back yard, and pure nature all around.

Yet, I live 25km from Ottawa, ON -- one of the largest Canadian cities.

Foolishness

[ChrisMaple]

TFA states that once an area ceases to be wilderness, it can never be wilderness again.

By about 1840, nearly all of New England was farmland. No wilderness, except for areas too steep or rocky for agriculture. Now, most has reverted to forest. Keeping an area open requires constant effort; trees colonize unmowed areas pretty quickly.