ABSTRACT
Nature conservation has always been a tough business. Victories are always provisional, battles have to be fought again and again, and progress is often difficult to discern on anything other than a local scale. The difficulties are more acute today than ever. Scientists and environmentalists working to protect nature face a host of well-documented challenges, all of which ultimately stem from the dominion established by people over the Earth and its ecosystems. The litany of looming catastrophes—mass extinctions, out-of-control invasive species, systemic transformations driven by global climate change, rampant air and water pollution, wholesale habitat destruction, and so on—is both well known and, increasingly, well documented. Human activity has mounted to the point where we have literally transformed the planet. Within the last half-century or less, we have arrived at an unprecedented moment in history: there is now no place so remote that it escapes, in the words of Wallace Stegner, ‘the marks of human passage’.
