ABSTRACT
Global environmental harm is not new. For many centuries humans have done things to the environment that have fundamentally transformed local landscapes and regional biodiversities. From bringing plants and animals from the ‘homeland’ to new parts of the world, to polluting rivers and seas with industrial outfall, to fire burning in particular local biospheres, ecological change has been part and parcel of how humans have worked with each other, and nature, for millennia. Not all such activities have been viewed as harmful, and the transformation of environments has not always been seen as a negative.
