ABSTRACT
Of all common human activities, the occupation and utilization of land in response to growing population has probably had the greatest impact on earth’s natural living communities. Even compared to other damaging technologies, the conversion of more and more of the planet’s surface to farming, grazing and plantations has almost certainly led to the largest losses of plant and animal life. Land clearing and agriculture are the most obvious destructive activities, but the rampant geographical spread of people around the world, driven by colonization, migration and the development of global travel and trade has also had significant impacts. In addition to the outright destruction of many pre-existing living communities for agriculture, the movement of people and goods has also relocated thousands of different species from home ecosystems in which their growth and spread was well controlled by evolved checks and balances, into new, far-flung locations where their unrestrained reproduction often leads to insoluble problems of species invasion. The complex interactions between human numbers, global expansion, and land use are challenging to unravel. But they are critically important if we want to understand the environmental impacts of human life and the possibilities for eventually coming into balance with the earth.
