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Current Biology has an article (open access, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.08.049) about the extent of wilderness areas around the world (except Antarctica). The authors found a decrease of 9.6% in the extent of those areas in the 2010s, as compared to the early 1990s.
For 3 of the 14 biomes (kinds of ecosystems)—"Tropical and Subtropical Coniferous Forests, Mangroves, and Tropical and Subtropical Dry Broadleaf Forests"—there remain no contiguous areas of at least 10,000 km2, say the authors. However, such large contiguous areas do comprise 82.3% of all wild lands.
They note that
the total stock of terrestrial ecosystem carbon (~1,950 petagrams of [c]arbon (Pg C)) is greater than that of oil (∼173 Pg C), gas (∼383 Pg C), coal (∼446 Pg C), or the atmosphere (∼598 Pg C), and a significant proportion of this carbon is found in the globally significant wilderness areas of the tropics and boreal region.
and recommend legal protection for wild lands as part of efforts against emission of carbon dioxide.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 16 2016, @02:38AM
The people who lived in the Florida Everglades considered that land desirable when they were kicked out to expand the national park. The south end of that national park (in Florida Bay) is an excellent example of why strict no-harvest preserves are an excellent thing. In the 1950s, Florida Lobster were abundant - to the point that fishermen would only catch them to eat if they had a bad day fishing and couldn't get anything else, the "bugs" were everywhere and easy to catch. They became popular, were harvested and their numbers tremendously reduced. Now there's a short season where they are allowed to be taken under strictly enforced rules and regulations, and in areas where harvest under these rules is allowed the lobster are relatively rare, hard to find and hard to catch. However, the park does not permit lobster harvest, ever, and as a result the population has rebounded (not to 1950s levels) and the commercial lobster fishermen now mostly line their traps up along the park boundaries to catch the lobsters that wander out of the park protection.
Point being: "giving up" some land, back to nature, makes the remaining land more desirable, more productive and more valuable.
Or, we can follow the model of the "Fertile Crescent," a.k.a. the cradle of civilization, which turned from a very human-friendly lands into deserts today after centuries of farming and extracting all possible value from all of the land to support human needs and desires.
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