Anthropogenic Landscapes

This is in response to the question: What is nature? Is nature separate from human influence?

According to author Darrell Addison Posey, “Human beings have molded environments through their conscience and unconscious activities for millennia - to the extent that it is often impossible to separate nature and culture.” He explains that until very recently, “a failure to recognize these anthropogenic (human-modified) landscapes [had] blinded outsiders to the management practices of indigenous peoples and local communities” (Posey, 2001). The decline of fire management and other forms of land cultivation, along with the loss of sacred sites (that had often protected ecologically sensitive areas) are a direct consequence of the movement of indigenous peoples to centralized settlements. In the absence of their caretakers these previously cultural landscapes experienced rapid declines of animal and plant species.

Having realized that it is impossible to stop human influence on the environment, today many scientists (including some on campus here at UCSC) are researching indigenous land management in places such as Yosemite National Park, as methods of conservation.

POSEY, Darrell Addison. Intellectual Property Rights and the Sacred Balance: Some Spiritual Consequences from the Commercialization of Traditional Resources in Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community. ed. John Grim. Harvard Press. 2001.