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"For millennia, all across the planet, humans have been using fire and tools to open up land for agriculture, gardens, grazing and hunting. In the process, we created ecological “mosaics”, or “patchworks”: landscapes that hold a mixture of habitats, like meadows, gardens and forests. These places were not designed as nature reserves, but they often catered to hugely diverse animal life. In her book Nature’s Ghosts, Sophie Yeo details research indicating that European hay meadows cultivated for animal feed were actually more successful at preserving a vast array of species than meadows explicitly cultivated for biodiversity. Looking back over the early Holocene – beginning 11,700 years ago – researchers have found that human presence was about as likely to increase biodiversity as reduce it."

"In 2021, Ellis published new research that looked back 12,000 years. He and his colleagues found that nearly three-quarters of Earth’s land was occupied and shaped by human societies. Other researchers have pushed even further back. Examining human-biodiversity interactions in the Late Pleistocene – back as far as 120,000 years – scientists concluded that across most of the planet, “‘Pristine’ landscapes simply do not exist and, in most cases, have not existed for millennia”.

Many of the landscapes people now tend to think of as untouched, from the savanna lands of equatorial Africa to the deep Amazon rainforest, have already been deeply transformed by human presence. “The essential role that people play in ecology is the critical thing, and it’s been ignored,” Ellis says. “The most biodiverse places left on Earth – this is almost universally true – have Indigenous people in them. Why? Well, they conserve a lot of that biodiversity and actually produce it. They maintain that heterogeneous landscape.”

What happens to the natural world when people disappear?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/nov/28/great-abandonment-what-happens-natural-world-people-disappear-bulgaria