Researchers are proposing an incisive way of looking at ecological systems by including humanity’s reshaping of natural environments.
Drawing on the standard concept of a biome (a regional ecosystem like grassland), McGill and University of Maryland, Baltimore County researchers, propose to remap the world according to "anthromes". You can think of these as the manmade ecological communities in which we live — for example, dense urban settlements, residential rangeland, rice villages. Traditional ecologists would could call Phoenix a desert, but that wouldn’t take into account all the green grass that human beings have pressed into service around their homes. Or the surprising number of other ecological changes that urbanization has wrought on the area.
The idea that humans impact the environment obviously isn’t new, but there has been a major disconnect between conservationists who want to preserve wilderness, and the rest of humanity, which has primarily been engaged in hacking, mutating, irrigating, cutting down, or otherwise changing that environment. We’re not even talking carbon emissions or industrialization, we’re talking irrigation. The very project of civilization (capital C, actually) has involved reshaping the natural environment to fit human needs.
Alan Weisman recently wrote a book called, The World Without Us, that envisioned how the Earth would return to its regularly scheduled programming without human meddling. Worldchanging’s Alex Steffen countered with a critique called The World With Us in which he wrote, "It’s not that hard to imagine the natural world recovering it’s health in our absence: it’s more difficult, and more necessary, to imagine it recovering its health in our presence."
Towards that end, anthromes are important. Having a map of the humanized ecological world can help us imagine how to change that world. We can look at our world as it is, not as we would like it to be. Imagine an anthrome of Phoenix, showing water usage, say, and then overlay that with how much water would actually be there. Then, imagine showing where that water came from, and how that’s affected the anthromes (and biomes) of outlying areas.
We can hope that we match-up our anthromes to our biomes, and that harmony will be reflected in energy and water efficiency. That’s the buried treasure that we might be able to find with these maps.