No Time Like the Present: Creating Landscapes for an Era of Global Change

Abstract

For millennia humans have interacted with the physical environment and other living organisms to shape ecosystems and landscapes. As our population has skyrocketed, our development of land accelerated, our consumption of energy, fresh water, and other resources risen, and our production of toxic chemicals, synthetic fixation of nitrogen, and release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere surged, we have become more and more entangled in the workings of the biogeochemical system that is the planet Earth.