America, even such dramatic figures understate our impact. The authors
of the second study, Erle Ellis of the University of Maryland and Navin
Ramankutty of McGill, argue that thinking in terms of biomes defined by
climate and vegetation—temperate grasslands, say, or boreal forests—no
longer makes sense. Instead, they divide the world up into “anthromes.”
There is an “urban” anthrome that stretches over five hundred thousand
square miles, an “irrigated cropland” anthrome (a million square miles),
and a “populated forest” (four and a half million square miles). Ellis and
Ramankutty count a total of eighteen “anthromes,” which together
extend over thirty-nine million square miles. This leaves outstanding
some eleven million square miles. These areas, which are mostly empty of
people and include stretches of the Amazon, much of Siberia and
northern Canada, and significant expanses of the Sahara, the Gobi, and
the Great Victoria deserts, they call “wildlands.”
But in the Anthropocene it’s not clear that even such “wildlands”
really deserve to be called wild. Tundra is crisscrossed by pipelines, boreal
forest by seismic lines. Ranches and plantations and hydroelectric
projects slice through the rainforest. In Brazil, people speak of the
“fishbone,” a pattern of deforestation that begins with the construction of
one major road—by this metaphor, the spine—that then leads to the
creation (sometimes illegal) of lots of smaller, riblike roads. What’s left is a
forest of long, skinny patches. These days every wild place has, to one
degree or another, been cut into and cut off. And this is what makes
Lovejoy’s forest fragment experiment so important. With its square,
completely unnatural outline, Reserve 1202 represents, increasingly, the
shape of the world.
THE cast at the BDFFP is constantly changing, so even people who have
worked on the project for many years are not quite sure whom they’re
going to bump into there. I drove out to Reserve 1202 with Mario Cohn-
Haft, an American ornithologist who first got involved with the project as
an intern in the mid–nineteen-eighties. Cohn-Haft ended up marrying a