human depopulation and the environment
I wanted to share some articles that challenge an assumption that I've had about depopulation.
Conventional wisdom suggests that human activity has negative environmental effects. This is somewhat intuitive: more humans, more resource consumption, less of everything else.
This is a study from Nature that examines the effect of human depopulation on the environment, specifically by examining biodiversity - that is, the ability for multiple species to exist and thrive in a particular area.
As it turns out, the conventional wisdom isn't true - or at least, it is not true during the timeframe examined by the study. They found that human depopulation would lead to increasing biodiversity, and vice versa. Why would this be?
Our results are not surprising, and are probably attributable to niche contraction and reduction because of decline or cessation of traditional human livelihood practices that provide dynamic stability (agriculture, soil and forest management, landscape and property upkeep) and contribute to the sustainability of biological communities inhabiting WAPU-like ecosystems.
An older article discussed the effect of human depopulation on the precedence of wildfires in a given area. The summary: with fewer humans in an area, there was less resource consumption but also fewer wildfire mitigation efforts.
In other words, human activity has changed the ecosystem, but the departure of humans can also disrupt an ecosystem in ways which are difficult to predict. It's not as simple as "less humans == better for the environment."