Wilderness lost

Australian researchers have found that about one tenth of the world's wilderness has been lost in the last twenty years. The lost area is over 3 million square kilometers and the losses have been greatest in South America (30%) and Africa (14%).

This is, unhappily, not a surprise. It's one of a series of recent studies that shows the increasing human dominance of the planet. Indeed, it's one of the less pessimistic. Taking the crude numbers it implies that some wilderness will last 200 years.