The idea that humanity is separate from the rest of the planet is deep-rooted, but wrong. Indeed, for most of human history, this has not been the case¹. Many landscapes seen by European colonists as ‘wilderness’ were in fact tended by Indigenous people. This includes North America’s wildflower-studded oak savannahs and Australia’s fire-maintained ecosystems. Worldwide, traditional agricultural practices — which have been used for millennia, in some cases² — have created ecological niches that support insects, amphibians, birds and plants, many of which have evolved together with humans.

When humans disappear, biodiversity takes a surprising turn

People have always cleared land to some extent. But the scale of this practice has been unprecedented since the beginning of industrialization in the mid-eighteenth century, and especially since the onset of industrial farming. Intensive land conversion is the biggest driver of biodiversity loss. It’s a key reason why countries agreed four years ago to protect 30% of land and water habitats by 2030 (also called the 30 × 30 target).

That goal, however, explicitly did not intend for protected areas to be human-free zones³. Now, as Nature reports in a News feature, evidence is emerging that biodiversity does not necessarily thrive in places that humans leave behind. In Japan, where entire villages are being abandoned because of rural depopulation, the decline in traditional rice-farming practices and woodland management is reducing habitat availability for many birds, insects and plants that thrive in flooded paddies, along field margins or in open-canopy forests.

This example and others show that protected areas need humans to be responsible for specific tasks. These jobs include water management, the provision of grazing animals and ecologically informed forestry, such as using prescribed burning to prevent catastrophic megafires similar to those the world is seeing increasingly. The Americas, Europe and Australia will need many thousands of fire-trained professionals in the coming decades.

Protecting nature means valuing biodiversity

Land-tending practices also include traditional foraging and planting, the building of clam gardens on the coast and cutting down trees and shrubs to thin woodlands and stimulate fresh growth. Such work must be informed by modern ecology and conservation biology — which increasingly incorporate lessons from ecological knowledge that comes from, in some cases, millennia of practical field experiments.

These practices also need to be funded. Traditional farming and land-management techniques are expensive compared with industrial agriculture, which requires less labour and has huge yields. If humanity wants to preserve these traditional relationships with the planet and the biodiversity they support, governments will have to subsidize this work directly.

This is already being done in a limited way, through grants to farmers and in agricultural-biodiversity schemes. However, nations should consider providing robust and comprehensive support. Programmes could be based on the US Civilian Conservation Corps — created during the Great Depression in the 1930s — although standards would need to be updated to improve diversity and equity, and activities would have to be supported by evidence.

Biodiversity conservation has an evidence problem — it’s time to fix it

At a time of mass unemployment in the private sector, the corps was a publicly funded job-creation scheme that employed three million young men. Working in teams, they planted trees, prepared terraced fields, built roads and trails, erected fire towers and otherwise tended to US natural resources between 1933 and 1942.

Today, artificial intelligence is raising concerns not only about its environmental impacts⁴, but also that it could cause another phase of high levels of unemployment. Governments looking to establish schemes that could buffer their workforces against job losses associated with technological changes should consider investing in people’s relationships with land, water and biodiversity. It would be a mutually beneficial outcome: for people and the ecosystems we inhabit.