The Earth Lost 10 Percent of Its Wilderness in Only 2 Decades

Picture a plain the size of India made of grass, exposed dirt, and the smoking remnants of vegetation. That’s what humanity has gifted the world since the early 1990s thanks to logging, mining, energy exploration, development, and other agents of landscape destruction.

The planet lost roughly 1.2 million square miles of wilderness over this period, equivalent to one-tenth of its total stock, according to a new study in Current Biology. Calling the pace of land-clearing “catastrophic,” researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society and elsewhere identify the Amazon and Central Africa as major targets of denudement. The former has suffered a 30 percent loss since 1992, while in the same time the latter has seen 14 percent of its wild areas vanish.