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Our stories, lives and art are neatly fitted into one new and brief section of the Holecene. However, shortly after the end of World War Two, this orderly classification is proposed to have shifted again. The increasingly complex web of human activity since the industrial revolution has yielded unprecedented changes to our relationship with the planet, and the age we live in. Your shirt, for example, was made from raw materials harvested in one place, constructed in another and sold to you in a third. This one process exploits the soil from which the textile was grown, the air quality in the factory it was assembled in, and to get to you, access to roads, boats and planes have all become necessities in the modern world.

Textile, mineral and nutritional needs have grown enormously with the exponential growth of the human population, affecting our planet on almost every level. Many aspects of our soil, air and water are easily distinguished from their early 20th century counterparts. This change has led scholars to suggest that we are no longer in the Holocene, but now the Anthropocene, the first geological period defined entirely by our own impact upon the world. To our credit we have not stopped trying to mitigate our industrial assails on the environment. Around the world, countless organizations are working to combat humanity's ecological damage. One of which being the ������ϲʿ�������ֳ�ֱ��, which I am lucky to be a small part of.

A view of Marseille's Vieux-Port, in the foreground, the Mucem, which chronicles thousands of years of Mediterranean history. A man reposes by his boat in between the two.

Maddox Feldbaum

A view of Marseille's Vieux-Port, in the foreground, the Mucem, which chronicles thousands of years of Mediterranean history. A man reposes by his boat in between the two

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These organizations are crucial in creating innovative solutions to the enormous issues that plague our planet. Despite this, on a global scale it is clear we are facing catastrophic failure. As described by Kohei Saito in “” and by Hochili, Hoare and Cunliffe in “”, ecological breakdown and climate change are both accelerating to nearly irreversible levels. Throughout human history we have strived to find and use new, cutting-edge developments, beginning with the elusive wheel and going all the way up to whatever new iPhone features are being released tomorrow. Our Promethean methods of thinking often show themselves in our efforts to rescue the planet from our own mistakes. These technologies, such as GIS mapping or the omnipresent rise of artificial intelligence, are what we tend to look towards when trying to find the key to coalescing our modern lifestyles with a sustainable future for the planet.

Despite this we continue to see the rapid degradation of the world around us. Countries obfuscate in negotiations with one another, while forests burn and when another preventative budget is cut, the oceans acidify and saturate with microplastics. Even with the immensity of our current knowledge, technological achievements and tools, we are struggling to reverse the continuation of the processes that gave us these tools in the first place.

Surrounded by all this chaos, confronted with our own shortcomings, one might look back on the previous myriad years of mankind and ask: How on earth did they do it?

Minor fluctuations accounted for, the Holocene was a largely stable period, especially concerning human impact upon the environment. With no formal national park system, no data mapping and no word documents, many human communities established themselves in a more harmonic way alongside nature.

The current scale of human activity is so great that it outshines the past efforts at nature conservation. While there is certainly a much greater threat facing nature nowadays, it does not eliminate all that has come before. Ancient Greek and Sanskrit texts detail the importance of natural areas in the form of sacred groves. While their spiritual motif might seem slightly archaic to us after 2,000 years, the goal behind it is exactly the same; protecting the ecosystems that surround us.

These groves stretch in different forms between the Gibraltar strait to Japan, and in the New World, similar symbiotic relationships between the environment and human beings can also be observed from prehistory onwards. Although there are glaring differences and levels to the threats faced by nature today, it is hard to escape the reality that nature conservation is an ancient practice, and one that has been performed quite well in the past.

Our modern world is flashy, beyond that even. Constant shine from metal piping, phone cameras and advertisements capture our attention and draw us to the digital fire our brains strive to take from the gods of our epoch. Caught up in this commotion it is very easy to lose sight of, or take for granted, the solutions that we have used to great effect in the past. Crumbling rock and stone hardly hold a candle to the automated, masterful processes carried out by our new, shiny machines. Or can they?

The aforementioned groves are still very well preserved in some areas and the local spirits that hold such a special place in the hearts of people might still be seen for a moment behind a tree or rock. Although this is not the case everywhere, some of these sacred places still hold the equipment and techniques with which ancient peoples worked alongside the land. In Peru, Florencia Zapata has . This successfully allowed for a greener, tried and tested method of living alongside nature in the Andes while also helping bring back indigenous history and culture.

This area, prior to the project, was subject to widespread overgrazing and overconsumption of resources at the hands of demanding, modern economic systems. The global system that defines the Anthropocene is both what produces the technology we hope will save us while simultaneously being what robs places like these of their vitality and connection to the land. Thus, while it may seem hard to go back to basics, there is clear merit to the ideas of the past. Modern society is subject to the biases and assumptions that millennia of anthropocentrism, extractionism and industrialization have constructed around us. The effect of these cognitive histories is to limit our ability to connect with nature, a connection which has certainly been stronger in the past.

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Maddox Feldbaum

An ancient outpost on the Greek island of Ios, overlooking what is now the vibrant town of Chora. Enormous cruise ships, smaller boats and fishing expeditions flood out of the port every day.

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While abandoning all comforts of modern society would be impracticable, efforts like that of Zapata’s show that the ways of old haven't fully gone out of fashion yet. The modern conservation effort wasn’t born in Yellowstone during the 1860s, nor in the international organizations that fight day in day out for the world’s safety, but rather in the primeval adoration for nature that is evident around the world. Our connection to nature is inherent in our existence and the severance of this bond is a largely modern event, cut by the petrol-powered machines of the industrial era.

As humans spread so thoroughly around the world in antiquity, we have come up with ways of cooperating and surviving with nature in almost every ecological niche worldwide. These solutions vary depending on the modern socio-economic context and often they will not be able to fix a given problem. That being said, what was important in the Holocene is still important now. We all want the world to live on alongside humanity and for us to be able to still swim in its oceans or relax in its forests, the only question remaining is how.

In my time with the ������ϲʿ�������ֳ�ֱ��, one of my tasks has been to sort through . For those unfamiliar with the platform, it is a website made to showcase success stories for ecological conservation around the world. While combing through the countless, poignant and developed plans to combat the loss of biodiversity worldwide, I was most struck by those that utilized practices or knowledge from the past. It was through this process that I encountered Zapata’s work, but the stories don’t end there.

In China, is utilizing ancient weaving techniques to revive traditional skills, thereby encouraging ancient sustainable practices. works in Mauritius to teach cultural practices in conjunction with a local open-air museum trying to rebuild the connection between people and the land. At the Site in Canada, the tradition of Ji-ganawendamang Gidakiiminaan (Keeping the Land) is being held as the framework for conservation practices, utilizing indigenous thought that has developed alongside the land for centuries. Examples of conservation work drawing from the wisdom of the ages stretch across the globe.

We can think about the past in any number of ways. It can be an object of simple intrigue, a warning for the future but rarely do we think of it as a trove of knowledge that could be applicable today. That same drive within us that pushes us to the next invention, the next great advancement, pushes us away from thinking about the merits of our past actions. To be able to look forward to new developments so entirely, one often discounts older knowledge on some level. However, there is much to be learned from the world that has gone by. Our practices of nature conservation are not new but our way of thinking about it is.

No longer is conserving nature a way of life, a bond developed between humanity and the ecosystem on a local level, but rather a separate entity, trying to reconcile two existentially different and often conflicting worlds. The countless ways we have worked alongside nature since the dawn of our species can provide so many more solutions than we might give it credit for. This alongside humanity’s ravenous appetite for cutting-edge advancement could lead us to a place where we are able to draw from the best of the past while also pushing forward to the limits of the future.

Humanity’s fight to mitigate our impact on the world is not a lost one. In fact, we’ve even done it before for thousands of years. There are certainly more factors now, many of which old waterways will be powerless to fix, but with the knowledge of the past and the endless possibilities of the future, we also have access to more solutions than ever before. In some regards, the time has come to take a step back and for us to contemplate other ways of life. Namely that of that gone by era, the Holocene, where for so long we were able to keep our planet stable, healthy and beautiful.

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worked to support our team from May to September this year. ������ϲʿ�������ֳ�ֱ��’s Protected and Conserved Areas Team offers short-term internships and youth-led consultancies to young professionals, worldwide. Send a CV and a note to us at [email protected]

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