By Conservation Magazine.

As though working through the five stages of grief, more and more ecologists are reluctantly accepting that we live in a human-dominated world. And some are discovering that patchwork ecosystems might even rival their pristine counterparts.

Most ecologists and conservationists would describe this forest in scientific jargon as “degraded,” “heavily invaded,” or perhaps “anthropogenic.” Less formally, they might term it a “trash ecosystem.” After all, what is it but a bunch of weeds—dominated by aggressive invaders, almost all of them introduced by humans? It might as well be a city dump.

A few ecologists, however, are taking a second look at such places, trying to see them without the common assumption that pristine ecosystems are good and anything else is bad. The nonjudgmental term for such a place is “novel ecosystem”—one that has been heavily influenced by humans but is not under human management.

Read more:  http://www.conservationmagazine.org/2010/06/the-new-normal/print/