Christopher Mims considers how humans have taken over the planet:
We consider “nature” to be whatever we experienced as children, and, limited by our incomplete grasp of history and our short lifespans, are only capable of recognizing short windows of change in what is by now the most profound transformation the Earth has experienced since the great extinctions of yore — that is, the human experiment. As a result, few of us are aware that Boston harbor used to be so full of lobsters that the crustacean was considered a food fit only for the poor.
His conclusion:
There is no "nature" left — only the portion of nature that we allow to live because we imagine it serves some purpose — as a thing to eat, a place to reprocess our waste, or an idea that fulfills our dwindling desire to maintain "the natural" for aesthetic or ideological reasons.
The Dish 