Given the scope of humanity’s seven billion-plus members’ reach, it’s hard to imagine that any spots of wilderness remain completely free from our influence. Climate change, for one, is already having global impacts. “We’re undoubtedly influencing the entire planet,” says Justin Adams, global managing director for lands at the Nature Conservancy. “So on one level there’s nowhere left on Earth that’s not touched by man.”

As this column explored in 2014, there are almost no unpolluted places left either. Air pollution blankets the planet, while debris plagues the deep sea to the Gobi Desert. It’s even difficult to find a spot that remains free from human noise for a mere 15 minutes. Our historic reach also seems quite profound; sophisticated tools like lidar – a remote sensing technology that uses lasers to examine the Earth’s surface – are revealing that even the seemingly remotest patches of tropical rainforest bear millennium-old human scars.

“There is increasing recognition that few places on the planet are actually pristine,” says Richard Hobbs, an ecologist at the University of Western Australia. “Most places are now impacted by human activities, even if this is only indirectly.”