Human intervention has changed the entire earth. The Anthropocene, the man-made age, begins at the latest 16 July 1945, when the US military detonated the first nuclear weapon in New Mexico for test purposes. Further nuclear bomb tests followed until 1988, whose radioactive fallout is detectable worldwide. In the meantime, man-made climate change is responsible for global warming, the rise in sea levels and the melting of the polar ice caps. All habitats have already changed as a result. The sixth mass extinction is in full swing. Scientists expect that by the end of this century at least 10 % of all animals and plants will be extinct. In terms of the economic exploitation of nature and its resources, habitats are once again increasingly becoming contested geostrategic and political spaces. Wars destroy habitats, and not of humans alone. Plants and animals are also massively affected by the consequences of war. According to a report by the Ukrainian Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, more than 300 million square metres of land has been contaminated longterm since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression. Habitat destruction and fragmentation, pollution, new forms of resource extraction such as deep-sea mining, climate change, extinction by introduced species, overexploitation by hunting and fishing, the expansion of urbanisation and road building, etc. all contribute to the loss of biodiversity.
The trail then leads into the lost habitats which, despite fierce protests at times, were abandoned and forced to undergo a marked transformation – or are yet to be lost. The importance of habitat as an economic resource or political terrain is in the foreground here and thus the question: how do we extract ourselves from the logic of an unbridled exploitation of resources?