It is clear that for many organisms—especially those we have intentionally designed—this era is uniquely favourable. Domesticated species from cattle to cats exceed humans in both total population and biomass. The same holds true for species that adapt to, coexist with, or live parasitically within human landscapes. The Anthropocene biosphere offers abundant opportunities for life forms suited to human-built environments: our crops, livestock, companion animals, ornamental plants, weeds, pests, parasites, commensal organisms and human-dependent taxa alike. From the human microbiome to indoor biota and the human biosphere embedded across more than three-quarters of the planet’s land surface, both favoured and human-favouring species flourish and evolve to adapt to an increasingly dynamic human world.

Yet the opposite is true for other life forms. Wild species, particularly wild animals, are disappearing at an alarming rate. Drivers include habitat loss and conversion, unregulated hunting and resource extraction, pollution, intentional and unintentional competition with invasive species, and global climate change—a factor whose impacts continue to escalate. While large-scale faunal extinctions began with hunter-gatherer societies in the late Pleistocene, current extinction rates, especially among island species, have sparked grave fears of a sixth mass planetary extinction event. Though it remains premature to confirm the onset of a full mass extinction, the consequences of Anthropocene species loss extend far beyond the erasure of the planet’s evolutionary heritage; they encompass wholesale transformations of ecological form and function across the entire biosphere. Most temperate forests and grasslands worldwide, for instance, have been converted to farmland and pasture, and the entire Mammoth Steppe biotic community has vanished entirely.

As wild species and wilderness give way to new Anthropocene ecosystems, it is critical to recognise that such shifts are not inherently unnatural. In humanity’s age of planetary dominance, human societies continuously generate novel ecosystems and even new species, which often differ drastically from those that evolved before human civilisation. Yet Pleistocene ecosystems also differed sharply from those of the preceding Pliocene, just as Pliocene systems diverged from Miocene predecessors. Anthropocene ecological assemblages merely represent the planet’s latest natural state: under new evolutionary pressures, ancient species persist, novel taxa emerge, and biotas intermingle to form new communities and ecosystems that will define the Anthropocene geological epoch for potentially millions of years to come.

Empirical measurements show that some of the world’s densest urban settlements host biotic communities whose species richness rivals that of remote tropical rainforests. While such assemblages typically contain widespread cosmopolitan urban species, numerous native wild taxa can also thrive, or at minimum persist, within urban environments. Life within these nascent Anthropocene ecosystems, however, undergoes profound reshaping: urban settings alter wild species’ foraging behaviours and even their physical morphology to adapt to nocturnal rhythms (much like humans). Moths, butterflies and crickets grow larger, while beetles and weevils shrink in body size.

Evolution proceeds, and life endures. Socially constructed ecosystems and Anthropocene species constitute new forms of nature, yet they remain nature all the same. Crucially, however, the emergence of these unprecedented novel ecosystems does not necessitate the disappearance of pre-human biotas. Despite many stark counterexamples, numerous species that evolved before humanity still coexist alongside us. Even extremely ancient lineages dating back millions of years—horseshoe crabs, crocodiles, ginkgo trees—have endured sweeping planetary transformations and continue to thrive today. No ecological law dictates that Anthropocene ecosystems and species must displace pre-Anthropocene life forms entirely.

Though the novel biotic communities, ecosystems and landscapes spawned by cities, agriculture and other Anthropocene land uses boast rich biodiversity, they cannot substitute for the wild, non-human ecosystems of the pre-human world. Even "frozen zoos and botanical gardens" may guarantee the survival of the species they house, yet none would argue they fully replace wild living populations. Human-centred ecosystems remain insufficient. It is time to move beyond socio-cultural designs that rapidly reshape the planet and embrace the "designs" of non-human and pre-human nature. To achieve this, we must acknowledge that the greatest challenge of ecological design in the Anthropocene is not merely how to design with nature, nor even how to design for nature. In this human age, the most transformative design work lies in empowering nature to become a more powerful designer in its own right.

McHarg’s call to design with nature stands as a laudable, far-reaching theoretical, technical and ethical advance compared to conventional design detached from environmental realities. By embedding planning within ecological systems, McHarg’s approach delivered superior outcomes and pioneered new design practices including native plant prioritisation and ecoregional planning. Extending this logic further, nature-based solutions offer well-documented advantages over traditional grey infrastructure design, most notably enhanced resilience. Empirical evidence confirms that green spaces improve human wellbeing. Designing with nature clearly benefits humanity—far more so than design disconnected from natural systems.

Yet McHarg’s "ecological perspective" and its integration into design emerged after Paul R. Ehrlich published The Population Bomb and shortly before Donella Meadows and her colleagues released The Limits to Growth, bearing the hallmarks of mid-20th-century environmental thought. In Design with Nature, driven by alarm over severe environmental degradation, McHarg questioned humanity’s "quest for survival, success and satisfaction". Though he advocated abandoning "domination and suppression" as the default template for human-nature relations, he echoed Stewart Brand’s maxim: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it". He cast humanity as the planet’s gardener. This framing may benefit humans, but is it sufficient for all other non-human life on Earth?

For McHarg, the gardener served as the core archetype, guided by dual objectives. First, to ensure the gardener’s creations remain attuned to local natural conditions. Second, to position humanity as the biosphere’s catalyst—or steward—to lead and foster creative co-design between humans and the environment. Undoubtedly, McHarg’s vision sought better outcomes extending beyond human interests alone. Nevertheless, his focus prioritised forging correct relations between human societies and nature, rather than carving out unimpeded space for other species to flourish entirely without human presence. The natural world was incorporated into design schemes as a functional and aesthetic element, planned within the bounds of environmental constraints and opportunities. Human habitats were improved, while ecosystems supportive of non-human cohabitants were created and sustained—including a vast array of species capable of utilising hybrid human-natural landscapes and coexisting alongside human constructions to varying degrees.

Despite its noble intentions, even design with nature, let alone design entirely divorced from natural systems, often fails to adequately conserve, sustain and nourish non-human life. As a result, countless species continue to decline, their survival prospects worsening year by year.

The concept of designing with nature has long existed, alongside numerous efforts to design for nature. Contemporary industrial societies are not the first civilisations to create dedicated spaces for wildlife. Polynesian tapu reserves, India’s sacred groves and European royal hunting grounds represent merely a few examples of traditional socio-cultural designs crafted to limit or redirect human impacts on non-human realms. Societies across the globe established long-term biodiversity preservation priorities, and modern conservation design—including the demarcation and management of protected public lands—represents evolving innovations and variants of these enduring priorities.

New protected areas, national parks, wildlife reserves and other spaces intended to sustain non-human species and wild ecosystems continue to evolve and adapt to shifting cultural dynamics within and across societies. For over a century, design standards for conserving wilderness and wildlife in the industrialising world have split into two competing frameworks: those centred on "nature for its own sake" and those centred on "nature for human benefit", embodied in the longstanding debate between John Muir’s preservationism and Gifford Pinchot’s utilitarian conservationism. Even Aldo Leopold’s efforts to forge "harmony between land and humanity" failed to resolve this divide. Recent discourse centres on valuing ecosystems based on the services they provide to society, in contrast to broader cultural valuation frameworks such as the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)’s "nature’s contributions to people" approach. Further removed from mainstream environmentalism yet gaining traction among conservationists and scholars is the framework of conservation "for biodiversity’s own sake", paired with emerging post-anthropocentric narratives that displace humans from the central controlling position—echoing the natural cosmologies of indigenous hunter-gatherer societies. We must recognise, however, that even humanity’s oldest, most traditional, ecocentric valuations of nature constitute evolving socio-cultural constructs; natural cosmologies shift continuously, just as human language and material culture do.

Today, humanity’s transformation of the biosphere is unprecedented in scale, and nature conservation has grown into a vast, expanding human endeavour covering more than 15% of the planet’s terrestrial land. Guided by evolving conceptions of "naturalness", conservation design varies dramatically, shaped by profound cultural differences in attitudes toward nature, divergent social objectives, and the variable efficacy of distinct governance systems. Forms range from well-funded national park systems to public grazing lands, traditionally managed indigenous territories, and "paper parks" offering minimal or no safeguards for non-human ecosystems. While recent calls urge design for nature to strengthen governance and adopt consistent, scientifically tractable principles—including historical fidelity, natural autonomy, ecological integrity, resilience and humble stewardship—the evolving socio-cultural processes that underpin all human activity equally apply, and arguably exert even greater influence, over conservation and ecological restoration practice.

As societies evolve, their perceptions and lived experiences of nature and naturalness shift correspondingly, driving constant revisions to conservation design and management benchmarks. Furthermore, maintaining historical environmental conditions and sustaining dwindling rare species populations frequently demands increasingly intensive management intervention to counteract the effects of population and gene pool loss, deforestation, agriculture, extractive industry, urbanisation, species introduction, wildfire, pollution and other human disturbances—not to mention long-term shifts in species ranges and habitats driven by climate change. The interventions required to reverse these impacts themselves trigger further alterations to ecological patterns and processes.

Even when the goal is naturalness, managed nature inevitably becomes human-shaped nature. Designs crafted explicitly for nature evolve alongside the human social worlds that create and sustain them. This may be the only achievable objective within an increasingly humanised planet. Yet let us consider the transformative potential of empowering nature to become a more powerful designer in its own right.