For decades, the dominant framework of environmentalism has treated humanity as a force to be contained. The prevailing logic held that the surest path to ecological preservation was exclusion — fence people out, minimize contact, and let nature recover in isolation. This philosophy shaped policy, funding, and public imagination for the better part of a century. But a growing body of work in conservation science is challenging that assumption, arguing that human presence, when ecologically informed, is not merely tolerable but often necessary for biodiversity to thrive.
The shift is not purely theoretical. Across multiple continents, land managers have returned to Indigenous burning practices — low-intensity, culturally guided fires that reduce fuel loads and prevent the catastrophic megafires that have become a hallmark of fire-suppressed landscapes. Ancient meadows in Northern Europe, long assumed to be "natural" formations, have been shown to depend on centuries of active harvesting and grazing. Even urban environments have produced unexpected ecological successes: the peregrine falcon, driven to the edge of extinction by pesticides in the mid-twentieth century, now breeds prolifically atop skyscrapers, exploiting the abundance of pigeons and starlings in city centers. The common thread is that these outcomes did not emerge from human withdrawal. They emerged from human engagement.
The Problem With Metrics of Dread
If the philosophy of conservation is shifting from exclusion to integration, the measurement apparatus has not kept pace. The environmental indicators that dominate public discourse — atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, species extinction rates, deforestation area, ocean acidification levels — are built almost entirely around loss. They are, in a sense, metrics of dread: instruments designed to quantify how far systems have degraded, not how well they might be functioning.
These indicators remain indispensable. Planetary boundaries, a framework introduced in 2009 to define the safe operating space for human civilization, gave policymakers a shared vocabulary for ecological risk. But the framework was never designed to capture the quality of human-nature relationships. It measures thresholds of danger, not degrees of flourishing. A forest that has been clear-cut and a forest that is actively managed by an Indigenous community may register similarly on a satellite-derived deforestation metric, yet the ecological and social realities on the ground could hardly be more different.
This gap between what matters and what gets measured is not unique to conservation. In economics, the limitations of GDP as a proxy for societal well-being have been debated for decades. Health systems have gradually moved beyond mortality rates to incorporate quality-of-life indicators. Conservation, by comparison, has been slower to develop positive metrics — tools that capture not just the absence of harm but the presence of something worth sustaining.
Quantifying Harmony
At a recent gathering in Oxford, researchers took on precisely this challenge: the construction of a scientific framework for measuring coexistence between humans and ecosystems. The ambition is to move "harmony" from the realm of philosophical aspiration to something measurable, trackable, and comparable across geographies. The task is formidable. Harmony is context-dependent — what constitutes a healthy human-nature relationship in a mangrove estuary in Southeast Asia bears little resemblance to the dynamics of a pastoral landscape in the Scottish Highlands.
The effort sits at the intersection of ecology, anthropology, data science, and political economy. Any index that attempts to capture coexistence must navigate difficult trade-offs: between local knowledge and global comparability, between quantitative rigor and the irreducible complexity of living systems, between scientific neutrality and the normative choices embedded in deciding what counts as "flourishing."
Whether such an index gains traction will depend less on its technical elegance than on its political utility. Metrics shape funding. They shape policy priorities. They shape which landscapes get protected and which communities get displaced. The history of conservation is littered with well-intentioned frameworks that failed to survive contact with institutional incentives. The question facing this new generation of researchers is not simply whether harmony can be measured, but whether the institutions that govern land, water, and biodiversity are prepared to act on what the measurements reveal.
With reporting from MIT Technology Review.
Source · MIT Technology Review
