Would you still wish to live on this planet if there were no remaining habitats where wild creatures could live freely, unimpeded by human interference? Though some may disregard or dismiss such a prospect, figures including myself, E. O. Wilson, and many others believe the answer is no. As creatures embedded within ecological systems, humans possess biophilia; all humanity cherishes wild nature, albeit through unique, culturally shaped, socially mediated ways. For some, a comfortable distance from wilderness suffices, such as viewing it on television. Others find fulfilment by spending weeks in remote, protected wildlands. Still others discover natural beauty on hunting expeditions, woodland walks, at the edges of farmlands, or in empty fields adjacent to their homes.

Undoubtedly, there exist as many ways to love nature as there are human personalities. Nearly every natural environment humanity yearns for corresponds to some existing, established, or emerging form of design. Admittedly, society’s capacity to design and construct ecosystems has grown powerful enough to reshape entire biospheres and planetary systems. Designing nature to sustain human survival, designing with nature, designing for nature, and even designing solely for human benefit all constitute forms of natural design, each amplified by the global transformative force of shifting human societies. Indeed, unintended planetary transformations stemming from human activity within a globalised society may now be the most powerful global shaper of the natural world—far outweighing purposefully engineered urban or agricultural landscapes built to sustain human civilisation. Global climate change, biological homogenisation, and cascading planetary impacts from humanity’s interactions with the rest of nature—including air, land and marine pollution, habitat fragmentation, species translocation, overfishing, excessive fertilisation, wetland drainage, flooding and river channelisation—may collectively inflict greater harm on non-human life than the total replacement of wild habitats with agricultural, urban and other human-centred sustainable landscapes.

After humanity’s intentional and unintentional large-scale alteration of the planet, novel Anthropocene ecosystems are rapidly expanding across all unmanaged lands, even within the remotest territories formally designated to safeguard wild nature.

Faced with seemingly irreversible Anthropocene transformation, is there still room for naturally functioning spaces unshackled from human influence? As human societies advance their capacity to design and reshape the planet, the answer ought to be affirmative.

Yet the very notion of nature unshaped by human designers carries an inherent contradiction. In both designing with nature and designing for nature, individual or collective human agents, bound to their social contexts, inevitably act as rule-setters and implementers. Even strictly managed biological reserves established to resist human encroachment remain vulnerable to incursions from the human sphere, whose impacts are often as profound as humanity’s footprint on all other planetary life. Any design capable of sustaining wild spaces for non-human species beyond the reach of human influence must embody unprecedented ambition, equipped to reverse or at minimum curb planetary anthropogenic degradation at the requisite scale and intensity. Many such designs remain conceptual, yet two emerging frameworks merit further reflection and development.

The Half-Earth Project, which advocates designating half of Earth’s land surface as interconnected protected natural zones, stands as one of the most radical and ambitious conservation visions. First introduced by Harvey Locke in 2013 under the banner “Nature Needs Half”, the concept rose to widespread prominence through E. O. Wilson’s book Half-Earth. Its core objective is to secure sufficient contiguous territory to safeguard the long-term survival of more than 85 percent of Earth’s species. While the book and subsequent research do not articulate a precise implementation roadmap, the design vision possesses striking simplicity: splitting the planet evenly appears inherently equitable, promising a healthier world for non-human life as well as humanity itself.

Crucially, even if the plan carries immense political, economic and social trade-offs and may prove unachievable in full, its framing is uplifting and accessible—far more encouraging than the pervasive pessimistic environmental narratives that breed despair among vast audiences. If executed thoughtfully, this framework holds unmatched potential to preserve Earth’s ecological heritage and advance sustainable development. Half-Earth, or comparable large-scale conservation models, may represent the sole design pathway capable of guaranteeing the continued existence of pre-Anthropocene species and ecosystems.

Transforming half the planet’s land into interconnected global protected zones would undoubtedly constitute the most ambitious landscape design undertaking in human history. Equitable planetary sharing already poses immense challenges, let alone fair distribution of land across ecological biomes, including Earth’s most productive and densely populated regions. The global land-use trade-offs required are difficult even to conceptualise. Modelling indicates that the agricultural repercussions of such a project would inevitably disrupt food systems to some degree. Which half of each territory would be allocated to conservation and ecological restoration? Where would lost agricultural output be offset? Who stands to gain and lose amid sweeping global land reallocation, and what compensatory mechanisms would be established?

Constructing a truly equitable, effective and sustainable global protected area system cannot rest control of planetary land assets in the hands of a small number of powerful institutions alone. Multi-tiered, non-top-down governance anchored in robust local and regional bodies, alongside innovative collaborative frameworks uniting private and public stakeholders, must be implemented at every scale. Elinor Ostrom’s scholarship on common-pool resource management offers a blueprint for collective stewardship mechanisms governing interconnected protected reserves spanning half the globe. Built environments and conservation zones must not exist as isolated silos, but integrate via continuous transitional corridors: interconnected national and indigenous protected areas, urban green spaces, grasslands, hedgerow networks, wildlife overpasses, dam removal projects and experimental conservation management regimes. Cumulative collaborative designs of this kind are vital to guiding compromise toward a shared planet that delivers value to humans while benefiting wild species.

What would a globally interconnected protected network covering half the planet look like? A global mosaic dotted with organic farms, green cities, rural settlements and indigenous territories woven together with minimally disturbed habitats? Or a patchwork of dense urban agglomerations and intensive agricultural plots interspersed with isolated protected wilderness? Would shared coexistence spaces for humans and wildlife expand, or vanish entirely? Would humanity perceive nature as closer, or more distant? These are merely a fraction of the many unresolved questions. More critically: is it possible to conserve or restore sufficiently vast, ecologically connected habitat networks to enable planetary species to migrate freely across continents and evolve adaptive responses to Anthropocene climatic and environmental shifts?

Fifteen percent of Earth’s land is already under formal protection, with an additional two percent slated for conservation. Establishing a global reserve network linking fifty percent of terrestrial land is theoretically feasible, and one certainty remains: while challenges and opportunities are equally monumental, this era of unprecedented global interconnectivity and interdependence represents the most opportune moment to advance a worldwide collective endeavour that sets aside expansive territories for wild species to thrive beyond human boundaries.

Redesigning humanity’s utilisation of the biosphere through design-for-nature frameworks is essential to preserving the biodiversity and wild spaces we value. Even traditional conservation regimes such as indigenous hunter-gatherer stewardship must play a foundational role in safeguarding Earth’s remaining biological diversity. These classic strategies will operate alongside evolving, innovative conservation designs and practices to sustain non-human nature amid persistent human pressure. In fact, large-scale expansion of such approaches is indispensable to securing a viable future for non-human life in the Anthropocene. Even so, carving out dedicated space for nature, or designing explicitly for its benefit, constitutes only the first step toward extricating wild ecosystems from perpetual entanglement with human spheres.

Nature undergoes constant transformation with or without human presence; it never exists in static balance, only perpetual flux. Even wilderness conservation in the most remote regions struggles to easily manage shifting conditions driven by intertwined natural and Anthropocene stressors ranging from human hunting to climate change and invasive species. Nevertheless, the most undisturbed zones retain long historical records of ecosystems unaltered by Anthropocene disruption, a baseline that can inform design and stewardship practices centred on nature’s autonomy.

Novel hybrid biotic communities and ecosystems emerging in remnant and recovering habitats within human-dominated landscapes lack established precedents to guide conservation planning. Across more than thirty-five percent of Earth’s ice-free land, vibrant hybrid ecological assemblages persist in landscapes lightly utilised or managed by humans, where pre-Anthropocene species coexist intimately with taxa that evolved following humanity’s planetary expansion. These mixed communities and ecosystems are unprecedented, with no viable pathway to revert to any known or imaginable pre-human historical state.

Yet non-interventionism is not a viable strategy in the Anthropocene. Faced with the transformative planetary forces of contemporary nature, unmanaged ecosystems shift nearly as drastically as actively managed ones. Even within Earth’s best-preserved wildlands, increasingly frequent, intensive stewardship interventions—pesticide application, systematic weed and fauna culling—have become standard safeguards against invasive species and other anthropogenic pressures. Individual such measures may elicit divided support as human pressures intensify, yet conservation management increasingly resembles horticulture and zoo husbandry as an undeniable reality. Accordingly, conservation values, natural design frameworks and the stewardship practices they inspire reshape wild species and ecosystems in much the same way agricultural norms and techniques reforest wild landscapes into farmland. Ideologies advocating rewilding or Pleistocene restoration merely represent distinct new frameworks of natural values and management practice. Ultimately, a Pleistocene park and Central Park operate on analogous foundational logic. All facets of nature remain intertwined with the transformative power of globalised human societies. Can wild ecological dynamics persist, unshaped by humanity’s continuously evolving cultural systems? Or will wild landscapes fade inexorably over time?

What would a future scenario look like that excludes human spheres entirely? Can nature be empowered to act as designer and steward within spaces carved out from human civilisation, blocking anthropogenic incursion entirely? The design challenges for such wild autonomous zones are unprecedented, yet they constitute a worthy pursuit.

Research has already explored analogous conceptual frameworks under the heading of “design autonomy”. At its core, this vision creates a form of distanced authorship by granting design agency to non-human entities via artificial intelligence systems equipped with sensing tools and interfaces for biotic and environmental interaction, generating values and practices derived directly from non-human life worlds. Such designs will likely remain rudimentary and experimental in the near term, yet they are not pure fantasy. On the contrary, they fall within the scope of technologies currently under development, including deep learning and interactive stewardship unguided by human cultural biases, capable of capabilities exceeding human expertise. These systems would possess the capacity to detect and interpret signals from animals, plants, entire biotic communities and ecosystem processes; engage in mutually beneficial interaction with biota and environments, such as facilitating migration, reproduction and the fulfilment of basic ecological needs; and intervene to mitigate, reduce and eliminate anthropogenic incursions, including noise pollution and waste accumulation.

While technological systems that position nature as primary designer may generate as many dilemmas as solutions, envisioning complete decoupling between human and non-human spheres becomes far more difficult without neutral third-party intervention capable of transcending both realms. At minimum, profound philosophical and ethical questions arise around the creation of autonomous wild spaces at a time when independent stewardship beyond human oversight faces immense practical barriers. Safeguarding the capacity of non-human ecological systems to evolve independently of human influence intuitively aligns with humanity’s deepest, most profound reverence for nature. Liberating non-human worlds from anthropogenic reshaping to restore genuine wilderness may reveal values more vital than conservation alone.