INTO THE WILD

Are you ready to discover the remote places where nature still makes the rules? Peter Gallivan heads off to explore the world's loneliest areas, where animals roam wild and plants grow freely.

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Life has been swimming, flying, crawling and growing on this planet for more than three billion years. Humans have only been spreading out across the world over the last 200,000 years. Yet in this short stretch of time, people have reached almost every corner. Join us as we go in search of the worlds’ emptiest, wildest areas.

What is a wilderness?

A wilderness is a place that is still untouched by humans. To most scientists, this means not only that no one lives there, but that the habitat is free from human impact – the unique mix of plants and animals that grow there is not influenced by people.

Wildernesses are also zones that people protect to preserve the unique ecosystem (the community of living things and their environment) and keep it wild. Dave Foreman, an environmental scientist, calls them a “self-willed land” – an area where what happens is due to nature alone, and not people.

Where the wild things are

It’s hard to find places with no trace of human activity. It wasn’t always this way of course – a thousand years ago there were only 310 million people on the planet. Today there are more than 8 billion. Scientists estimate that 77% of all land and 87% of the sea has now been changed by human activity. So, where are the world’s last remaining wildernesses?