Certainly, over the past two to three millennia, wherever humankind has altered landscapes, chiefly for agriculture, degradation of the natural capital base has ensued and invariably led to a loss in the productive capacity of the land, often leading to desertification and abandonment (Montgomery, 2007). Parallels can be drawn to today. A growing body of evidence (as discussed in the Prologue) suggests that, as humankind began to chart its course through the Anthropocene, fundamental shifts in the state and functioning of the Earth systems started to exceed the range of variability experienced in the Holocene (Steffen et al.,