THE dominance of Man over nature is highlighted today in an extraordinary new series of satellite maps that reveal how one half of the Earth carries the “ecological footprint” of humanity. A vast swathe of pink – once the colour used to mark the British Empire but now chosen to show land that has been ploughed up or paved over – stretches across 24 per cent of all available land in the world. Another 26 per cent is pasture for livestock. The scientists who created the map from remote sensing satellites said yesterday that humans had become a force of nature “comparable to volcanoes or to cyclical variation in the Earth’s orbit”.