The pre-eminence of human activities over natural processes in the shaping and evolution of landscapes distinguish the last 300 years as being a special epoch in the Holocene, referred to as the Anthropocene. Humans became sedentary about 5,000 years ago and have been stressing the land resource base since then. However, in the early period societies recognized the value of ecosystems and practiced social laws based on religious or moral mores to guide agriculture. Changing values and social stresses resulting from population pressures have in general slowly erased the respect for land. Socioeconomic pressures have forced humans to abandon sustainable practices and opt for profitable approaches ignoring the collateral costs for enhanced productivity. In the anthropocene, the decline of land quality has been systematic and presently about 31% of global land resources are threatened with a diminishing capacity for biomass production. Humans have appropriated about 11% of the global land area for agricultural purposes but when the support services for humans are included, about three times the land area is appropriated. These areas have experienced extreme decline in land quality or land degradation has already set in. If not already desertified, the threatened lands are prime candidates for desertification. Temporal studies during the anthropocene suggest that highest rates for such processes were in the last about 60 years.