As others have mentioned, the main approach to maintaining quality drinking water has been through conserving watershed integrity. Adherence to the filtration avoidance criteria are a great basis for protecting the water supply and has led to a massive project on controlling the watershed. The costs of acquiring lands, setting rules and regulations, and initiating programs to protect the watershed are all justified for the protection of water. Prevention, making sure that pollutants do not enter the water in the first place, is a much less expensive and more desirable means of maintaining quality than filtering. However, leaving water unfiltered does mean that measures like these are not enough, especially if NYC govt agencies are primarily concerned with public health. Using chlorine to disinfect is only the most basic step. With microbial pathogens, especially antibiotic-resistant strains, toxic compounds, and other harmful substances in the water, money should be invested in technology that can detect and control these. Additionally, monitoring of content in the water and disease surveillance is extremely important if the city’s agencies want to stay aware of the drinking water quality. The National Research Council found that NYC’s monitoring program to be “informed”, “extensive”, and “of high quality”, but there is room for improvement. NRC suggests analyses of groundwater, randomly checking tap water in homes, and conducting rick assessments on Cryptosporidium. These are not cheap to perform, but would be important complements to an unfiltered system.

Though it is in the City’s best interests to find a cheaper way to protect the water, this is just the local agencies’ wants for the short run. If and when the quality of unfiltered water becomes too difficult to manage, the supply system will have to filtered. This is not undesirable to agencies like the EPA, who value healthy and clean water foremost, but balancing watershed management and water treatment is a big question of agencies with limited resources. As the NRC mentions in the conclusion, watershed management planning “is not a guarantee of permanent filtration avoidance”. With the growth of populations along the watersheds, and subsequent economic development, rules and regulations about activity in these areas cannot be considered a foolproof solution. Neither can simple disinfection and on-site inspections. It is in the local agencies’ best interest to continue pushing for environmental health of the basin and water source, but also to begin pursuing the more expensive technological treatments like filtration. It may seem obvious but, basic protection of the watershed area is the foundation of managing safe drinking water, which means that it needs to be both expanded into other measures when necessary, and well-maintained even when other measures are included.

Ehlers, Laura J., Max J. Pfeffer, and Charles R. O’Melia. “Making Watershed Management Work.” Environmental Science & Technology 34.21 (2000): 464A-471A. General Science Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 2 Dec. 2012.

http://pubs.acs.org.remote.baruch.cuny.edu/doi/pdf/10.1021/es003466q

1. You’ve probably received a wide array of responses after publishing your book… What would you say the general reaction like, and how did it match/differ from your expectations?
2. After reviews from critics and readers, are there messages in your book that you would like to clarify? Is there anything you think people are misunderstanding about your arguments or inflating (or deflating) disproportionately?
3. Which chapter of your book, or idea in the book, is your favorite? Why do you feel passionately about this particular one?
4. How quickly/slowly do you feel traditional conservationist stances are changing at this point? Have you been able to see any impact for which this particular book is responsible? Do you feel these recent changes/lack of change are un/satisfying?

Marris wraps up her book with a chapter titled “A Menu of New Goals”, most of which I did not find that new. The list of seven, (protect the rights of other species, protect charismatic megafuana, slow the rate of extinctions, protect genetic diversity, define and defend biodiversity, maximize ecosystem services, and protect the spiritual and aesthetic experience of nature) seemed to be those which conservationists already have had in mind. She did however, relate them to her idea of the rambunctious garden in a few ways, such as suggesting that we change our subjective perspective of what “nature” can be so that we may find spirituality and beauty in not just “pure wilderness”. Most of the rest was a summarization of debates among conservationists and the clashes between goals they are still experiencing. She points out several problems with only focusing on a single goal, and obviously ties everything together by telling us we need to balance goals carefully. In my opinion, balancing of goals is something everyone knows already. Getting people to agree with each other, having the wisdom to discern the best thing to do, and having the power to execute plans are the main concerns. However, I did feel that the points she made afterward in the “Juggling Goals: section were more thought-provoking.

Marris claims that conservationists dislike talking about the costs of projects and that it is considered impolite to discuss something like money matters in the face of the grand project of saving Earth’s wonders. I, like Marris, think this is a ridiculous and impractical way to approach things. In order to achieve the best results, conservationists have to face the reality that not all projects are the most logical or efficient way. This is especially in regards to restoring certain historical baselines as Marris has mentioned in past chapters. I would also apply this to possible solutions she offers like Pleistocene rewilding, which seems like it would be too much of a hassle for an operation that would need to be heavily managed. Her command to “preserve open land” is something with which I also agree. All land is still part of nature, and even protecting a weedy lot from urban development is a great step. This kind of thing is something I think people intuitively desire already. Her final idea of using distinct parts of lands for specific ends is an interesting idea. Some would be for historical restoration, some for species preservation, etc., in an attempt to reach different goals at the same time. I feel that this might sound like a wonderful idea on paper, but would be rather difficult to execute in real life. With problems of jurisdictions and the strong organization needed for such projects, I am not sure if this could be a successful practical application. As Vitousek says, he would love to see ahupa’as restored to various historical baselines, “if [he] had the power the chiefs used to have…”, meaning having the kind of strong authority and execution ability. Disagreements over which part of the land is most suitable for which goal are sure to arise and interfere with good causes.
All in all, Marris ends the book with some strong points and calls us all out to be rambunctious gardeners. Whoo!

In “Designer Ecosystems” Marris discusses how humans can change environments in order to fit the needs of the environment. The typical approach is to return to the historical baseline, but Marris argues that manmade approaches can possibly lead to ecosystems that are healthier and more efficient. To back up the idea that the manmade has already become mixed into our idea of what natural is, Marris starts with the example of our mental image of a stream, which is not as close to what Nature creates on her own as we might believe. It seems like such projects can be quick fixes for small areas, but as Marris points out, many complex ecological processes may be too far damaged for us to restore with this method. I agree with Marris’ idea that we may have to rethink our approach to lands that are infested with invasives or changed beyond hope of restoration. Wasting money on hopeless causes is silly, and as in the examples of the pesky rats and nonnative grasses in Australia, I think it makes sense to consider alternative methods of bringing the ecosystem into a more desirable state rather than always pushing for the historical baseline. However, I would not want to argue for these ideas in combination with her beliefs about rewilding and accepting invasive species. The possibility of having a chance to build a successful designer ecosystems then could become a way out, excusing mistakes with those projects. I mean a “it’s okay if we mess up the ecosystem here doing this, because we can simply fix it into something better afterwards.” kind of thought pattern. I rather think that the “design”ing should be a perspective used for those lands which have already been changed by past errors. I’m not really sure how Marris feels about these things because she continues talking about possibilities, sprinkling lots of “maybe”s and “likely”s, at the end of the chapter when discussing how far we may take designer ecosystems. She even says that the relations from organisms which have developed over millions of years from natural selection will probably outperform anything humans attempt to create. I’m not sure where her confidence about introducing proxy species and moving around life strategically like chess pieces comes from if she thinks Nature is more likely to be better than us, even “up to hundreds of years in the future”.

Chapter 9, especially the latter half, involves more everyday situations of how we can make more nature everywhere. There is a lot of content in this chapter, but I think most of the discussion about what regular citizens in this chapter is pretty self-evident and nothing really new. People are already being resourceful and trying to bring spots of nature all around them, whether in parks or in gardens or streets. To my experience, people usually do seed a mixture of aesthetically pleasing plants and native plants when they want more green. As for the rest of the chapter, I’m not that sure how well the idea of corriders could work in our world where land is valued so much as private property, but I do think allowing nature more space, and encouraging plant growth in our cities’ nooks and crannies (as well as in set apart places, like parks and gardens) where we have previously built over whole ecosystems is a good, agreeable thing.

The first of these two chapters focuses on invasives and all the bad press they get. Marris claims that invasives are judged as detrimental before they are able to truly show their worth. She names a few cases where invasive species have been responsible for serious ecological and economic costs, but then goes on to tell stories of how invasive species have a bad name for only those few incidents. Many foreign species, she says, are incapable of actually causing extinctions and that they actually increase diversity in some cases. She uses researcher Sax’s study of increased diversity on islands as an example. Of course, she has to admit that this was on a per island basis and that global diversity was actually decreasing. The example only serves to show that extinctions cause by invasive species is rare — a statistic we might expect… Surely Marris is exaggerating when she suggests that everyone thinks invasives kill off native species as if they have genocidal intent in their genes. She goes on to other cases where the distinction between native and non-native species is blurred, and it is therefore difficult to say who is the invasive and who belongs. This is a good point that I like, because it speaks a lot about how humans organize reality into labels that are not necessarily efficient or logical. Is the familiar always the same as the native? Do animals that have lived in one place for a time have a “right” to that land, or “belong” there? These are questions that need more appreciation and reflection.

The next chapter, about “novel ecosystems”, discusses situations where exotic plants are introduced and then left to their own will. Marris’ argument is that these can sometimes bring better conditions to the ecosystem, more efficient nutrient cycling, faster growth, etc. The condition is sometimes, since she admits that “these new system likely do spell out homogenization and extinction, in some places.” While it may be the case that some species can be safely added to an ecosystem like her example of mangoes, she is right to say it “sometimes” works, and not even venture “the majority of times”. Even if a species becomes invasive and the population booms, she says, they become controlled with passing time. However, she does not and cannot claim this happens all the time. While species like the zebra water mussel and Canadian water weed have faded as pests, she forgets that there still exist examples like kudzu and rabbits in Austrailia that spell serious ecological and economic trouble. Not to mention that it may take decades to wait for nature to clean up the mistake, during which time the invasive species will already have wrought enough damage. This may not the most fitting example, but the Irish potato blight comes to mind and the negative  impact that potato mold had on people was temporary but intense. The ecologists Marris so makes fun of are simply operating on a “better safe than sorry” mode. In the end of the chapter, Marris mentions that much of the world is already a “novel ecosystem” by her definition, which is true. man’s touch has been that widespread. I agree that these should be studied and offer much new knowledge for us, but I am still not comfortable with the idea of going out and creating these new “novel ecosystems” as our experiments.