The tenth and final chapter of Emma Marris’s Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World is entitled “A Menu of New Goals.” Rightly so, the chapter presents a list of goals that Marris suggests for when “you admit that you can’t put things back the way they were” (219). With this list, Marris manages to come up with conservation hopes that solve any problems possible instead of trying to solve everything. Goal 1 is to protect the rights of other species, which follows along with Marris’s recurring argument that humans can and should coexist with nature. Goal 2 is to protect charismatic megafauna, which is the preservation of large mammals that humans like. Goal 3 is to slow the rate of extinctions, which is to assign all species equal value. Goal 4 is to protect genetic diversity, which is to transcend the concept of a species and save animals of varying genetic composition regardless of their label as a single species. Essentially, this will conserve as many organisms as possible. Goal 5 is to define and defend biodiversity, which regards whole ecosystems as more important than the individual species that make them up. Goal 6 is to maximize ecosystem services, which is to conserve mainly those ecosystems that provide something beneficial to humans other than preserved nature. Goal 7 is to protect the spiritual and aesthetic experience of nature, wherein conservation is done simply because humans like the look and feel of nature versus the usual reasons of maintaining wildlife and the environment.

Marris distinctly points out that “the final lesson is that no single goal will work in all situations” (220) and that “there is no one best goal” (243). Given that, some of the goals that she presents are quite contradictory. This is not a flaw on Marris’s part, but just something that will forever be an issue when it comes to the matter of conservation. In fact, Marris does a pretty good job of covering the different schools of thought on conservation. Still, there will always be different views and opinions on what is best for the planet, which Marris uses to her advantage in promoting the concept of the rambunctious garden: “In different places, in different chunks, we can manage nature for different ends—for historical restoration, for species preservation, for self-willed wildness, for ecosystem services, for good and fiber and fish and flame trees and frogs” (245). I’ve agreed with Marris on this point throughout the whole book. We need to make the best of what we still have. Sure, the ideas of historical baselines and reintroducing native species sound really great, but they’re basically impossible. All of the goals discussed in this chapter have some level of significance in the world of conservation, and there is nothing wrong with some overlap across the world. Everyone does not have to conform to one goal; all of the various goals can be accomplished in different places where they would be the most appropriate and beneficial. Nonetheless, these goals must be attempted to some extent. All the conservationists of the world will never come to a consensus on what one thing is best for the environment, so we’ll just have to do what we can because the most important thing in all of this is the bigger picture: saving the natural world that we’ve so brutally destroyed and learning to simultaneously flourish alongside it.

In the eighth chapter of Emma Marris’s Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, entitled “Designer Ecosystems,” comes an addition to the recurring concept of manmade nature. Yet again, this proposal rivals the standard conservation tactic of restoration to a historical baseline. Instead, designer ecosystems refer to those that are mended to suit their needs. This is more of a functional restoration, for it involves the construction of different aspects in order to perform certain jobs such as the reduction of nitrogen. Although this hasn’t become a particularly accepted or common practice, it seems pretty useful and beneficial. The idea of the historical baseline is slowly fading as conservationists begin to see more and more that the true origins of ecosystems cannot be discovered and that they’d end up changing anyway. If we can do something to repair damage while simultaneously conserving nature, there is no reason why we shouldn’t do so.

Another type of designer ecosystems that Marris mentions is that of entirely human-generated ecosystems. This is really not conservation at all, since nothing is being saved or preserved, but it’s more of an extreme version of the rambunctious garden. It isn’t humans tending to the nature around them but humans actually creating the nature. This might be the future of conservation, but it’s a bit too controlled for me. Nature has always been out of human control, and our efforts to save it are pushing that boundary, but us building it from scratch is just going too far. It’d be like little virtual ecological communities, and the point of nature, as I see it, is that it’s out of our hands and can’t and shouldn’t be manipulated to that extent.

The ninth chapter of Marris’s book, entitled “Conservation Everywhere,” rehashes the aspect of the rambunctious garden that says that nature can exist everywhere. All of her aforementioned conservation methods operate in accordance with her idea to “[make] the most out of every scrap of land and water,” (193) “from industrial rivers like the Duwamish to the roofs of buildings and farmers’ fields” (194). Theoretically, this sounds perfect. Instilling small pieces of nature everywhere possible can’t hurt; it would add some aesthetic value to urban areas while conserving nature at the same time. Yet, even with her example of the successful coexistence of nature and industry on the Duwamish, nature in “the loud, soot-belching landscape of factories, processing plants, energy infrastructure, and transportation” (204) seems remarkably difficult. In any city, these installments of nature would really just be out of place and probably ineffective. Nevertheless, it could be a great initiative if there was a foolproof way of going about it.

Throughout the ninth chapter, Marris appears to believe that everyone wants to coexist with nature in order to conserve it. Based on the history of humankind, I would beg to differ. All we’ve ever done is destroy nature to make more room for us, so it wouldn’t make sense that people are suddenly willing to surround themselves with it just because it’s dying out. In fact, many people are probably more than willing to let it continue on its current path of deterioration, or if not they definitely don’t want it at their doorstep. I personally think that conservation should be a priority and that we should do it however possible, but the hope for ‘conservation everywhere’ won’t even get close to becoming a reality until this becomes a more widespread view.

In the first five chapters of her book, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, Emma Marris discusses various conservation methods only to shoot them down and advocate her proposed method of the rambunctious garden. Most of the time, the negative aspects or consequences of a method involve invasive species. One conservation technique involves restoration to a baseline with the overall goal of attaining a pristine wilderness where only native species exist. The issue with this is that most ecosystems, if not all, have been tainted by invasive species over time, which makes such an accomplishment practically impossible. Another conservation practice is that of rewilding, which heavily involves the introduction of invasive species to ecosystems in an attempt to somewhat restore balance along the food chain. A prominent counterargument to this practice is that the invasive species may not survive in the new ecosystems or that they’d adapt too well and overpower native species, effectively failing to restore the balance. The third conservation scheme is assisted migration, which is the process of relocating various species from an environment in which they are struggling to live to a more suitable habitat. Again, there is no guarantee that these invasive species will survive or not take over the ecosystem entirely.

On the contrary, the sixth chapter of the book, entitled “Learning to Love Exotic Species,” stresses that invasive species are not really as bad as they are made out to be. There is definitely a substantial amount of evidence that makes them look bad, and that seems to be what people focus on the most, but “while some exotic species are a huge problem, the vast majority are not. Science is finding that some are quite well behaved and innocuous, or even helpful” (141). Marris offers several examples to support her claims, such as the case of the Pyura praeputialis, a creature from Australia that has helped boost biodiversity on Chilean rocky tidal shores by creating a habitat where large invertebrates and algae can flourish. There are also the examples of exotic grasses becoming homes for native birds and southwestern willow flycatchers nesting in the exotic tamarisks (151-152). With those illustrations put out there, Marris then leads into the seventh chapter of her book and breaches the topic of novel ecosystems, which are “new, human-influenced combinations of species that can function as well or better than native ecosystems and provide for humans with ecosystem services of various kinds–from water filtration and carbon sequestration to habitat for rare species” (161). The term ‘novel ecosystems’ basically refers to ecosystems that have been altered by humans and invasive species over time yet are still functioning well. At this point, these exotic-dominated ecosystems that were created, for the most part, by human hands are all we really have. They may not seem ideal to some conservationists, but they “may be our best hope for the future” (176).

Up until this point, I was convinced that invasive species were something to be frowned upon. They seemed to be the one problem that always got in the way of a good conservation tactic, but that is no longer the case. By now, they are essentially unavoidable anyway. If they are profuse and valuable, I don’t see why we shouldn’t take full advantage of them. They’re probably our best shot at sufficient conservation, so we should definitely take what we can get and encourage it wholeheartedly.