Marris Chapter 8&9

When I was reading chapter eight and chapter nine the main thing I understood from it is how Marris is trying to take us into a new path in dealing with nature, more specifically one that involves the future of nature. The first thing I found important while I was doing the reading is this concept that Marris introduced to me known as the Designer Ecosystem. For one thing it caught me off guard because earlier in her book she talked about the concept of Rewilding and this is the exact opposite. Rewilding is a way of reverting nature from how it is now to its former pristine form. Basically this means that conservationists would take a piece of land and try to return it to how it was a few thousand years ago before the influence of man took hold. Designer Ecosystems from what I understood is a way of organizing the ecosystem around a certain place or in a certain manner that will be beneficial in some way. One example that Marris provides is how they are fixing certain parts of the ecosystem to remove Nitrogen from the water. To be more specific she explains how in one place they tried to design a stream but after adding a certain amount of boulders into the ecosystem she says herself it “looks more like a wet land than a stream”. But, to emphasize her point she is showing how by manipulating the ecosystem it can prove to be beneficial. Furthermore, in my opinion this is a much better approach to conservation than rewilding. For one thing even without human interaction nature would have changed, so reverting the ecosystem to how it ‘used to be’ doesn’t make sense, I mean some of the changes would have occurred without our interference, so this form of conservation whereby we design the ecosystem to have a beneficial purpose seems to make more sense. I mean why try and fix a broken past, when instead we could look towards a better future. As for chapter nine again in my opinion she is telling us to watch for the future. The way she does this could clearly be seen in the beginning of the chapter when she brings a story about when she was kayaking in a river in Seattle, Washington and she witnessed a Salmon do an impressive jump a few feet from her kayak. She then proceeds to try and make us guess where she was; she starts off by asking us to guess if she was in the Sol Duc River or even if she was in a rainforest in British Columbia. Then she juxtaposes those two by saying she witnessed this in the middle of Seattle. In my opinion she is showing us how nature is everywhere, like in the heart of a city and since the title of the chapter is called “Conservation Everywhere” she is telling us to conserve all the nature, literally everywhere. So to reiterate my initial claim I truly believe in these two chapters where Marris is trying to tell us to care for the future of nature.