For the past few centuries mankind has made substantial efforts in shaping the landscape and environment to fit his will. This in turn caused a separation of nature: that which is man-made and that which is naturally from earth, or more commonly known as nature. Since man operates in man-made environments, we view nature as something distant and untouched by man. For this reason, when we attempt to protect a piece of nature, we isolate it from mankind. This inaccessibility allows us to preserve nature rather than change it into something we’d prefer it would be, like a parking lot, shopping mall, or office building.
However, in her book “Rambunctious Garden,” Emma Marris states “our mistake has been thinking that nature is something ‘out there’ far away…somewhere distant…somewhere faraway. This dream of pristine wilderness haunts us. It blinds us.”(1) She recognizes nature as everything around us, from the forests in Hawaii, to the battling elk in the Yellowstone, to the pigeons on the streets of Manhattan.(2) Because of her perspective on nature, Marris is against the idea of a “pristine nature” and believes in the notion of a “rambunctious garden,” where humans control the environment and manipulate it.(3)
However, since she believes that no piece of the environment is pristine, because humans have touched nature in some type of way, then her idea has already come to pass. Over the past few centuries, mankind has taken an active effort to inhabit more land and shape it as he pleases. Since we are living in a human-operated world, the environment already bends to our will. With this power though, we have shown to be irresponsible and not ready for that kind of power. With many dying species, a growing population, rampant pollution, global warming and the inability to provide for other humans in certain areas of the world, humans aren’t capable of coexisting with nature, at least not at this point in time.
For this reason, environmentalists and conservationists pursue the idea of isolating specific pieces of nature from the public. If there were nothing to stop us from entering a piece of land, then we would simply shape in however we would like. Throughout history we have shown that our pursuit of growth and prosperity has made us inconsiderate to natives of the land. This includes, plants, animals, and even other humans. Because of this selfishness, if we were to remove the barrier between the “far away nature” and the man-made then it would eventually result in the elimination of the nature less tainted by human interference.
Hence, while humans ultimately do play a role in the future of nature, we have proven we can’t completely coexist with it at this point in time. Until we can resolve the issues we have created, or amend them to a certain extent and prove that we are capable of handling the responsibility of nature’s future without abusing our dominance over it, we will never be ready to achieve Marris’s goal of a “rambunctious garden.”
