Emma Marris, in her book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, examines the pervasive yet incorrect way people see nature and offers a more proper way to approach the environment around us. Two strong points she makes in the first two chapters of the book are the following. One, the earth’s ecosystem is never pristine and despite any human efforts, it will never be. Second, ecosystem is never stable and constant. It is always changing, both by human disturbances and internally, on its own.
Both claims above are new and bold. They are not what most of us are used to hearing. Marris also claims that for many many years, people including ecologists who’ve dedicated their lives to study the earth’s ecosystem and conserve nature have believed the opposite (3). One, the correct and the best way to conserve nature is to preserve its “pristine wilderness”. Or to recreate the area to resemble the way it used to be before human dominance over it. Second, “the idea of nature as unchanging or fluctuating (27).” Much of the ecologists failure to conserve nature arises from such incorrect views of nature. Marris’s goal in her book then, is to shatter such long-held and culturally engraved ideas about wilderness. It is to show us a “new way of seeing nature” (2). It’s about better understanding how nature operates so that we can better conserve it. Rambunctious garden isn’t about “just building walls around the nature we have left” but about creating “more and more nature as it goes” (2-3). Its focus is not on the past but on the future. Not how nature used to be but what it should look like as the world continues to evolve. Marris attempts to make the point that nature is everywhere, not just in protected parks or isolated landscapes, and most importantly, the beauty of nature can co-exist with humanity (3).
Human interaction with nature is constant but our relationship with it is limited to our “romantic notion” of what it should be like: untouched. Marris demonstrates this misfortune very well with the Yellowstone National Park model. The park’s conservationists did not understand “that the ecology of Yellowstone is not stable over historical or prehistorical time” (34). Their goal then, was to return it to its pristine state or baseline. Naturally, they thought, to do that, the park should exist apart from humanity. Consequently, people living in the area were kicked out (26). In this example, conservationist’s blinded view of nature resulted in futile and ineffective action to conserve it. Now we better understand that “a protected area doesn’t have to be depopulated to work”(26). Regardless of people, nature change on its own. With such new knowledge, “obsessing over 1872 is” definitely “no longer as helpful to park managers (34). The focus now then for the park is on managing resilience, which is “an ecosystem’s ability to endure disturbances…without substantially changing in character” (36).
I believe she has made a very good point. Humans have dominated and continue to affect every area on the Earth. We have altered its climate, land, plants, as well as the animals living in it. And so making humanity the enemy of nature would be foolish. We need to work together, not backwards in time but to the future, equipped with a new way of seeing nature.
