In the The Rambunctious Garden, Emma Marris tells us of the many assumptions that the public has on our existing wildlife and nature as being a foreign distant place that had been “untouched by grubby hands.” She also tells us about the ideas and plans that conservationist have in order to preserve natural ecosystems, and try to bring them back to their original ecosystem, one untouched by humans. However, she also shows us how many of these ideas are flawed and impractical.
Marris tells us that conservation of ecology has been greatly limited to spaces that are the most green and usually the least populated areas on Earth. Marris wants the public (and most conservationist) to drop these assumptions and see that nature is not restricted and can be found in urban environments as well. “Conservation can happen in parks, on farms, in the strips of land attached to rest stops and fast-food joints, in your backyard, on your roof, even in city traffic circles,”areas you would not assume need to be conserved. She gives us a new perspective on nature, but continues to explain the problems we face today.
Marris portrays conservationist to be almost stuck in the past, “reminiscing” and “romanticizing” nature as something that must be pristine and devoid of human presence. She explains that most conservationist and ecologist formulate a “baseline,” which is basically a “reference state, typically a time in the past or a set of conditions, a zero point before all negative changes.” Some ecologist consider the baseline to be the landscape that was present before Europeans arrived, and some go as far as setting the baseline to before any humans, including indigenous arrived. The baseline says that the present nature is broken and must be restored to its “correct state.”
This seems like valid reasoning on paper, however Marris points out the biggest problem with this: “ecosystems simply cannot stay unchanged for more than a few thousand years.” She explains that the ecology for major parks, like the Yellowstone, cannot remain constant. The baseline set for Yellowstone Park is set to the environment of the nineteenth century, an era known as the Little Ice Age, which was much colder than our climate today. The plants and animals that lived during that century were able to thrive under those conditions. About three hundred years later, the same ecology would not be able to thrive in a warmer climate, and ultimately be replaced by a more adaptive ecosystem.
Rather than just agreeing with Marris, I really admire the points she brings up in her book. Her notion of redefining our classification of nature and approach to boundless conservation areas are ideas that can make nature more enjoyable and readily found (or realized.) I was also surprised by the methods that conservationists have used to bring some ecosystems back to their baseline. Spending years to pull out nonnative species of flora, poison rabbits, and shoot out the many wild animals in an area is unethical. Conservation is needed to preserve the natural world, but it is unnecessary to recreate the same ecosystems of the past.
