In the tenth and final chapter of Rambunctious Garden, Emma Marris discusses the various goals to act towards nature in the right ways, and concludes simply that “no single goal will work in all situations” (154). While we can approach nature in many different ways, we should approach each separate nature-related problem pragmatically and figure out the best solution to use, according to Marris, even if it involves compromising and having to choose between conservation and human development, essentially.
Marris cites past authors Aldo Leopold and Arne Naess as support for the view and goal that “all living things have intrinsic value and deserve to be protected for their own sakes” (154). Humans are therefore equal to all other species in their value to Earth, and must treat other species as if they were equal to us. This follows from the concept that humans have a moral obligation to protect species, but it takes it much further by saying that “human uses of the land won’t have a privileged place” – which is a bit radical but in a sense nothing new to the anti-human conservation and restoration ecologists that Marris mentions repeatedly (156). A second goal is to protect charismatic megafauna – “large animals that humans like and really don’t want to see extinct,” like polar bears, pandas, and some keystone species (156). The problem with this is that in some places, “keystones push ecosystems in undesirable directions,” like in South Africa, where elephants have turned a landscape from featuring biodiversity to “patchy shrub lands” (157).
Other goals are slowing the rate of extinctions, protecting genetic diversity and biodiversity – the first referring to specific species and the latter used to describe species and their ecosystems – and maximizing ecosystem services, which treats land and species as “valued to the extent that they help out humanity” (163). While all of these goals may have great benefits for conservation, species, and humanity altogether, they have their limits: for example, with the most commonly agreed upon goal, protecting biodiversity, Marris writes that it “may be the most problematic conservation goal precisely because it embraces so much” (163). Additionally, for many of the goals, there are trade-offs to be made, decisions that potentially save one species and let another go extinct, as is the case with the Endangered Species Act, which says that if “a group of organisms you care about is not deemed to be a species or a subspecies, it might just lose its ticket to protection” (161).
These are questions that society will face for years to come, as more and more developing countries modernize and the human population grows. The rambunctious garden tries to address these issues with pragmatic solutions that take into account a need to preserve nature and a need for society to develop. The garden exists in some places, but Marris’s conclusion suggests that people are too afraid of change and this societal dilemma, and for us to move forward, we all need to manage the Earth in the best way possible, and “embrace it in the right spirit” (171). Yet, I can’t help but think that trying “just about everything” is too risky for the world, and conservationists have learned from mistakes that Marris failed to consider over and over again (170).
