Emma Marris immediately presents her standpoint in the fundamental environmental debate with the title of her book, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. Though “rambunctious garden” may seem like a paradox at first, the concept is fairly easy to grasp. “Rambunctious” as in letting nature run its’ course and “garden” as in allowing humans to oversee and manage. Marris states that this notion “creates more and more nature as it goes, rather than just building walls around the nature we have left (3).
In “Weeding the Jungle”, Marris calls on history, statistics, and her own personal experiences in order to put into perspective how the natural world has changed at the hands of humanity. Additionally, Marris presents the notion of a pristine wildness (another paradox) and modern efforts to recreate it. She describes pristine wildness as a cultural construction of an idealistic world (15). It is impossible, Marris argues, to create a pristine wildness unaffected by mankind. Numerous difficulties prevent us from doing so: disagreements on baselines, sparse or non-existent information on what was present, extinct animal and plant species, atmospheric disparity, etc. Still, the pristine wildness approach dominates conservationists. Marris advocates that is only when that ideology is dispelled and modified that we can move forward. Marris also suggests that, depending on the needs and wants of people, “forests…can be managed to achieve a smorgasbord of alternative goals” (13).
The “Yellowstone Model”, the views and writings of past conservationists and romantics and their contrasting views are presented. Marris says, Americans “perfected and exported the ‘Yellowstone Model,’ based on setting aside pristine wilderness areas and banning all human use therein, apart from tourism” (18). This model has set a precedent of conservation, prompting other countries with “lots of land inhabited by few people—or by people with few rights” (25) to follow. The caveat of the Yellowstone Model is that it requires land to be “untouched”. This leads to the forcing-out of indigenous people, which we first saw in the Conservation in the Anthropocene article. Marris builds on this, stating that forcing native people out is ironic, as “their land had sufficient nature to interest conservationists in the first place. (26).
Marris, instead of holding onto accepted theories against human intervention, creates a unique approach that embraces humanity. I agree that trying to restore places hundreds or thousands of years back is fruitless and that we should look to the future. While I believe that saving species from extinction is necessary, creating and maintaining exclusive havens for them is not the way to go about it. Not only do these refuges require a lot of time and resources, but also sheltering and isolating species is what led to the demise of many (6). The belief in a pristine wildness may be the ideal for many, but it is far from realistic in the world that we live in. Humans have altered the world too much as is to return to such a state. Marris put it best when she wrote, “layering goals and managing landscapes with an eye to the future, rather than the past, is the cutting edge of conservation” (14).
