In these two chapters of Marris discuses about designer ecosystems and conservation in areas we may have never thought about. In the beginning of the chapter, Marris talks about how our concept is a running atypical stream. It is actually not natural. It was actually created by the Europeans when they dammed areas that changed swamp areas to areas with the rivers we are trying to return to.
Based on this point, Marris argues going back to a past point not worth it in this case, as in others, since the rivers way of flowing was changed by man and is a bad goal if conservationists want to go back to before humans impacted nature. I agree with Marris that this isn’t worth the money it takes to restore an area is the goal is pristine nature since the baseline may not have been pristine to begin with.
A new approach to restoring areas is to engineer or design for specific goals such as nitrogen reduction, sediment capture, or the maintenance of one or more small number of named species. Some goals may interfere with others so choose wisely. Restoration ecologists design to a certain extent since the ecosystem 100 years ago cant be exactly recreated, so human technology or proxy species may be used to obtain a similar ecosystem.
People may assume that before humans arrived, ecosystems were most efficient in the natural cycles. However, it has been shown that designer ecosystems can be more efficient than a recreation of a ecosystem. It is true that humans recreate ecosystems by design to a certain extent. However, how should we change the ecosystems? Introducing proxy species feel right to me if it helps an ecosystem return to its former functions. Moving animals around to prevent their endangerment feel right to me, too. To improve an ecosystem for our benefit should be only allowed if it also benefit the species living there.
The author’s point in chapter feels very familiar to me. She talks about ways of adding nature to lands not normally thought of for conservation such as planting native plants to cornfields or placing food for butterflies in city parks. Conservationists in Europehad have less pristine land to work with and and they try to maximize nature whenever possible, such as using agri environment schemes.
One idea that I really advocate in this book is to add nature wherever possible in the city. I always believed in that viewpoint that we should add nature wherever possible in the city including workplaces and gardens. Any worker can make a work area a conservation space. I really like the idea of having a garden on the rooftop since instead of seeing concrete on roofs, we see lots of plants which can be appealing given how we don’t see as many plants as we normally would in the city except for parks.
She lists steps and results from turning a garden or an area to a native plant garden: plant local flora, local animals will be attracted since they are already attracted to those plants which are adapted to the climate already. I am not sure to what extent people will start to love nature as she said but this idea of gardens sound much more plausible and digestible than her other ideas.
