To end her book “Rambunctious Garden,” Emma Marris hits us with the reality that “there is no one best goal. Even if we agree to pursue all sorts of goals, we still have complex compromises to make between ideologies in contested places and between local and global interests” (170). “Throw the real limitations of budgets, politics, and time in there and the choices become ever more brutal” (153).
With the number of approaches Marris puts forth in her book, the ending sadly reminds us that there is no way to save every species, plant, and landscape that still exists at this point in time. “We can’t have both elephants and biodiversity…we must choose between ensuring a frog species’s ultimate survival or leaving it in its native ecosystem…and an experiment in which whole ecosystems are pitted against one another in a battle royale” (153-154).
With the existence of many cultures, peoples, and landscapes on earth there has to be compromise by both sides to reach a common goal. With compromise comes sacrifice and to move forward we have to realize that if we are serious about saving the environment we need to save what is deemed the highest priority before we lose it by delaying action. Finding out what is important is going to be incredibly difficult though because we’ll need numerous groups of people to agree upon a solid choice, which is always difficult.
The next thing to consider is how do we approach the environment and our limitations of “budgets, politics, and time” (153). If our budget doesn’t allow for a specific action, it could inevitably lower the priority of something because what’s the purpose of placing something on a high priority if our limitations make it implausible. This affect could eventually cause us to diminish the value of certain natures and instead of attributing aesthetic and spiritual values, we might only be concerned with the intrinsic values of the land.
The ultimate issue is the future. There is never a 100% that we will know what our efforts will sow. We don’t know for sure if one ecosystem should be chosen over another, but in the importance of acting in time, we must do so anyways. Knowing this we must understand the reasoning behind certain approaches and stick by it. We can’t make a decision and decide to return the ecosystem to a state before our intervention. That would be moving backwards and eliminate our forward progress, wasting time, money, and resources. To save the environment we must all reach a common goal and set our minds to purpose and achieve it.
