In Emma Marris’ “Rambunctious Garden” she offers a more contemporary view of nature and its relationship with humans. She believes that the eighteenth and nineteenth century quest to conserve “pristine” nature is outdated because there is no such thing as unchanged nature. Ecosystems have undergone many changes both “anthropogenic” and not. In the first two chapters of Marris’ novel she explains why the manner in which nature was viewed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is an outdated approach.
Marris explains that in society we are conditioned to believe that nature is “distant, wild, and free” with no human interference (Marris 1). However, she offers a new outlook on conservation, which she dubbed the “rambunctious garden” (2). According to Marris, the rambunctious garden is a “hybrid of wild nature and human management.” Rather than preserving a large plot of land where no people live, she believes that conservation should be intertwined with cities, or places with a high concentration of people. Marris stresses that the “rambunctious garden is everywhere” and does not have to be a large open space (2). She gives examples of “strips of land attached to rest stops” and “city traffic circles” as rambunctious gardens. In order to do so, she explains that society’s view of what constitutes nature must change.
In society, the idea surrounding nature is that it must be a “stable, pristine wilderness” (3). When nature is preserved it is done so according to a “baseline,” which is how the land was believed to have looked like before the influence of people (5). However, this becomes very tricky because nature undergoes many changes over the years be it “anthropogenic” or through a natural occurrence ie volcanic explosion. Furthermore, preserving nature according to the baseline poses potential problems, because species and humans who were living on the land are in most cases forcefully expelled. For example, in the Scotia Sanctuary, the rabbits and foxes were deliberately poisoned because they were viewed as a “threat” to the species already in the Sanctuary. I agree with the author’s position that preserving nature according to a baseline is not the most effective way for land conservation because it becomes difficult to decide what makes nature “pristine.” Also given the large amount of people who live in the cities, it is crucial that nature is included as part of their daily lives rather than something that is “distant.”
Furthermore, Marris also describes the historical transition of the connotation behind nature. In the 1860’s literary Romantics like Henry David Thoreau and Percy Shelley praised nature as “the stuff of life” (18). It was a place where people can be in solitude, which means that nobody can live there permanently. Consequently, this is also the time when the Miwok Indians were forcefully removed from Yellowstone because of the belief that there should be no people living in the park. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century, ecologists began to research how nature itself changes and achieves stability. For example, Australia over the millennia has drifted towards the north, but the overall global climate was cooling so it managed to reach a “stable climate” (33). All in all, ecosystems are always changing be it “anthropogenic” or by nature, and according to Marris, it is ultimately impossible to find an unchanged ecosystem to preserve. Ultimately, the only feasible solution for the twenty-first century is to create a “rambunctious garden.”
