In Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, Emma Marris makes it clear that current conservation methods are inefficient and do not work in our world. Within the first few pages, Marris already tells the reader that nature is not “pristine” and it is always changing. She claims that humans already control most of the whole Earth and people should “admit [their] role and even embrace it” (2). In other worlds, people should not depend on the old conservation methods because we have an even greater influence on the world now. This is similar to Kareiva suggesting everyone to not depend on the outdated conversation methods. Marris further adds that nature is more than just “untrammeled wilderness” since nature is almost everywhere in this world.
Marris also shows the reader how the old conservation methods do not work. According to Marris, many people want to transform an area of land into something similar to pre-human existence. Marris often refers to this as the baseline. The baseline is assumed to be “a time in the past or a set of conditions…before all negative changes” (3). However, there is no actual baseline because nature constantly changes. Yellowstone Park is often viewed as one of the most “pristine” places in the world, but it “has always been in flux.” (27). The idea that nature keeps changing makes it impossible to set a baseline because there was never a “zero point” in the first place. Ideally, this zero point should be where everything was in a stable equilibrium, but that is impossible according to Feng Sheng Hu. Marris even argues that if people continue to hold onto the baseline idea for Yellowstone, they may have to make the baseline “under cold circumstances” (35). Of course, this will be very difficult to do with the increasingly warm climate.
I agree with Marris’s case on nature. Regardless of human interaction, nature is always changing and reacting to its surrounding. For this reason, it is near impossible to change nature into a “pristine or untrammeled wilderness.” In fact, Marris calls it a paradox. “A historically faithful ecosystem is necessarily a heavily managed ecosystem… If we define wild as ‘unmanaged,” then the ecosystems that look the most pristine are perhaps the least likely to be truly wild” (12). While managing ecosystems are difficult, Marris argues that managing ecosystems to avoid a large number of extinctions is possible. To be able to do this, people should stop depending on the old romantic view of a “pristine nature” and start embracing the fact that nature is almost everywhere in this world. In addition, people need to accept the fact that humans are part of many ecosystems. This will change the way people think and perform their conservation method and it will also change the way people react to the term “pristine wilderness.” I think Marris summarized it best by saying to focus on “future, rather than the past, [as] the cutting edge of conservation” (14). Otherwise, we are wasting resources on an unachievable goal by attempting to reserve the past.
