As far as endings go, Marris’ last chapter in Rambunctious Garden was certainly a hodgepodge of ideas. However, they are admittedly more ambiguously biased than the previous ideas and chapters that she proposed. For everything from saving species to sustaining ecological services, each concept was presented, and then critiqued for their individual flaws. While it certainly put the tone of how ecology is being hotly debated now—that each and every suggestion is radical, impractical, unpredictable, or, in the best of cases, sensible—I believe that it also put a damper on the arguments that she spent the entirety of the book building up. Nevertheless, it perhaps underscored Marris’ own view of how the practice of ecology is doing in terms of the typically complex interaction between humans and human organizations and institutions.
On a different note, it seems as if Marris’ suggestions seemed too… broad. It may be the fact that they were merely suggestions and not yet implementable on the scale that she desired (pachyderms in America?). It is also probably the fact that many of the institutions and people that she did mention were still hashing out even basic or initial plans, likely having had to return to the drawing board a few times before (possibly) achieving any sort of compromise between ecologists, scientists, governments and/or other involved parties. Still, while she indeed mention with great detail the anthropological effects and occurrences on various ecosystems or ecological actions, the one absence that seemed to be quite glaring would be the urban-rural link. Yes, Marris did affirm the prospect of letting a lawn go unattended in chapter 9, to great biodiverse effects, but those scenarios are often of the suburban and rural kind; furthermore, everything from aesthetics to governmental regulations to land disputes make such a project rather difficult in its own right (not that I would mind being called a crazy old cat person). If she truly suggests a high-rise urban counterpart to a rambunctious landscape, though, that sort of contradicts the smooth ecosystemic transitions and connectivities that she had earlier implied. To that effect, she did not offer a solution to how that line would work itself out (nor did she offer a solution to predators of rewilding knocking at our doors, but that was another blog).
In all, the book provided an insight into the rather massy and ambiguous life of an ecologist. Unlike mathematics, where many of the concepts are hard facts, there was a serious lack of rights and wrongs, yeas and naes, just a really big gray area that worked beyond three dimensions. Whether we progress in ecological enlightenment fast enough to avoid some impending cataclysmic anthropologically made “natural” disaster (or biohazards… you never know if the zombie apocalypse is around the corner) may be the deciding factor of whether we can act soon enough at all. Alas, time goes on and the earth keeps spinning, whether we’re alive to see it or not.
