In Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, Emma Marris examines the incorrect way that people view conservation and presents her own view to the way nature should be treated. She explains that natures is not pristine, it always evolves and constantly changes. Instead of striving to protect and restore a “pristine wilderness,” Marris suggests we follow strive for the “rambunctious garden” that coincides with human existence and interaction.
In the first chapter, Marris presents that her “book is about a new way of seeing nature.” She criticizes the long-held belief that nature should be restores to state of its past. She examines numerous examples of ecologists ridding ecosystems of their invasive species, reintroducing native species, and attempting to bring habitats to their previous positions. Marris proved these attempts flawed by explaining that nature and ecosystems are ever-changing and do not possess a point of static. She quoted Heraclitus, “the only constant in nature is change itself.”
Another flaw in determining what the “pristine wilderness” was like, is that there is little documentation of what species existed at a certain time and the state that the ecosystem was in.
In the second chapter, Marris conveys the conservationists as being stuck in the past “romantics” that are striving for a nature that is pristine and before human presence. This goal of achieving a “pristine wilderness” is proven flawed when ecologists are unable to come to a conclusion as to the baseline of an ecosystem. Some believe it was before the Europeans settled the Americas but this idea is also flawed because before the Europeans arrived, indigenous people have been cultivating, hunting, and changing nature for hundreds of years.
She presents the Yellow Stone model of conservation where millions of indigenous were relocated in order to protect the nature of the region. “The irony is that they were doing the least harm—after all, that is why their land had sufficient nature to interest conservationists in the first place.” She further explains that ecologists are only recently beginning to understand that protected areas do not have to be depopulated in order to work and a link between humans and nature can also result in positive reinforcement.
I agree with the points that Marris brings up in the first two chapters that nature is ever flowing, it is never static, and that human interaction with nature is something that we should not fight but embrace. I believe that removing humans from the equation of nature would mean that we should remove all species from nature because essentially plants and animals also rob resources from nature. Though it is definitely known that humans have done the most harm, I believe that this is just another adaptation that nature will make and as Aho stated, “You can’t become attached to one particular snapshot. Part of the beauty of ecology is its change.”
