In the first two chapters of her book “Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World,” Emma Marris argues that the idea of nature that most conservationists have is an inaccurate one. Marris argues that creating protected areas that resemble a time when man had not dominated that landscape is impractical and unrealistic. Instead, Marris favors a system of conservation where nature and man live together and conservation takes place everywhere.
Up until recently most conservationists have been following the “Yellowstone Model” (Marris, 18). This is the idea that wilderness areas should be set aside in conditions that the areas had before humans came to the area, an idea that was made popular thanks to John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt who were natural park advocates. Yellowstone was one of the first national parks in the world and lead to the creation of national parks in other countries. In the 1960s, A. Starker Leopold and other scientists visited national parks in the United States and published the Leopold Report which stated: “as a primary goal, we would recommend that the biotic associations within each park be maintained… as nearly as possible in the condition that prevailed when the area was first visited by the white man” (Marris, 24). The Leopold Report had a huge influence in the conservation community and conservationists strived to meet its standards.
Marris argues that conservationists that follow this standard fail to take natural change into account. Ecosystems often experience natural disturbance such as fires or droughts. In addition, ecosystems have to deal with secular climate change. The climate has shifted between cold and icy periods called glaciations and warmer periods called inter-glacials. Because of all these natural disturbances, ecosystems do not have a natural equilibrium, or balance of nature, on which conservationists should base their visions for natural parks. Instead, ecosystems follow stochasticity, or randomness. Professor Hu from the University of Illinois even stated, “There really isn’t one unique state of natural conditions for any given landscape. What is more realistic is to set a range of natural conditions” (Marris, 31).
Scientists are slowly starting to realize that they should manage natural parks in a way that builds resiliency rather than creating an ecosystem from the past. Marris and like-minded scientists realize that the ecosystems that man has created will still serve the same functions, such as storing carbon and harboring species, that the old ecosystems played. The ideas of Marris and the new conservationists can be summarized by a quote from Marris: “Layering goals and managing landscapes with an eye to the future, rather than the past, is the cutting edge of conservation, but some ecologists, conservationists, and citizen environmentalists just aren’t there yet” (Marris, 14).
