Marris’ concluding chapter lists a series of common goals that she says need to be met for these new, alternative conservationist ideas to be plausible. However, setting up common goals proves to be easier said than done, since there are so many opinions floating around these hotly debated conservation issues. Firstly, there are the ethical arguments of who has rights to what, how to define intrinsic value, and whether one thing in nature can be sacrificed for the goodness of something else. Advocating for individual species can be just as hard, as Marris points out it is often “ extremely political and highly emotional” (page 157). Protecting diversity also proves difficult as a result of various laws and acts with hard-to-define or unenforceable policies. Another of her goals, Maximizing ecosystem services, seems to be a plausible goal with a very strong argument, that even she agrees seems to be very popular among conservationists today – we have a finite number of resources, and with our growing population, unless we take care of the ecosystems which help provide us with those resources, we may one day run out. Even this goal however, while favorable, does not seem very concrete. In fact, it seemed to me that Marris’ concluding chapter and the arguments she tried to make was very vague, and almost discredited all the specific ideas and themes she has brought up throughout the book.
While I did appreciate the fact that in this final chapter Marris acknowledged the many unavoidable difficulties and challenges that will undoubtedly arise before any of her earlier proposals can come to fruition, I think that making these the main focus of her concluding chapter really undermined the arguments made. While I agree that we must be realistic with our goals, be open about the costs associated with them, and acknowledge the political and ethical battles they may spark, ending her book on that note may not have been the best idea in my opinion. Her conclusions, while admirably realistic, left me feeling a bit underwhelmed. What could have sparked a call to action instead left me with restrictive thoughts in my mind, and I couldn’t help but to go over all her previous themes in my head – rewilding, designer ecosystems, assisted migration – and think of all the difficulties and challenges that would stand in the way of their application.
I enjoyed Marris book as a whole, I wholeheartedly agree that it is time to drop the traditional conservationist “baseline” ideas and accept that we have forever altered our planet and there is no turning back. Instead, we should all work to make sure nature and humans can coexist in the mutually beneficial relationships that can come out of many of Marris’ proposals. The Rambunctious Garden is the future of conservation in my opinion, especially in an urban setting such as NYC, and I can only hope that I can see that future begin to come to fruition during my lifetime.
