Emma Marris’ book, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-wild World is quick to make its point regarding the futile traditional conservationist efforts that are best left abandoned in favor of a modern, “rambunctious garden” philosophy where we stop pitting humans and nature against one another and instead encourage an active relationship between the two. From the first chapters Marris seems to advocate that in our modern, man-dominated world, efforts to preserve or backtrack to a “pristine wilderness” are fruitless. Marris points out that the very nature of ecology is that it is ever-changing, whether humans intervene or not. Because of this, Marris makes her point that instead of spending countless money, time and resources on preserving the historic notions of nature and wilderness, we should instead welcome the idea of a “rambunctious garden”, where humans and nature can work together, instead of being separated by a fence.
I think Marris makes a very good point with her case. She says, like the previous two articles we’ve read in class, that there is virtually no place on Earth that has been left untouched and unchanged by humanity. If we were to follow a traditional conservationist approach, the amount of time and money it would take to transform an area back to its original ecology and then preserve that ecology is unfathomable, and to do that for hundreds or thousands of areas is virtually impossible. Marris goes on to provide examples of cases where such conservationist efforts had negative effects, such as when many inhabitants were driven out of Yellow Stone National Park in an effort to preserve to area. While making her case, Marris also provides the reader with arguments from those advocating the “conservationist” approach, such as Ostertag and Cordell so that we could see the other side of this debate as well. It will be interesting to see what other observations, arguments and examples Marris gives in the upcoming chapters.
