Throghout the first two chapters of her book, “Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, Emma Marris attempts to reveal her thesis and the main point which will be stressed throughout the book’s duration. She argues that the modern view of most conservationists is mistaken and needs to be adjusted. She claims that this view refers to the “Yellowstone Model,” which was made famous by John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt. According to this model, natural parks should be set aside as protected areas in order to be restored to their natural conditions, before they were altered and interfered with by humans. Marris argues that this process does not seem plausible for a number of reasons. Firstly, in order to do so, conservationists would have to be able to recreate what this ecosystem may have been like before human interference. Then they would have to be able to reintroduce the species that would have been natural to that ecosystem, while removing all of the introduced species. This process would have required a lot of effort, time, resources and money and would have proved to be worthless.
As an alternative, she believes that instead of using up all of this time and energy in converting nature to a pre-human “pristine” environment, conservationists should work on intertwining the two and allowing them to work side by side and in harmony. She believes that nature in all around us and in this respect conservation can happen wherever we look. She states, “Conservation can happen in parks, on farms, in the strips of land attached to rest stops and fast-food joints, in your backyard, on your roof, even in city traffic circles. Rambunctious gardening is proactive and optimistic; it creates more and more nature as it goes, rather than just building walls around the nature we have left.” Instead of cutting off a section of land and characterizing it as sacred we should support an organization where man and nature can work and live together in order to support the ecosystem and allow it to thrive.
One strong point that Marris stresses throughout the first two chapters is that over the years we have developed a notion that nature is something that is far away and mysterious. In fact, we view nature as a place in which there is an absence of human life and interaction. In reality, there is no such place that can be referred to as truly “pristine.” Not only have humans altered and interfered with almost every ecosystem, but even if this wasn’t the case nature constantly reshapes itself, whether there is human interaction present or not. Therefore, it is pointless to try to reshape nature to its former natural conditions due to the fact that change is constant and ecosystems are always changing, with or without human interference. Therefore, Marris claims that instead of forcing nature and man to become enemies we should strive to combine the two and create a “rambunctious garden” where both can live in harmony with one another.
