In the first two chapters of “Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World,” Emma Marris discusses the efforts made by conservationists in the field of preserving the nature. She summarizes her main points in her thesis: “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.” (3) In this, she states that she believes that nature preservation should be done in all parts of a country, rather than creating separate partitions of land set aside for conservation. She proposes for nature conservation to be partnered with the human influences that are made on the land for conservation. Her description about the origin of these conservationist methodologies going back to the late 1800s with the creation of the Yellowstone National Park really provided good reasoning for the way that modern preservations are kept. People try to make these nature reserves as similar as they used to be thousands of years ago in order to truly get the natural feel of the original biodiversity and ecology of the region. Marris talks about how it is nearly impossible to actually backtrack a piece of land to the way it once was because changes in nature are inevitable, such as changes in climate. The method of preserving certain pieces of land, by making it into a national park for example, is flawed because the land will still be influenced by human activity. She points out other reasons why nature conservation this way is not effective. “People often were already living there when the protected area was created. And because the Yellowstone model requires ‘untouched’ nature, the people were often kicked out.” (26) This shows that although natural parks are made to look like they have been that way forever without having any interaction with humans, parks have been made to look that way after their inhabitants were forced to move out.
I believe that Marris makes many strong points against the current way of nature conservation. I agree with her that people are making nature conservation areas for the sake of preserving nature alone. Instead, we should accept that nature has been modified by humans and should work on preserving the nature the way it is. We should not harm it, but we shouldn’t try to fix it back to a previous condition just because we think that is the way it was meant to be. I also agree with her claim that change is inevitable and there is rarely a situation that is always predictably cyclical. Changes will be made to ecosystems that alter the species and land and these changes are not in the hands of humans. Conservationists have to accept the fact that humans have altered nature and that there no part of nature is absolutely “pure” in the world.
