At the beginning of her book “Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World,” Emma Marris argues that the idea about “true” nature that most conservationists have is an inaccurate one. She claims that the notion of creating protected areas that resemble a time when man had not dominated that landscape, the time when nature was “pristine” is impractical and unrealistic. Marris, instead, leans toward a system of conservation where nature and man coexist and where conservation takes place everywhere. Nature sure is no longer natural, then, according to her, why should we make the futile effort to change something that is ever changing by nature.
The author first addresses the difficulties of creating these “pristine” areas and the massive efforts needed to create “islands like the past”. One project the Australian Wildlife Conservancy was working on was returning the condition of a part of the Australian outback to the time when humans first colonized the continent. The creation and maintenance of such a place requires an enormous effort to evict all the invasive species including human and to erect walls and fences around the area. The Sanctuary, as the Australian termed it, was meant to sweep away all the domestic species that had been introduced by human a long time ago, such as cats, rabbits, goats and foxes. The violent methods that were enacted were aimed toward considered “invasive” entities including remaining human, like in the Yellowstone where Indians were “forcibly removed” from their land. The author thus illustrates the great amounts of work, unethical however they maybe, needed to achieve pristine nature.
I believe that at the beginning of her book, Emma Marris makes many strong points against the current way of nature conservation. I favor her opinion about people trying to conservation areas for the sake of preserving nature alone. They don’t account for many external and internal factors, including the fact that nature has already been modified and humans have been included as part of nature. Instead we should preserve nature the way it is and not try to revert it back to a previous “baseline” that we humans have set for it for the status that nature should be in, according to our own limited opinion. Changes will definitely occur no matter what, changes that will alter the species and land in the ecosystems, and not by the hands of humans. Conservationists have to accept these facts before moving on to the real mission of conserve it.
