In this last and final chapter of Rambunctious Gardens, Emma Marris ties together all of the ecological goals that conservationists share and points out both the flaws and benefits of each. She believes that the ultimate solution to tying together all of these goals is to “manage nature for different ends” for “different places, different chunks” that way every location can be preserved to maintain open land and biodiversity. Marris ultimately believes that because humans affect all parts of nature “it is our duty to manage it,” and as she points out there are 7 different ideologies to accomplish that (171.) The goals can be split up into protecting individual species or protecting ecosystems. They both go hand in hand because understandably without the right ecosystem animals and plants can’t exist.
The four goals that are focused on protecting species are to protect the rights of other species, protect charismatic megafauna, slow the rate of extinctions and to protect genetic diversity. While these are all great goals the issue is that they all conflict with each other. For instance to protect charismatic megafauna and then to protect the right of other species will inevitability contradict one another due to their conflicting goals. Charismatic megafauna are basically animals that humans love and don’t want to go extinct such as whales, dolphins or any “big mammal with big eyes” (156.) However under the goal to protect the rights of other species it says “humans are not specially privileged species but mere nodes in the grand web of life” (154.) This directly contradicts with this idea of protecting the charismatic megafauna because they are not “specially privileged species” either, and protecting them doesn’t necessarily prove beneficial to the ecosystem as a whole. If one were to do a cost benefit analysis under the goal of slowing the rate of extinctions, the outcome isn’t always that charismatic megafauna are the most cost efficient organisms to save. However sometimes these charismatic megafauna are keystone species that have essential umbrella species that are necessary to protect. Essentially protecting species through whichever goal, even if it is conflicting, is better than complete ignorance.
Marris focuses the rest of her three goals on the ecosystem as a whole. The goals are to define and defend biodiversity, maximize ecosystem services and to protect the spiritual and aesthetic experience of nature. These all seem very different but these goals essentially tie back to the first goal of defining and defending biodiversity. For instance, ecosystem services are the “what have you done for me lately school of ecology”(163.) While this seems like a very selfish way to conserve, it does pay out because essentially it is the way to get financing. The ideology is successful in finding the “common interests shared by nature lovers and business people” (167.) The 3rd goal of protecting the spiritual and aesthetic experience of nature is what began the conservation movement in America, and using that excuse does help preserve biodiversity as well. The only issue that we find nature to only be beautiful if it’s pristine, and as this book Rambunctious Gardens points out, maintaining the pristine wilderness is often more damaging then beneficial to the environment. However Marris ties this back to increasing biodiversity by saying that these lands can be preserved through rambunctious gardens or “the conscious and responsible, and joyful cohabitation” of humans and animals. Essentially Marris’ point is that it is our responsibility to get involved and to do so would be creating more and more rambunctious gardens.
