Emma Marris in the first two chapters of her book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World makes her main points clear: that “there is one thing that nature is not: pristine,” humans “are already running the whole Earth,” and it’s too difficult and time-consuming for society to turn back the clock and attempt to conserve parts of the world as if they were untouched by humans (2). She goes through several examples around the world as evidence that the past and present efforts of conservation are invalid, discussing such ideas as the “baseline” in-depth and evaluating conservationism in America from Thoreau to today’s ecologists following in his steps accordingly. The idea that nature is peaceful, undisturbed, and stable is false, according to Marris, and there must be changes in the way society visualizes nature and the ways in which we approach the topic, from an ecological and topical standpoint.
One of the examples that she uses to demonstrate her points takes place in Hawaii, where presently “half of the plants in Hawaii are nonnative,” and study plots used by other scientists to restore tiny parts of forests back to its supposed pristine state appear “a bit sad and empty, like someone’s living room in the middle of a move-out” (6-7). Apparently, efforts to restore plots like these have failed, as “the mature native trees had grown very little,” and the trees were being restored by humans, ironically: after all, why should humans interfere with a typical ecosystem, that changes frequently and has very little stability? Marris elaborates more on this idea in the second chapter, when she says that “(g)enerations of field ecologists tried to make their observations fit this model, but the real world was stubbornly unpredictable” (29). Although the instabilities of ecosystems have been confirmed decades ago, the “assumption of stability is still with us and is as tenacious as ever” (30).
Marris talks extensively about the history of conservationism, rooted in Europe and America where writers such as Wordsworth and Thoreau criticized their urban neighbors and surroundings, wanting to escape them and explore the solitude and balance that is only found in places away from rustling towns and people. Yet, using Thoreau as an example, some of these writers detested the wilderness, contrary to what most people would believe: he “actually preferred a middle ground between the truly wild and the truly civilized” (20). Another famous conservations John Muir furthered the “wilderness cult” by “trying to bring civilized humans to God through the glory of His mountains and forests,” believing that the wilderness “must not be changed radically to suit man” (21). It was and is “nature for nature’s sake,” a purely human invention that harms the way in which humans can co-exist with their environment.
Hopefully more changes have been taken on by governments, ecological organizations, and other entities to shift our conservation efforts towards the future by accounting for human dominance; yet, a change in Western culture and attitude towards nature will take quite a while, as the world continues to urbanize and people run out of space for their so-called “solitude.”
