Rewilding Response

In “Rambunctious Garden,” Emma Marris suggests the idea of “rewilding” as an alternative method of conservation of nature amongst the human-dominated world. In its essence, “rewilding” is an effort to make natural reserves look and act like they are “pristine.” She describes it as “rewilding posits that the main factors necessary to keep ecosystems resilent and diverse are the regulation provided by large, top-of-the-food-chain predators; the room for these predators to do their work; and connections between predator ranges so they can meet, mate, and maintain a healthy diverse gene pool.” (60) She claims that “rewilding” would bring nature to a more “pristine” state because the biodiversity in the area would be more similar to its state before humans made their influence. She gives many examples of how this idea would be beneficial for nature and the ecosystem. For example, to make up for a large predator that is now extinct, “rewilding” would have similar animals put in the area to make up for that preditor. The goal of “rewilding” is to make the organisms move in a cycle in nature. They would be allowed to live and die without human interaction for the most part so this way; the natural cycle that they act in would be able to continue. Compared to other conservationists who aim to preserve nature in its original form by setting it back to a baseline state and then leave it to stay that way, “rewilding” takes into account that every part of nature has been altered by human interaction. Instead, “rewilding” is made possible by humans placing the right organisms in their natural habitats and let them naturally interact as they once did before. As Vera sees it, “the only thing man did was create the conditions, and nature filled it in.” (71) This sort of mentality about nature preservation seems a little more practical and possible than the idea of setting aside separate “pristine” land. However, I find that there are many flaws associated with the idea of “rewilding.” One – it does seem like an ethical way of creating “pristine” nature. I do not think that we should preserve nature by moving animals around the places we think they should be just for our own happiness. Essentially, “rewilding” is simply engineering nature the way we think it ought to be. This is unethical because animals are not for us to treat as objects and we cannot create natural ecosystems by modifying the ecosystem. Two – I feel that “rewilding” is just another example of having biodiversity for the sake of having biodiversity. It does not replicate the way nature was before humans so we should not try to make it appear as if it was. By adding predators and other organisms into natural habitats, we are interfering with natural cycles and making even more changes. The reason conservations work so hard to find “pristine” natural reserves is because everything else has been contaminated by human actions, but “rewilding” will only add to these human actions. I would not consider nature to be nature if it has been engineered to look a certain way by humans.