Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World by Emma Marris.

4/5 rating. 171 pages.

Book #22 of 2023. Read June 28, 2023.

This book is all about how to best take care of the world’s ecosystems in a way that saves what we find most dear to us.

I really loved the idea that Emma introduces in this book about how we must get away from only the absolutely pristine being considered nature. As she so rightly says: “Nature is almost everywhere.”

“We can marvel at the diversity of life and fight its disappearance, even if that diversity occurs in unfamiliar places. We can find beauty in nature, even if signs of humanity are present. We can see the sublime in our own backyards, if we try.”

“To run it consciously and effectively, we must admit our role and even embrace it. We must temper our romantic notion of untrammeled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended by us.”

Emma beautifully sums up the thesis of this book by this quote:

“In different places, in different chunks, we can manage nature for different ends – for historical restoration, for species preservation, for self-willed wildness, for ecosystem services, for food and fiber and fish and flame trees and frogs. We’ve forever altered the Earth, and so now we cannot abandon it to a random fate.”

I think some more of my favorite quotes from the book can sum it up much better than I can:

• “When Lewis and Clark crossed the Great Plains in the beginning of the nineteenth century, they saw massive herds of bison surging from horizon to horizon – and so those massive herds were treated as the correct baseline by later conservationists. But new research suggests that the herds were unusually huge because the main predator of bison – man – had just been knocked way back by disease. The famously large passenger pigeon flocks in the early 1800s – so large as to blot out the sun for days running – may have been a similar freak population explosion attributable to the disappearance of their main competitor for maize and nuts.”
• “Dubos’s 1980 book The Wooing of Earth argued that our goal ought to be to create ‘new environments that are ecologically sound, aesthetically satisfying, economically rewarding and favorable to the continued growth of civilization.’”
• “To make the most of our protected areas, we must think beyond their boundaries and complement our wildernesses with conservation everywhere else too, from industrial rivers like the Duwarmish to the roofs of buildings and farmer’s fields.”
• “In much of Europe, a farm run in an old-fashioned way is a conservation tool,”

Additional Quotes:

“Writing in 1901, Muir said that wildness was a necessity for ‘tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people’ suffering from ‘the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury.’”

“As a primary goal, we recommend that the biotic associations within each park be maintained, or where necessary recreated, as nearly as possible in the condition that prevailed when the area was first visited by white man. A national park should represent a vignette of primitive America.” – the Leopold report

“Since Yellowstone’s creation, parks and nature reserves have been set up around the world. By one count, about 13 percent of the Earth’s land (and a paltry 1 percent of its oceans) are protected areas, and it is undoubtedly the richer for it.”

“Countries with lots of land inhabitated by few people – or by people with few rights – began their own national parks.”

“Early parks are all craggy, bedecked with grandiose vistas and tall waterfalls. Preserving something less sexy, like a swamp, just because it was a rare ecosystem, would have to wait until the 1940s. Existing protected areas are disproportionately steep, rocky, barren, and covered in ice – useless for economic gain, and unrepresentative of the full spectrum of ecosystems on the planet.”

“According to journalist Mark Dowie, about half of the Earth’s protected areas were ‘either occupied or regularly used by indigenous peoples.’ Millions of people have been moved in the last century to protect nature, but the irony is that they were doing the least harm – after all, that is why their land had sufficient nature to interest conservationists in the first place.”

“He feels that the idea that wilderness must be absolutely pristine was part of a propaganda campaign by the U.S. Forest Service. By insisting on a strict level of purity in wilderness, the agency could limit the amount of land that could be officially designated wilderness under the 1964 Wilderness Act and thus taken out of circulation for other uses.”

“The pristine wilderness notion is a historically created idea about what ought to count as nature, and there is no reason we can’t change it. Just as the definition of citizen has changed to include more kinds of people as political ideas changed, so could nature expand to include more kinds of areas.”

#readthisbook #rambunctiousgarden

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