When some ecologists look out on the Great Plains, USA, they imagine a very different picture than the rest of us. Prairie grasses sway in the breeze, massive herds of bison thunder across the vast open landscape, and hotly pursuing the herd is… a cheetah? Believe it or not, this is the future these ecologists want, and it may not be as crazy as it sounds. In Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, Emma Marris—one of these visionary ecologists—challenges long-standing ideas about conservation, nature, and what is “natural.”
Concept art of Pleistocene Rewilding. By Sergio De La Rosa
The main subject she calls into question is the notion of the “pristine” wilderness, and whether it should be the baseline for conservation and restoration projects. Marris argues not only that the world is far too changed by human influence for this idea to be practical, but also that it never was pristine in the first place. Instead, she says, we should embrace our status as Earth-movers and take a more active role in tending the Earth as our “half-wild, rambunctious garden.”
From the start, she lays out this new paradigm in stunning clarity, explains why the old way of thinking is problematic, and spends the rest of the book exploring unique—and sometimes weird—case studies. These case studies point to how the “pristine wilderness” concept as an ideal is a relatively new phenomenon, and it is not a realistic one. Yet, it is still the ideal that most conservation projects strive toward.
Take America’s national parks, for instance. Set aside starting in the nineteenth century, they were designed to remain a time capsule of the landscapes “as nearly as possible in the condition that prevailed when the area was first visited by the white man,” in the words of scientist A. Starker Leopold in 1963. But that goal did not account for the changes to the landscape made by Native Americans, who were already using resources in Yellowstone for some 10,000 years.
So if the baseline isn’t the arrival of “white men,” how about the arrival of humans? Her most fascinating case study probes this idea. Known as “Pleistocene rewilding,” this radical restoration proposal seeks to restore landscapes to the way they were 10,000 years ago. And missing a significant piece of the ecosystem—megafauna, like extinct giant sloths and saber-tooth tigers—isn’t stopping the scientists behind the movement. Their proposition is to import surviving megafauna (think elephants or cheetahs) to fill the niches of those long-gone creatures in places like the US Great Plains. Invasive species who?
The premise is that these extinct megafauna were an important part of the larger ecosystem. Intensive grazing by large populations of different, big herbivores would have had a huge effect on plant species composition, and top predators would have maintained both populations and diversity of those herbivores. Basically, if we really want the ecosystems to function the way they did before people arrived, we need more large animals. Marris didn’t entirely sell me on the idea—it seems awfully risky to assume similar megafauna would fill exactly the same niche—but it seems that persuading me was never her intent. Like the rest of the book, the example raises fundamental questions about the goals of conservation. Is land “wild” if its wilding requires imported species from half a world away? Is it “restored” to prehuman conditions if you add animals that the land has never seen before, if they are similar enough to those ancient cousins?
Don’t expect to have these questions answered: it’s your job as the reader to grapple with them. Indeed, my one frustration with the book is the lack of a clear resolution, save for the last page and a half. At its heart it is a philosophical text, and as such Marris doesn’t have all the answers. Her success is in asking new questions. And she does so in a way that is entirely accessible, and so fascinating it is entertaining (“Wilderness cultist supremo Teddy Roosevelt” is my new favorite moniker for that President). This is science writing at its best, and you’ll never look at the world outside your window the same way again.
