Rambunctious Garden
Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World
A paradigm shift is roiling the environmental world. For decades people have unquestioningly accepted the idea that our goal is to preserve nature in its pristine, pre-human state. But many scientists have come to see this as an outdated dream that thwarts bold new plans to save the environment and prevents us from having a fuller relationship with nature. Humans have changed the landscapes they inhabit since prehistory, and climate change means even the remotest places now bear the fingerprints of humanity. Emma Marris argues convincingly that it is time to look forward and create the “rambunctious garden,” a hybrid of wild nature and human management.
In this optimistic book, readers meet leading scientists and environmentalists and visit imaginary Edens, designer ecosystems, and Pleistocene parks. Marris describes innovative conservation approaches, including rewilding, assisted migration, and the embrace of so-called novel ecosystems.
Rambunctious Garden is short on gloom and long on interesting theories and fascinating narratives, all of which bring home the idea that we must give up our romantic notions of pristine wilderness and replace them with the concept of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden planet, tended by us.
Praise
“Potentially the most optimistic and controversial work about the future of nature to appear in years.”
—Grist
“Marris is a whip-smart writer . . . already being compared to the greatest environmental writers and thinkers of the past century, Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Covering the world of ecology and conservation from the ancient forests of Poland to the urban waterways of Seattle, Washington, Marris calls for a new kind of conservation that eschews the defensive stance of the past and embraces the challenges of acknowledging, understanding, protecting, and restoring the nature of the present and the future. This is a thought-provoking book that should be widely read and more widely discussed.”
—Kent H. Redford, director, Wildlife Conservation Society
“In Rambunctious Garden, Emma Marris weeds through a jungle of ecological dogma, yanking and hacking at our most cherished perceptions of Natures purity. Marris asks us to look beyond the black-and-white world of pest and weed versus native and natural. And to humbly accept our duty, as tenders of a garden rambunctious beyond our ken, but not beyond our care.”
—William Stolzenburg, author of Rat Island and Where the Wild Things Were
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