Customer Reviews

Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World

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"Rambunctious Garden" is the the most important conservation biology book thus far in the 21st century. I'm an active participant in, and advocate for, two of the leading-edge conservation options Emma Marris covers in her book: assisted migration and Pleistocene rewiding. I can attest that she not only got those topics "right", but I learned even more. Adding that to my experience of deep learning in the rest of the less familiar chapters, I came away with a full and enthusiastic "yes" to her notion of "rambunctious garden." I now see a vast landscape of distinct paths in conservation all interweaving within a robust, necessary, and alluring paradigm shift that offers cultural gifts to our species and lifeways while doing a better, more flexible and peacefully questing job in protecting our furred, feathered, scaled, sun-powered, and lignified kin in this grand and ongoing epic of evolution.

As well, as a science writer myself (evolution and ecology), I applaud this book for showcasing the vital role that science writers play. (Note: This is Connie Barlow writing this review, not my husband, Michael Dowd, whose Amazon account I share.) That role is far more than sorting through the science and presenting it in understandable and inspiring ways, which at least a few scientists in every field are masters of. Rather, no participant scientist can faithfully present the contrarian views during the rambunctious time of a paradigm shift in their particular field. Marris doesn't hide the fact that she is not only intrigued by but inclined toward this new way of viewing human-Earth interactions. But as to how the shift in perspective and possibility actually ought to play out on the ground -- well, for that, she lets the actors (scientists, land managers, and citizen activists) speak for themselves.

My only misgiving is that, not surprisingly, two classic conservation goals may appear to be cast aside in the early chapters: the goals of wilderness protection and prevention of species extinctions. But read on. In the last third of the book, where Marris brings the new pathways into a landscape view of the paradigm shift overall, those two classic goals are seen to maintain a vital presence in the now patchier quilt of conservation biology. And from my perspective, each will likely turn out to be even better cared for (tended), if they too are allowed to evolve in form and function.

As a long-time wilderness and biodiversity activist of the boomer generation, I see myself on both sides of the paradigm shift -- exultantly rambunctious in some areas, but deeply rooted and perhaps too unbending in others. But thankfully we all eventually die, and it will be the next generations who choose which of our contributions will carry forward. And here is where writers who preference the "pristine" need to continue to wax nostalgic and pass those deep memories and emotional responses forward. Those of us who watched the mayfly hatch in Michigan this spring with not a single bat zigging through the swarm know in our bones that something precious was missing. So along with Emma Marris's book on our shelf (or Kindle), there should always be a place for Darwin, Leopold, Krutch, Eiseley, Carson, Lopez, Tempest Williams, and fellow expositors of near-pristine nature during their own times. Let us never become autistic to the diminishing sounds and sights of spring -- simply because the change is less pronunced over the span of a single life. Only then will "rambunctious" not open the door to loss.

It's taken me a while to compose my thoughts on this book. Quite honestly after chapter 1 I felt like throwing it in the trash. She comes off a little rude towards conservationist, using the history of the world as her evidence that they're wasting their time. She falls just short of mentioning that Dinosaurs used to walk the earth, and that the earth used to not exist. So... what is this book about?

Chapters 2 through 5 I absolutely loved. Chapter 1 is completely forgiven. She talks about the formation of conservationist movement, and travels a fair amount of the world seeing how other countries deal with preservation of such places. She points out the problems with simply picking a date out of the calender to say what's native and not. And the mountain of evidence is undeniable. She talks about the problem of climate change, both in the past and where we're heading to some degree. This isn't the main focus of her argument though. She brings up the tough issues conservationists are faced with today, many of which don't have clear answers. What to do about invasive species, hybrid species, should we care about genetic diversity and can we care about any of these without breaking the bank? For brief moments she talks in a level of detail on par with the book "Gun's Germs and Steel," by Jared Diamond, and I enjoyed every moment of my reading. The only thing I can really fault her on is not including any pictures, anywhere in the book at all. Seriously if you're going to travel the world bring a camera!

What's wrong though is I was enjoying these chapters for reasons the author probably didn't intend. I wish her book was entirely about issues conservationists face today. Sadly it's more like plants are plants regardless of their origin and are deserving of protection (conservation?) and study regardless of where on earth they are growing.

I understand and get her point, I even support it to some degree. But she seems to talk about assisted migration of endangered and threatened species as though it's the same issue as importing yet another nonnative species into the country. She mentions invasive species only cause extinctions on islands, in lakes and in fragmented forests, but completely ignores the fact most forests in North America are very fragmented. She out right uses some of the same examples used by Doug Tallamy in "Bringing Nature Home" as examples of how nonnative plants benefit the world, as opposed to how Tallamy used them to show how they don't. Did we need to import plants from Asia for erosion control? Couldn't we have found something at least on our own continent? Couldn't we have just replanted the native species that were growing there before the bulldozer removed them in the first place to cause erosion issues with the hillside? Does everyone in the world need an exotic plant collection?

I'm all for bending the rules when it comes to only planting natives but Emma never states any definition as to what she personally considers to be native. She spends too much time combing the world for examples of success stories where nonnatives, and sometimes invasives, benefited the ecosystem somehow. Birds nesting in trees isn't benefiting the ecosystem, nor is simply offering nectar. Birds will nest along skyscrapers in New York City, and next time you have a pair of foul smelling socks, go ahead and soak them in 1:1 sugar water. Hang them out to dry over the summer and count the bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds you're feeding. Who needs a forest at all when we can get the same results with sky scrapers and dirty socks?

My point is it's laughable to think a 13 page chapter on assorted exotic species from around the world is going to change anyone's mind. I'll agree many invasive, and even aggressive spreading species are mislabeled as such, but this needs to be treated on a case by case basis. Conservationists moan about Butterfly Bush but the truth seems to be only certain cultivars, and even then mostly in subtropical and tropical areas, seem to be aggressive enough to warrant the label invasive. It would have been nice to get some examples of plants that are invasive in the world (maybe something her North American audience would recognize) and visit them in their country of origin. Finding a place in the world where Kudzu or Purple Loosestrife are proudly grown in nature preserves of which they are native are the kinds of example this book needed. I think she mentions something about it when briefly talking about Rose Apple but I've never herd of that before, so again pictures would have been nice.

One of her last chapters where she's kayaking down a polluted river, looking at some nonnative plants, and talking about the combination of conservation and industry there had no effect on me. I got the idea that it's meant to be a chapter to enlighten the reader about what a wonderful world we live in, but to me it was just more pages to turn.

My personal view is that any sort of food crop is perfectly fine to grow regardless of origin in the world provided it's not considered a noxious weed or illegal to grow. Beyond that there's no reason for anyone to grow anything nonnative. I say native in a broad sense. If the plant is hardy in your growing zone, you have the right soil and lighting for it, and it's not crossing any major geographical boundary (a mountain range, an ocean etc...) then you have every right to try and grow it. Beyond that I feel that anyone trying to re-shingle their roof with bamboo they grew themselves is an idiot.

Sticking with natives have the benefits of being the most palatable to the indigenous insect life, which are near the bottom of the food chain. Emma addresses this issue slightly, saying these relationships will slowly catch up to the nonnative either by import or by a sudden increase in a bug's diet. Personally I'd rather not wait 500 to 10,000 years when planting a butterfly garden. Call me old fashioned but I like my host plant associations to be firmly established over a few decades at least.

This book turns a lot of the conventional conservation dogma on its head. Those people that view humans outide of nature or that view all exotic plants as disasters waiting to happen may find this book challenging. The author systematically makes the argument that there is no such thing as pristine nature. Humans have touched every part of the planet whether through direct intervention or through climate change. Therefore we have to give up the myth and set about tending the garden that is planet Earth.

I found the arguments against the standard "pre-European" baseline especially compelling. She argues that anthropogenic climate change is nothing new and the effects of human action can be seen even 10,000 years ago when the human populations in the Americas drove gigantic, methane emitting, herbivores to extinction. When neolithic man can change climate so greatly, simply rolling back the wilderness clock to a time before Europeans showed up in the Americas seems pretty arbitrary. She also provided me a better understanding of what kind of wildernes those Europeans colonists encountered when they arrived. Many people think of that environment as an untrammeled paradise but there was a huge and advanced civilization in the Americas with a population to rival Europe. The Europeans didn't see this because of disease. I took that to mean that the pristine wilderness those explorers saw was more like a vacant lot that had recently been overrun by weeds. That is what happens when disturbed or cultivated land suddenly falls out of use. Making a weed filled vacant lot your baseline seems hard to justify.

So where does that leave us? Apparently with a lot of tough questions that can't be easily answered with, "before Europeans or before humans". However, even when presenting the panoply of choices, the author makes the process seem hopeful and exciting. Maybe the best way forward is simply to tend the garden that is all around us well.

I was lucky enough to get an early copy of Rambunctious Garden. I've admired the author's writing about nature and ecology in Nature for years, but even so, I was surprised and impressed with the power and grace of her writing here. In addressing the gap between our fantasies about "pristine" nature and the reality of a much scrappier and more adaptable natural world, Marris doesn't just reveal what is wrong about how we usually think about wilderness and conservation--she shifts the focus to an understanding that is at the same time more realistic, and more optimistic. I can't remember the last time I've read a book about biodiversity, wilderness and conservation that is both hopeful, and believable. Rambunctious Garden is a must read for anyone who wants to really understand the natural world and our place in it--and especially for those who want to do something positive with that understanding.

Emma's book is like a breath of fresh air, bringing intelligence and clarity to an often contentious debate. It is very difficult to describe an alternative world without focusing on ideals, models, or sketchy notions of past states. Many of the scientists at work in these fields present persuasive arguments but often fail to realize themselves that they are founded on very rigid assumptions of some correct state which may never have existed, nor could it exist. I recommend this book as readable, enjoyable, and thought provoking. She is definitely not on the attack, and offers reasoned and reasonable solutions.

The elephant in the room, of course, is us. The loss of wilderness and large predators was caused by human colonization. Out of a sense of guilt or righteous anger, we want to "fix" what has been done. But as Emma has so clearly pointed out, the solutions are often not realistic or even beneficial to the systems they attempt to fix. Rather than hold up some ideal of "how it was" or "how it should be", one needs to concentrate on process. By minimal intervention, one can assist ecosystems restore health to themselves. In the end, that is what nature is: a restorative process.

PLB
Ithaca, NY

Emma Marris is a talented writer and lucid thinker who has written a brilliantly sensible book. "Rambunctious Garden" is about the future of nature. It rejects the "wilderness cult" and melancholic perfectionism which has dominated much of nature conservation policy in the last century. Instead, with thorough research and documentation, Marris explains the importance of "adaptation" policies which accept the reality that there is no pristine nature left on this planet and that it is not possible to restore nature on Earth to its former state.

Marris may step on some toes with her dismissal of the traditions of John Muir and Henry Thoreau whom she describes as being forerunners of a trend in conservation that, by the 1980s, had become "full blown misanthropy". One senses an impatience and near disdain in her attitude toward traditional conservation ideology and its "Romantic, religious" obsession with pristine nature. She herself presents a more postmodern, realistic view of how, not simply to conserve pockets of wildernesss, but to respectfully and productively cohabit with all of nature.

Reading Marris's insightful history of conservation and ecology science, I was struck by two realizations:
One is how little is actually known about nature's processes and how very hypothetical and untried ecological science is.
Two is that adaptation models have been considered unacceptable. Marris points out that nature is always changing and in flux--why is this news? However, cosmologists were also reluctant to give up the "steady-state" model of the universe and accept it as changing, expanding; it seems the human desire to keep things as they are (or were), to want to conserve the status quo, runs deep, no matter how contraindicated by life and death.

Regarding the many unknowns in ecological science, Marris's chapter on "rewilding" makes evident how very difficult it is to predict what consequences ecologists' decisions will have on the future of nature and how even acting with the best intentions may be disastrous, although Marris is hopeful that ecological science will create balance and "more nature" than it will destroy. Yet so many ecological choices and policies are based on untried hypotheses. A plan to reintroduce large predators like lions and cheetahs to the Great Plains of the United States to bring that damaged ecosystem into balance was recently devised by a handful of men who had a meeting at Ted Turner's ranch. They suggested that "towns and farms" that do not want wild predators roaming their area could "fence themselves". This is not all that different than current large predator policies that allow mountain lions to roam regional parks in the West, sometimes (rarely) attacking hikers or wandering into towns. A proponent of the Great Plains idea wrote that without large wild predators "...nature seems somehow incomplete, truncated, overly tame... Human opportunities to attain humility are reduced." Personally, I prefer the John Muir style of misanthropy.

More disturbing, regarding the arbitrariness of hugely important ecological decisions, is the influence of commercial value. In a chapter on "assisted migration"--a very new practice of repopulating species further north or further uphill to help them survive global warming--Marris indicates that a decision on what tree species to preserve on 25 million hectares of forest in British Columbia is mostly influenced by the "surprising importance" of just one man's ideas, a British Columbia forester, for whom the commercial value of forests is primary.

Perhaps all this arbitrariness is the underlying point of Rambunctious Garden. Nature, Earth and its life/death cycles are in constant flux. The only real known is that nature will take its course. Individual species, including humans, will have to adapt or die off. Marris is hopeful that adaptive policies can conserve much of nature, including humanity, and she makes a powerful case for her beliefs. Her arguments for adaptation--as opposed to only preserving hypothetical pristine baseline states for protected ecosystems--are followed by her chapters addressing responsible ecological stewardship through adaptive policies such as "rewilding", "assisted migration", "novel ecosystems", "designer ecosystems" and "conservation everywhere".

Marris's vision is eclectic, inclusive, pragmatic and optimistic. The final pages of her last chapter "menu of goals" are moving and inspiring. They also contain a magnificent description of Sandhill cranes at a river in Nebraska which reveals her remarkable creative talent and love of nature. Rambunctious Garden is a compelling read throughout and seems to me, a layperson non-scientist, to be a very important voice in the field of ecological science--and more, an extremely important book for absolutely everyone.

I sneaked a look at a review copy of Rambunctious Garden and can't recommend it enough. It's a thoughtful look at the concept of nature in the modern world, and it has an empowering message for average people who would like to help the planet. Since reading it, I've become aware of the garden all around us, even here in the heart of London!

This is a quiet book with a big message - that much of what passes for "ecology" is simply wasting time and resources in pursuit of artificial goals and false gods - religiously romantic misanthropy based on wooly thinking cloaked in a veneer of science.

There are several well-written reviews that go into detail about the book, so I won't reinvent the wheel here. Suffice to say that readers will find that most of what they 'know' about the environment simply isn't true. Humans have made major changes in the environment since before the dawn of civilization, not merely since the Europeans took over. Huge herds of buffalo blackening the great plains were likely an anomaly, rather than typical. Invasive species are often good and not always bad, and good and bad are moral judgments rather than scientific ones anyway.

The author is clearly sympathetic to the cause, even as she methodically demolishes its theoretical underpinnings. Given the misallocation of resources that can result from some eco-claptrap, slightly less sympathy might be in order, and often you wish she would pound the table just a little bit harder.

Nevertheless, like the generations of self-righteous doctors who ignored Ignaz Semmelweis's recommendation that they wash their hands before delivering babies, I suspect most professional and armchair ecologists will shrink from the author's prescriptions. That is their loss and ours.

I got this book after reading a favorable review in the 'Economist'. The author argues that many people concerned about the environment, especially in the United States, seem to have an either-or attitude. Either an area is truly wild--and good; or not truly wild--and bad. Ms Marris argues that there are few areas anywhere that are truly pristine, and in any case, areas do not have to be pristine to be ecologically valuable. She also argues that people can play a positive role, not just a negative one. In making her case, she travels to some interesting spots and presents an entertaining narrative. I do have one quibble. When describing her travels to Hawaii (where I happen to live) Ms Marris describes the Hawaiian Goose as a flightless bird. The Hawaiian Goose is not flightless.