#rambunctious garden

[probablyasocialecologist]

When conservationists focus on “pristine wilderness” only, they give people the impression that that’s all that nature is. And so urban, suburban, and rural citizens believe that there is no nature where they live; that it is far away and not their concern. They can lose the ability to have spiritual and aesthetic experiences in more humble natural settings.

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

[stormynightsreawake]

i took a walk today and noticed how spring had been carrying on without us. every cherry tree hummed loudly with bees. these natural spaces between housing developments are so important to the robins and the honeybees and the rabbits here. read rambunctious garden by emma marris. anyway it was nice to smell honeysuckle again

[jamestfarley]

The Rambunctious Garden, 2018. 

Showing at Firstdraft in Sydney, February 7 - March 2, 2018. 

More info HERE

[probablyasocialecologist]

The inhabitants of North and South America had grand cities, expansive agricultural fields, large-scale irrigation, and huge earthworks, including agricultural terracing, residential platforms above floodplain aquaculture works, and massive religious mounds —some in the shapes of animals. Near present-day St. Louis, one can still climb the central mound of the corn-crazy metropolis of Cahokia, a London-sized city that flourished from about A.D. 950 to 1250. And nearly everywhere people had a way with fire. Many North American groups used fire to clear areas to promote new green growth, which would in turn attract grazing animals that could be hunted. The Haudenosaunee, for example, burned Manhattan every fall. Many American prairies and grasslands thought to be “natural” were in fact artifacts of Indian land management.

In the east of North America, for hundreds of years before Europeans arrived, people supplemented their maize crops by using fire and tree planting to create orchards. These orchards have now mostly melted back into the forest but can still be picked out by their high concentrations of chestnuts, walnuts, pecans, hickory, and the like.

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

[probablyasocialecologist]

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. It is our duty to manage it. Luckily, it can be a pleasant, even joyful task if we embrace it in the right spirit. Let the rambunctious gardening begin.

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

[probablyasocialecologist]

Emma Marris, the author of Rambunctious Garden (RG), loves the nature hiding in back street alleys and along the highway median strip. Marris believes it’s time to abandon (or de-emphasize) what sh…

The idea of wilderness is not black and white, but more nuanced—nuances that Marris and others of her persuasion are unwilling to acknowledge. Most wilderness advocates readily admit that human influences are widespread and pernicious—but that on some parts of the globe natural processes dominate to a greater degree than in more humanized landscapes. It is the degree of naturalness, not the complete absence of human influence, that makes some places wilder and less domesticated than others.

To use just one legal definition, the word ‘untrammeled’ as defined in the Wilderness Act does not mean untouched, or state of “purity”; rather it defines wilderness areas  as places that “generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable.”  Downtown Los Angeles is considerably more modified to human ends than say the Arctic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Arctic Refuge, by the Wilderness Act’s definition, would qualify as “wilderness” even though the refuge is certainly not “pristine” in a literal sense.

Marris, like many of the Post Modern revisionists before her, also tends to exaggerate the impacts of aboriginal peoples. She equates the modifications, degradation, and exploitation of modern technological human societies — swollen to populations never seen before on Planet Earth — as essentially similar in effect, if not in scope, with the alterations effected by aboriginal peoples. Native people, we are told, were the first members of the smart resource management school of thought. Just because aboriginals may have hunted, gathered plants, and set fires, she jumps to the conclusion that no lands are genuinely wild in the sense of being largely “self-willed” and natural, so any new modification is just a natural extension of the aboriginal use and “management.”

There’s no doubt that aboriginal peoples had some influence on the land.  Early human hunters, it is now argued by many paleo-biologists, contributed to the extinction of some Pleistocene mammals, and many Pacific Islands bird species suffered extinction after the Polynesian people arrived.  Nevertheless, the overall influence of aboriginal peoples upon the Earth was significantly lower due to low population numbers and limited technology, compared to today’s techno society. In favorable, but localized areas Native American influences were likely significant, but the farther one ventured from villages, popular food gathering sites and favored hunting grounds, the more limited the human influence.  Nor would anyone, I think, want to argue that just because aboriginal people caused species extinction, that makes modern extinction rates acceptable.

Human presence has never been evenly distributed upon the face of the Earth. It is simply hyperbole on Marris’ part to make sweeping statements like “we humans have changed every centimeter of the globe.” Even with all our technology, much greater human population, and so forth, there are vast areas of the North American continent, the boreal forest, especially, where human presence is low and human influence is small compared to, say, the agricultural wastelands that dominate the former prairielands of America’s heartland or the cityscapes scattered across the country. Similar degrees of human influence exist on all continents. .

Too many environmental disasters have been justified by exactly this kind of logic—humans are going to make things better. The bucket brigades of fishermen who dump fish willy-nilly across watersheds hoping to “improve” the fishing, as well as the state wildlife agencies that have planted non-native fish around the West, now pose a threat to the majority of native species.  Likewise, the introduction of exotic grasses like buffel grass for “improved” livestock forage is now overwhelming the Sonoran Desert biota.  Even the inadvertent release of diseases from transplanting non-native nursery stock  has led to the spread of  Dutch elm disease,white pine blister rust, and other forest pathogens. These and many other examples of unintended consequences of human manipulation should be enough of a precautionary warning to anyone who has really studied the scientific literature.

[...]

I don’t have any argument with her admonishment that we should appreciate the bits of nature that survive in our humanized world. I love the birds singing in my suburban yard, the frogs that have found a place to breed someplace under the shrubs and the occasional deer that may wander through my city lot. But I am not fooled. My city lot is not nearly as functional as a large wild reserve, nor is the collective effect of thousands of similar city lots any substitute for one big natural area.

[probablyasocialecologist]

We still have complex compromises to make between ideologies in contested places and between local and global interests. Society must decide what its goals are on multiple scales, then allocate the best-suited land to these various goals and get going, not shying away from the occasional bold experiment. Here, land for soulful contemplation, plus water filtration. There, land for the tiger and for ten endangered plant species. Over there, a mixed-bag refuge for island species that have winked out on their home atolls. And there, farms with wide boundaries left to go wild and highway medians covered in flowers.

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

[universitybookstore]

Environmentalist and Seattle native, Emma Marris explores the future of conservation in her surprisingly optimistic new book, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, from Bloomsbury.