Bloomsbury USA

About a decade ago, the Dutch Nobelist and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term "anthropocene" to describe the geological epoch we’re living in today, in which humankind has become a force capable of driving radical environmental change on a global scale. Through climate change, we’ve touched even the most remote places on Earth. Yet we cling to a vision of nature as something distant, wild, free -- and untouched. In her new book, Rambunctious Garden, journalist Emma Marris calls this ideal "the cult of pristine wilderness" and argues that it’s due for a makeover.

Marris, who covers the ecology beat for the journal Nature, leads readers through the controversy over this idea by taking them to some of the world’s conservation hot spots: From Yellowstone, the "mother park" of the U.S. park system, to an experimental nature reserve in the Netherlands where the Pleistocene is being reborn. Throughout, she articulates a more expansive notion of nature -- one that doesn’t just accommodate humans but requires us to be its steward. OnEarth spoke to Marris about her book and why we should all let "a little more wild" into our lives.

What prompted you to write the book?

I wish I could tell you that there was one epiphany moment, but it was sort of a gradual realization that the scientists I interviewed had a public way and a private way of talking about conservation. At work, they’d tell me about historical baselines -- times in the past, before all the negative changes to an ecosystem. But when you got them in the bar they would talk more about how these systems were really in flux. When you started pressing them about why we should care about 1491 or 1850 or whatever the date it was that set as a baseline, they often admitted that it was arbitrary. I thought that was interesting.

I also read Charles Mann’s book 1491, which is about what North America was like before major European contact, and about new research showing how pervasive native communities were and how much they changed the landscape.

I was surprised to read that the population in the Americas might have been as high as 112 million people.

I got that from Mann. It’s a figure that’s pretty contentious -- it goes up and down, so who knows where it is this week -- but it’s big. Much bigger than we thought.

How did the original inhabitants of North America change the environment?

First of all, they killed off most of the animals over 220 pounds that lived here, such as mastodons, giant ground sloths, camels and horses. These extinctions are far in the past -- they weren’t caused by the grandfathers of the people who were around in 1491 -- but huge landscape changes rippled outward from those extinctions that we’re just starting to unpick from the pollen records.

And then, of course, there was planting, agriculture, burning, field clearing, all sorts of modifications, including big earthworks.

So the idea that the continent was a pristine wilderness before Europeans arrived is a myth. Are we still holding tight to this idea?

Many of us are. I had this notion that before humans messed with nature, it was in perfect balance and it was more or less unchanging. It just cycled through the seasons in perfect harmony until the minute that we got here, touched it with the tip of our fingers, and screwed it up irreparably.

So the myth of pristine wilderness has got two components: One is that nature in the absence of humans doesn’t change; and, the other is that change that comes from humanity is always bad and always final; that you can’t "untouch" a piece of nature.

You propose that we should really think of the Earth today as a "rambunctious garden," which became the title of your book. What do you mean by that?

It’s meant to have two meanings. One is that the rambunctious garden is a new way to describe the earth, in which we acknowledge the fact that humans have already influenced everything about it and take responsibility for managing it. The earth becomes a little bit more like a garden, but it doesn’t have to be sterile or showy or artificial. It can have a wild spirit in it; we can manage for wildness if we want to. So a rambunctious garden is a place that we run but that still has a lot of energy and liveliness and joy to it.

The second meaning is a description of what people can do with their own pieces of land. Instead of having a very orderly and neat garden attached to your house, you’d let your garden go kind of wild so that it’s friendlier to wildlife and can help with conservation. So the idea is that the earth is more like a garden that we thought -- and that our gardens should be more like nature than they are now.

Before writing the book, did you run your idea by any scientists, and how did they react?

I not only talked to scientists about it, I talked to anybody I could get a hold of. I’ve been obsessed for this for years. By 2008 I was buttonholing ecologists at the bar, giving them my big spiel and finding that a lot of them were already in the same place. I had just had this great realization, but a lot of them totally accepted the fact that nature was a moving target, that "restoration" was restoring to arbitrary baselines, that we needed to be able to find conservation value in secondary forests and other "degraded landscapes." But they hadn’t really gone public with it yet.

Do you think climate change is forcing everybody’s hand, since it’s the one human footprint that’s leaving no place untouched?

There are other candidates for that. Radiation in the atmosphere after atomic testing is another. There are also persistent organic pollutants that show up at the North and South poles. But climate change is like this whole envelope that surrounds the world. It’s metaphorically very intense.

If we throw out the goal of restoring nature to a pristine, pre-human state, what should we be working toward?

That’s the tough part. The sweet part about all of this is the realization that we can make more nature and the planet can get better. But the tough pill to swallow is that it means a lot of meetings. Instead of having the one goal of pristine wilderness, we have to, for each piece of land, choose between a long list of options. Our goals could be everything from aesthetics, to ecosystem services, to creating habitats for endangered species, to historical fidelity. The list goes on and on, and there’s a whole chapter in the book listing them. So what does that mean? All the stakeholders -- a favorite word in conservation circles -- will have to sit around and decide what the goals are going to be for each piece of land. That’s going to be rough.

The one exception to this is private land. There’s only one stakeholder and that’s you, and you get to pick whatever goal you want whether it’s managing for native plants, creating habitat for butterflies, filtering rainwater to drink -- or growing vegetables for your family.

Let’s look at an example. Has the National Park Service figured out a goal for Yellowstone, which features prominently in your book and in our collective imagination?

The park service is actively trying to figure out how to manage their parks under climate change. They’re having to choose between fighting like hell to keep the species associated with a particular park in it, or spending that same money trying to get those species established in the next park northward. They’re very interested in "maximizing resiliency" -- meaning, instead of aiming for historical fidelity, they want something that’s relatively stable. They’re not going to hold an ecosystem to a historical baseline so hard that it’s on life support and vulnerable to one bad year. My sense is that they’ve made the decision to let these systems evolve away from what we’re used to in order to keep them robust.

You write about ways that private citizens "can squeeze conservation value out of human-dominated landscapes," such as our backyards, city parks and farms. What are some of these strategies?

There are so many ways. There’s no law against assisted migration, so you could look at a tree that’s suffering in its home range because of climate change, plant it in your own garden and see if it does well.

For a long time there was a real vogue for native-species gardening. My mother did this and had all Pacific Northwest plants in her Seattle garden. That’s still a really good thing to do because it creates habitat for local wildlife, but you don’t have to be a purist about it because these plants are all going to be moving around anyway as microclimates change.

Or you could just stop mowing your lawn and see what happens!

As a renter who lives in the city, I often feel as though I can’t make much of a difference. So I was excited to read about "metapopulations" -- the idea that mobile plants and insects in your backyard can interact with plants and insects elsewhere in your neighborhood to form a larger network.

Ilkka Hanski, the metapopulations researcher from Finland who I quoted in the book, talks about this dream he has of neigbhorhood clubs that would consciously create a metapopulation. So not only would you plant some milkweed for caterpillars in your yard, but a certain number of neighbours at a certain distance away would agree to do so as well so that you can get a thriving metapopulation. He sees this as a great way to build community. The point is, there are lots of opportunities to do things, even in little tiny boxes outside your window.

You finished your book two weeks after your daughter was born. By the time she grows up, do you think we’ll have embraced the model of a rambunctious garden?

We will have had to. Otherwise, we’re all just going to be in professional mourning for generations, and that just doesn’t seem psychologically sustainable, apart from anything else. By the time Adele is grown up, I’m hopeful that not only will this model have been broadly taken on board, but there will be a civic pride in pushing for all these goals.