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Interventionist Conservation Travis Kavulla 2 2 Interventionist Conservation Travis Kavulla he cult of pristine wilderness more: his book’s eponymous God is a cultural construction, species. Lynas is concerned with Tand a relatively new one,” solving the large-scale man-made writes reporter Emma Marris in her ecological problems that he believes new book-length essay, Rambunctious pose a serious threat to the planet’s Garden. Contrary to environmental- future. But his argument is unortho- ists who seek to restore or conserve dox. “Until now, environmentalism “pristine” enclaves of nature from has been mostly about reducing our human encroachment, Marris argues interference with nature,” he writes. that nature is everywhere, from the “My thesis is the reverse: playing barren Arctic God (in the sense to the birds in a Rambunctious Garden: Saving of being intelli- suburban back- Nature in a Post-Wild World gent designers) yard. Nowhere By Emma Marris at a planetary is nature static Bloomsbury ~ 2011 ~ 210 pp. level is essential and unaltered by $25 (cloth) if creation is not human beings; to be irreparably The God Species: Saving the Planet ecosystems are in the Age of Humans damaged or even plastic, constant- By Mark Lynas destroyed by ly changing and National Geographic ~ 2011 ~ 280 pp. humans unwit- adapting to new $25 (cloth) tingly deploying conditions, and our newfound to the activities of different plants powers in disastrous ways. At this and animals. This constant flux in late stage, false humility is a more the earth’s rambunctious ecosystems urgent danger than hubris.” ought to give us pause when consid- Marris and Lynas are both voices in ering the impact that Homo sapiens, a growing chorus of environmental- the gardening animal, has had on the ists who acknowledge an important environment, both before and after and active role for human beings, and the advent of modern technology seek to solve environmental problems and industry. not simply by restraining human If man is nature’s gardener in activity but rather by harnessing Marris’s work, for climate-change human innovation and creativity. By activist Mark Lynas we are even dispelling the myth of the “pristine Summer 2012 ~ 117 Copyright 2012. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Travis Kavulla wilderness” and recognizing the role pre-industrial human beings on their that man has played in shaping the environments throughout history. natural world for millennia, Marris The idea that indigenous peoples forces the environmental movement lived in a timeless balance with their to articulate more sensible aims than environment is based on a simplis- recreating a simulacrum of ecosys- tic and inaccurate ideal vision of tems that purportedly existed prior a golden age before the arrival of to the advent of industrial civiliza- modernity and industry. For exam- tion. Lynas, for his part, argues for ple, while Native Americans did not “technofixes” to save the planet. He reach the technological development takes a dim view of the hard-line of industrial Europe, they did form belief that solving major environmen- impressive civilizations that exer- tal problems will require “a world- cised a remarkable scale of control wide change in values, a program of over the land. Marris observes that mass education to reduce people’s the mound-building peoples who desires to consume...‘smashing the lived near modern-day St. Louis lived power’ of transnational corporations, in “a London-sized city that flour- or even the abolition of capitalism ished from about a.d. 950 to 1250.” itself.” The welcome efforts of these Archaeologists have found evidence two authors to correct the errors that the population of the Americas and prejudices of environmental- at the landing of Columbus was at ism are signs of a slowly maturing least comparable to that of Europe. environmental movement that seeks But centuries later, when the inte- practical solutions for the future, not rior of the continent was explored grand ideological transformations to by Europeans, perhaps 95 percent restore some mythic past. of these people had perished from diseases that had been brought from arris locates the genesis of Europe and outpaced exploration. Mthe pristine-nature cult in Such large populations cannot but America with nineteenth-century indelibly shape the nature that sur- transcendentalists like Thoreau and rounds them. Emerson and with later naturalists The people we now consider like John Muir and Aldo Leopold. indigenous to North America are For these writers, European indus- themselves relatively new arrivals, trial civilization had despoiled the coming to the continent some thir- natural beauty of America, which had teen to fifteen thousand years ago. before then existed in harmony with There is growing evidence that this the indigenous peoples. The central arrival brought with it “prehistoric problem of this view is that it is false. anthropogenic change,” including It fails to acknowledge the impact of the extinction of some of America’s 118 ~ The New Atlantis Copyright 2012. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Interventionist Conservation largest animals. Marris catalogues a terated and timeless form whatever list of the megafauna that could be they first glimpsed upon their arrival, found at the first moment of man- while ignoring the influence Native kind’s arrival: “wild horses, mam- Americans had had. This view of moths, mastodons, sixteen groups of nature shaped the environmental pol- ground sloths, the glyptodon (some- icies of the 1960s. In his influential thing like a four-thousand-pound 1963 report for the U.S. National angry tortoise with a spiked mace for Park Service, “Wildlife Management a tail), short-faced bears that would in the National Parks,” A. Starker make polar bears look puny, camels, Leopold — the son of naturalist Aldo saber-toothed tigers, lions, and chee- Leopold — recommended that “each tahs.” And, Marris says, indigenous park be maintained, or where neces- peoples around the world brought sary recreated, as nearly as possible not only extinctions, but also exot- in the condition that prevailed when ic new species to the environments the area was first visited by the white they settled in millennia past. By the man.” When the Wilderness Act of time Captain Cook landed in Hawaii 1964 was passed, Leopold’s vision in 1778, he found a place that was, in of wilderness as a pristine environ- Marris’s words, “very much shaped ment was insinuated into the law: “A by the Polynesians who had been liv- wilderness, in contrast with those ing there for at least one thousand areas where man and his own works years: a semi-domesticated landscape dominate the landscape, is hereby filled with species the Polynesians recognized as an area where the earth brought with them, including taro, and its community of life are untram- sugar cane, pigs, chickens, and rats, meled by man, where man himself is and missing others, including at least a visitor who does not remain.” There fifty species of birds, who were hunt- are now 757 so-called “wildernesses” ed out by the first arrivals.” Even so, in the United States, covering a com- the islands still manage to be home bined area about three times the size of today to many species found nowhere the state of New York. But the theory else. of wilderness that gave rise to these These examples of the history of lands’ designation does not recognize human impact on the natural envi- the role of Native Americans who ronment prior to the age of European had lived on and shaped the “untram- exploration and the modern indus- meled” areas that the Wilderness Act trial era are important because they aimed to preserve. show that early European and later This notion of preserving nature at American explorers, with whom a “holy baseline,” as Marris calls it, written history of the Americas origi- is not simply historically and scien- nates, set down as nature in its unadul- tifically problematic; it can also lead Summer 2012 ~ 119 Copyright 2012. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Travis Kavulla to poor environmental policy deci- what less concerned with flora and sions. An example Marris gives is the fauna, and less convinced of the prop- U.S. war on Phragmites, a supposedly osition that nature in its state of per- invasive reed brought to America petual change is resilient to human from Europe in the eighteenth or activities. He is also tackling a bigger nineteenth century that has come to problem: not just the preservation of dominate certain marshlands along nature here and there, but “saving the eastern seaboard. According to the planet” from a myriad of global recent studies, Marris points out, ecological problems. Unlike Marris, the Phragmites reed was a common who highlights the ways human species in America until a few tens beings have shaped nature for mil- of thousands of years ago, when lennia, Lynas argues that modern ground sloths ate the reed to local man has a special mission of stew- extinction. So when the very similar ardship because, unlike other species European lineage of the reed was and unlike our prehistoric ancestors, inadvertently reintroduced to the who relied on the combustion of Americas not so long in biological woody materials found above ground, terms after its demise, it should have modern humans have unlocked the been unsurprising — one might even energy reserves that otherwise would say natural — that the reed found and have remained in situ: coal, oil, natural filled its earlier niche. “Learning to gas, and other fossil fuels. Burning love exotic species” — species that these sources of carbon at the expect- have been recently introduced to an ed rate will result in “planetary-scale ecosystem — should be a goal of mod- destruction and perhaps a mortal ern conservationists, Marris argues.
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