On the Phone with Emma Marris
Get over it: there’s not such thing as Nature. We might as well abolish the word, for all the ways it muddles our understanding of how we fit into the world.
In slightly exaggerated form, that’s the idea that kept me busy for the past few years. And though I believed it, and believed—at an abstract level—that it must be an important idea—I still had a sneaking suspicion that I was, you know, full of it. I knew that traditional ideas of nature and environmental purity were played out, and that something else was going to have to take the place of treehugging as the emotional engine of environmentalism… but I knew this at what, generously, you might call an intuitive level.
Emma Marris, in her recent book Rambunctious Garden addresses these ideas in a far more immediate and necessary way: through a scientific prism. With engaging on-the-ground reporting, she shows how, far from being a mere philosophical issue, the rumored end of nature is already playing out in the field, as conservationists and environmentalists wrestle with a paradigm shift that may change what our environmental goals are, and how we try to reach them. If, by the end of this book, you aren’t convinced that the future of conservation positively requires that we abandon simplistic ideas of nature and environment, well, you haven’t been paying attention. And by the way, Rambunctious Garden and Visit Sunny Chernobyl are available as a handsome two-pack.
Marris spoke to me by phone this past spring, from her home in Missouri. (Edited for length and clarity).
Andrew Blackwell: There is a movement going on, this particular wave of thinking about nature and the environment. Was there a moment when you realized that?
Emma Marris: Well, I was working for Nature. I was on staff there and I was doing lots of stories about conservation biology and ecology, mostly because I just wanted to get out of the office. I began to notice that the stories I was drawn to had this shared theme of this sort of loss of Eden. That the ground was shifting underneath the feet of these ecologists and conservation biologists. So I became interested in this idea that paleoecology and overall ecosystem dynamism was sort of ruining their fun, when it came to this idea of being able to put things back [to a pre-human state]. I started striking up conversations with them about this topic at conferences and stuff, and usually at the bar, after the day was over. And their guard was down a little bit. And just started having lots of really interesting conversations about it. So yeah, I don’t know that there was one big epiphany—
AB: Well, it sounds like it was at the bar.
EM: Yeah, kind of! I mean, I can’t point to one moment at one bar, but it was sort of like lots of moments at lots of bars talking to ecologists. I was intrigued by the fact that a lot of times they would only say this stuff at the bar. Because there was a sense that it was somehow letting down the team to admit some of this stuff. To admit that your baseline [the estimation of the “original” state of the ecosystem] might have been crap, or that…
AB: Or that baselines don’t exist.
EM: Yeah, exactly. So it was a little bit of an underground topic for a while. I think its much more openly discussed now, just a few years later.
AB: So you’ve seen that change, just in the last three or four years?
EM: Yeah, though it’s hard to tell. Because on the one hand, I could be watching a field that’s opening up and starting to talk about it. I could also just be hanging out with the members of the field that are more into it, and self-selecting. That’s a problem when you get really into a subject like this. You start only interviewing people that are also into it, and then the next thing you know, you’ve convinced yourself a paradigm shift has occurred.
I think it’s got to be at least partially true. And then there’s been some debates about this. There was a big paper in Nature, a bunch of ecologists signed last year, saying that invasive species had been overly demonized. And then there was this response by like 250 ecologists, saying, “No, no! Don’t let them off the hook!” So I do think that we’re not just hanging out with people who find this interesting. I do think this is a real conversation that’s really excitingly going on.
AB: Sometimes, as you said, it’s so hard for people to discuss this, because it feels like it’s giving away the farm, or giving away the core argument of the whole [environmentalist] enterprise. Do you think there will actually be something different, a different kernel at the heart of American environmentalism in twenty years?
EM: I do, sort of. The thing that makes it difficult is that you’re not replacing one beautiful, crystalline idea with another beautiful crystalline idea. I often think that its analogous to energy discussions. Fossil fuels were like the be-all and end-all, and everything was fossil fuels. And then to say that we’re going to replace that with a piecemeal approach. Some will be wind and some will be solar. It’s just not as appealing. You want there to be one answer.
And I think the same is the case with conservation. We’re going to be replacing this really spectacularly clear idea—about the past as the destination—with this much more complicated idea of goal-setting and various possible different goals that society could agree on. And I think that there won’t be one goal that will do for every situation. It will have to be, you know, “This park has this set of goals, and this reserve over here has a set of goals, and my backyard has this set of goals.” It’s just not as intellectually appealing. And what it really implies is a lot of meetings.
AB: [laughs]
EM: Like stakeholder meetings. Which just don’t sound fun. An entire generation of people sitting around talking about what do we want for the strip of wilderness at the edge of our town, what do we want for our city parks. It just sounds like a lot of bureaucratic work. So that’s something I really struggle with, as somebody who doesn’t really like meetings.
AB: Were there people you met that really caused you to question whether or not this is true? Was there someone out there who made you think maybe you should double back on what you were thinking?
EM: If anything, for a while the reverse was true. That I kept wanting to interview old silverback ecologist-types for the book, to play the role of the voice for the majority position. And they just kept disappointing me, because their ideas were all evolving. They all were embracing a much more nuanced vision. With the exception of Daniel Simberloff, who thank god he’s around. There were very few people who were really old school. You know, it’s been a very gradual process for many of them.
There are definitely some people who I love and respect who don’t really like this way of thinking that much. Like David Forman, who used to co-run Earth First. And I’ve interviewed him a couple of times, and this just doesn’t sit well with him. But on the other hand, he said, “Oh, we were never purists about the wilderness concept.” They used to throw beer cans out of the truck. [In the book] I talk about how I see him as someone who really promulgated this view of this really strict division [between humanity and nature]. And he sees himself as much more pragmatic.
AB: I was surprised by that. I thought, “Really? So, all the time you had the fist up, you were thinking, ‘This is a pose.’”
EM: That’s the thing. People are complicated. I’m sure he had his pragmatic days, but when you read what he writes, he’s clearly very passionate about the wilderness. And he’s not the only one. And I certainly have a lot of respect for this entire generation of people who did a huge amount of work stopping places from getting developed, under the banner of wilderness and pristine nature. And if it weren’t for those guys, there would be a lot less open space for us even to be having these philosophical conversations about.
Then of course more recently, there’s a couple of guys at UC Davis, Tim Caro and some other guys, who put out this paper in the journal Conservation Biology suggesting that all this talk of the anthropocene was a bad idea, basically. And more or less making the argument that we shouldn’t say these things out loud, because it was giving ammunition to the evil forces of development. Which is something I hear a lot.
AB: I was curious about that. How do people respond, especially readers?
EM: The number one question I get is a very personal reaction. And it’s usually by a guy who has briar scratches all over his calves, and he’s wearing Chacos. And he’ll say, “Ok, fine, invasive species maybe they aren’t all so bad. But what about species blah, which I have spent the last twenty-five years trying to eradicate from my place?” And it really shows just how deeply personal and emotional these kind of battles against invasive species can be, and these battles for a particular place and a particular state. You know, this isn’t just all about science. A lot of it is about emotion.
The second most common question is, “Maybe this stuff is more or less true, but if you say it out loud aren’t you just giving all this ammunition to the forces of evil.”
AB: Right.
EM: But my response to that is, “Yes.” I am giving ammunition to the forces of evil. But A) they’ve been doing just fine without it. It’s not as if they’ve been struggling to convince people to develop undeveloped land. And B) if we suppress what we know to be true, for the sake of desired policy outcomes, that can only bite us in the ass. I mean, the general public can be very skeptical about what scientists tell them about the environment.
Take a look at the climate change discussion. All you need is like one climate scientist to kind of make a sneery comment about people, and everybody feels like they’ve been tricked and duped. And then if you actually try to trick the public, that seems like a really bad, bad approach. I mean, we just have to own up to the fact that this is much more complicated than we thought it was, and that we can’t go home again.
AB: I was struck by how, even inside the scientific community, where most of your book is taking place, just how much it’s rife with myth and taboo. It started to seem crazy. When [Shahid] Naeem, from Columbia, is talking about invasive species—
EM: Yeah. He’s a wonderful guy, by the way. I feel like I kind of sold him out a little bit.
AB: He has that quote, which is amazing, which is something like, If I had my way, I would uproot every amazing[ctk] species on the planet and put everything back where it belongs. And it’s just… holy shit, dude.
EM: [laughs] But its sort of unfair to single him out, because so many ecologists feel this way.
AB: That’s the sense I got. In some ways it’s a portrait of a huge group of people who are wrestling with some really important things, but only willing to talk about them at the bar.
EM: Yeah, definitely. And you know, some of these guys are very thoughtful about all this stuff, and when you ask them about it, you can tell they’ve thought a lot about it. But some of them are real scientist guys, who do the field work, and they do the papers and stuff, and they’re a little less reflective about this. Or you kind of have to push them to get philosophical about it. There’s sort of a caricature of the scientist who doesn’t think about all this values stuff as having anything to do with what they do. And when you try to press them to identify where the values show up in their work, they feel sort of insulted at the idea that there’s any connection between their work and emotions and values. So I did a lot of gentle pressing, and buying of beers.
AB: That’s what you need the book advance for. To buy beers for conservationists.
EM: Yeah, that’s right.
AB: People must inevitably ask you, “Oh, what does this mean for the average environmentally conscious person living in Topeka or Brooklyn?” What do you tell them?
EM: Well, the first thing is I try to get them psyched about the possibilities of whatever kind of space they have direct control over. Their backyard, or the roundabout on their street. Or their window box, if they’re in Brooklyn. It’s about rethinking: what kind of conservation value can I eke out of this tiny space? And there’s a lot you can do with fiddling with your garden and making it much more biodiverse. And if you want to get into it, you could be planting rare plants, you could be planting the plants that certain migrating birds and insects need.
The other thing, too, is getting involved in more community-wide discussions about what do we do with different spaces. If they’re saying, “What do we do with this park downtown?” then throw some nature into the park rather than just a big basketball court. So I guess it’s just participating in as many discussions as possible about what these goals should be for pieces of nature. But I think it’s also that, in a way, your average environmentalist is a person who lives in a world of sadness. And grief. And guilt.
AB: [laughs]
EM: At least I am. I feel a lot of environmentalists, they do their work in a way of self sacrifice and working hard and spending a little more money for more eco products and green consumerism and stuff, and then maybe they reward themselves by taking a trip to go rafting in Yellowstone or something. And they feel like they have more of a claim on that beauty, because they worked. But we should be rewarding ourselves constantly, daily, with all of the little nature that’s around us. What I would like is if environmentalists became happier people. [laughs] Because we need to be happier.
It helps to have a toddler, because they’re so slow. You walk down the street with a toddler, and you move really slow, you look at all the beetles, you stop and you talk about what the different trees are, and you can actually have this rewarding natural experience in your own neighborhood, even if your neighborhood is Brooklyn. Cause there’s street trees there, there’s birds. So I guess that’s part of it, too, is that we shouldn’t just be shopping and self-sacrificing. We should also be enjoying nature. Wherever we find it.
AB: That relates to something I was thinking about. The whole purity myth, or whatever you want to call it, can really end up being a force for disengagement.
EM: Absolutely. That’s what I really worry about almost more than anything. This notion that if you want to get youth interested in nature, you have to drive them to a national park. Or put them in front of a TV screen that’s showing pictures of a beautiful pristine nature. I wanted to do more in the book about nature documentaries. Because I have a bone to pick with them. I mean, there are some fantastic books out there, about the tedious work of editing out every single trace of humanity from these documentaries, and about the tricks of the trade, to get these amazing shots without having any wires or fenceposts in the shot. And I think they have a lot to answer for. In a way, that they’ve created this idea that there is a place somewhere without fences and roads, and antennae and car tracks and stuff.
And did you see this poll that came out from the Nature Conservancy? They did this poll of American teenagers about how much time they spend outdoors, and about their barriers to spending more time in nature. And 61% of their respondents said that they didn’t spend more time in nature because, “There was no nature nearby.”
AB: Wow.
EM: So, the vast majority of teenagers think that they don’t live anywhere near nature, and that just has to be false. I mean, unless they’re in solitary confinement.
AB: [laughs]
EM: They do live near nature. So that’s really frustrating to me. And I remember this in my own youth, too. When I was a little kid, I was a total nature geek. I was like, little John Muir-ette.
AB: You had a beard?
EM: Exactly, I had a fierce beard. And I wrote really sappy nature poetry, and I was really into this whole notion of spiritual transcendence through nature, and spent a lot of time in the back yard staring at the moon in the middle of the night. And then when I was a teenager, it all went away, because I became educated that my backyard and my local parks and second growth forest that was near Seattle weren’t good enough. And I didn’t really have the money, or the gear, or the friends who were interested, to go to the Olympic Peninsula every weekend. So with the exception of a few camping trips, I spent the better part of one or two decades just living in the city and assuming that there was no nature there, and having no relationship with nature. And it wasn’t really until I started doing the research for this book that I got hooked back into it.
AB: That’s how I thought about my whole project. Sort of this radical embrace of non-obvious nature. I want to go to some completely wretched spot and then get my Muir-style reverie on.
EM: Yeah, right! And I think you can. Part of it is you can be inspired by the chutzpah of these weeds. By how much life will find a way to cling on in these circumstances. I lived in DC for a while, and you go into the DC subway system—
AB: Yes! They have little weeds down there.
EM: Yeah! And those station are far enough down that they can act as bomb shelters in case of nuclear attack on the capital. And there are those little weeds, just hanging out, growing along. That’s got to make you happy.
AB: You make a big point of framing this as an optimistic book. And that’s clearly not just an accident of the publisher saying, “Oh, make sure you don’t depress people, because it’s about the environment.” That’s actually a central part of your project. Trying, as you said, to hope that environmentalists can be happier people.
EM: Yeah, and I’m not an optimistic person by nature. [laughs]
AB: Really?
EM: I was very firmly in the “We’re going to hell in a hand basket, armageddon is around the corner, climate change will ruin the planet, we are already screwed” kind of thing. But having the ground shift under your feet in this way, where return is no longer possible, and the only direction that you can go is forward… I think it just forces you to get excited about where you can go.
Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, by Emma Marris. Bloomsbury, 2011.
