Author Emma Marris @Emma_Marris wants conservationists and environmentalists to think hard about new ways of protecting the special places they love? We are as well as have been asking these questions for 10 years as well as educating the public on a TOTAL different approach…… which is in fact using a different path to Protect Our Children’s Resources.
The questions that need to be asked: are why is it that Large NGOS refuse to Join Research that they for one dont have, nor could they use it on their own if they had it… Are they that self absorbed in wanting to be the one group that creates change? Perhaps if they spent more time helping research that they can’t use alone would be a good start.
The way to disentangle our wildlife is to take these politicians into the courts and make such an example out of their unconstitutional pandering with large money lobbyists they become less wanting to create policy based on getting votes and force them to do their Job which is protecting Our Children’s Resources as mandated.
For the public that would mean join an NGO that has research that is different than the large NGOS have. Perhaps even stop supporting NGOS that pay their Directors would be a great start to put the focus back where it belongs which is on Protecting Our Children’s Resources. The public also asking those large NGOs why all but 1 have refused to respond to Our invitation to Join Research that they dont have nor be able to use on their Own. Ask them why they refuse to Join as one voice…. Why has the Public or Large NGOs for that matter not joined a push to establish Our “Proposed Sacred Resource Protection Zone” surrounding National Parks? Our National Parks werent established to allow their inhabitants to be slaughtered on their borders, they were established to protect our children’s resources.
Missoulian- As Rocky Mountain states wrestle with how to handle growing numbers of large predators, an author who radically shook up the way we think about wild country is about to weigh in on the fate of wolves.
“If we bring back an animal, and put such intensive restrictions on where it’s allowed to go and what it’s allowed to do and what it’s allow to eat, and we shoot it if it breaks any rules, at what point does it cease to be a wild animal and just be a free-roaming pet?” asked Emma Marris, the Oregon-based science writer and author of “Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World.”
“If somebody can crack the social engineering problem, and figure how to disentangle the large-carnivore issue from national politics, that would be amazing,” she said. “I don’t know how you do that at this point.”
Marris’ upcoming and as-yet unnamed book looks at the ethics of interacting with wild animals, especially wolves. Asking provocative questions has become her specialty.
“Emma’s work really has changed the landscape of environmentalism and conservation,” said University of Montana philosophy professor Christopher Preston. “She made it possible to say that environmentalism is about more than protecting pristine wilderness areas.”
Preston, who interviewed Marris for his own book, “The Synthetic Age,” said the debate over public lands looks at how much people have taken control of the planet. Some, like environmentalist and climate campaigner Bill McKibben, argue that wild nature has vanished and humans must take responsibility for managing everything. Others in the “Deep Ecology” faction insist that pristine wild places persist and must be protected from development.
In “The Rambunctious Garden,” Marris took a challenging stance that people should consider letting go of unsustainable wild things and accept a new ecosystem that includes invasive species, genetic tinkering and lots of deliberate gardening of the relics we want to preserve. Almost a decade out from its publication in 2011, Marris has refined her position.
“I never expected it would be quite the conversation-starter it was,” Marris said of the book. “Some of it reads a little flip. I think I didn’t make clear enough that I do not advocate all management going in these techno or interventionist directions.”
Marris said she remains convinced the earth no longer has places free of human impact. But that doesn’t mean every spot on the globe needs day-to-day human intervention.
“It’s incredibly important to have places where we don’t do anything, although that will mean invasive species may move in and take hold over time,” she said. “Those areas are where we’d best practice humility and check our hubris. There are still places where we don’t get to decide what belongs or doesn’t belong on the landscape. We can admit that nature is smarter than us a lot of time — maybe most of the time.”
For example, she supported the ideas of The Wilderness Society science director Greg Aplet who calls for a “portfolio approach” to managing special places. That approach proposes three parallel strategies where some places get innovative management, some get protection of existing features, and some are observed but left alone.
“It’s like an investment portfolio, so you can hedge your bets that way,” Marris said. “If (something) backfires, you’ve got these other landscapes to fall back on. So if you do restoration for decades, and the climate changes and that system breaks, you’ve got your innovation landscape over the hill that’s where you’ve been able to roll with the punches.”
The debate also needs to make more room for the role of people on the landscape, Marris said. For example, the Wilderness Act of 1964 defines special areas “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
But that law obscures the historic and prehistoric evidence of people who hunted, cultivated and lived in those places, shaping much of their character. For example, Garry oak savannahs along the Pacific Coast from California to British Columbia have survived for thousands of years because local residents routinely burned away competing underbrush. Yet state and federal land managers classify that activity as natural, instead of cultural.
“They’re still basically lumping native people in with animals, acting as if the things they did on the landscape were not human things,” Marris said. “That’s a deeply troubling error in the heart of ecology.”
Unfortunately, the charged political atmosphere in the United States makes it unlikely those law reforms can get addressed soon, Marris predicted.
“They do not want to open the box until they feel much more secure about the (presidential) administration and where the hearts of the politicians are,” Marris said. “I think they would rather hobble along with the current Endangered Species Act — keep going with what we’ve got and try to defend it from begin dismantled — until such a time we can rework these policies and more realistically reflect the ecosystems that have been influenced by humans for thousands of years.”
But some change must come, if only because growing populations and changing climate patterns will force hard choices on undeveloped land. One advantage in letting go of the purist attitude, Marris said, was a widening of opportunities for action.
“There’s a limited amount of money for conservation,” she said. “If you’re spending all your money purifying, making something exactly the way it was and removing all the invasives, you don’t have the money to just buy land. Heavily imprinted land is often pretty cheap. And for many of these places, all you need is time to get something that has value for many species out of that. I wouldn’t trade it for the old-growth Hoh Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula, but it’s a great adjunct to that.”
Source: Wolves: Wild or ‘free-roaming pets?’ Environmentalist asks hard questions | Local | missoulian.com