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Submitted By elliecarlin
Words 1090
Pages 5
Ellie Loeffler
Dr. Gary Gress
Global Environmental Issues

Emma Marris Lecture
The Ethics of the Rambunctious Garden
MIND-BENDING LECTURE

Sponsored by the Presidential Dream Course Mind-Bending Morality, Law and Science
September 11, 2013

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community, it is wrong when it tends otherwise.”- Aldo Leopold

For my outside connection, I attended the lecture “The Ethics of Rambunctious Garden” given by Emma Marris, author of The Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. I found Emma’s lecture to be extremely fascinating. Her ideas on conservation are controversial and optimistic. She spoke in a charming and authoritative way, leaving me with a feeling of trust and awareness of her passion for nature. I enjoyed having a complete understanding of all the issues she referred to, from being in our Global Environmental Issues class! In the first few minutes, Marris described the two narratives environmental activists often refer to when considering a morally correct state of nature. One of the narratives was The Garden of Eden, before the fall of Adam and Eve. The second was sort of a Jack Kerouac-like notion of pristine wilderness; the beating heart of what it means to be nature. These narratives are useless to us Marris argued. Humans now occupy over seventy-five percent of ice free surface, there is no pristine wilderness left. Non-human populated areas are either unbearably hot or icy and rocky. Marris claims “even the remotest places now bear the fingerprints of humanity.” Ecosystems are not stable or static, thus the notion of returning them to a previous state of being is illogical and impossible. We can no longer “put it back.” Why do we care about historical baselines anyway? We have no idea of what the

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