Nature bats last?
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BOOK REVIEW
Nature bats last? David N. Cole and Laurie Yung (eds.): Beyond naturalness: rethinking park and wilderness stewardship in an era of rapid change. Island Press, Washington, DC, USA, 2010, 287 pp. Cloth, ISBN-13: 978-1-59726-508-9; illus., US $70.00; Paper, ISBN-13: 978-1-59726-509-6, US $35.00 Keith T. Killingbeck
Received: 31 January 2013 / Accepted: 1 March 2013 / Published online: 19 March 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Bias. I have one, or at least I thought I did when I first picked up Beyond Naturalness. That bias revolved around the notion that landscapes already protected from development as wilderness areas, or the like, are best ‘managed’ by nature, not humans. The best management, like the best government of Thoreau, is the one that intervenes least. In fact, I couldn’t wait to read Chapter 6, Let it Be: A Hands-Off Approach to Preserving Wildness in Protected Areas, thinking that it would surely affirm my bias and show convincingly that not only does nature bat last, but that it should be the only batter. Well, long before I slipped into Chapter 6, Beyond Naturalness did a masterful job of forcing me to stare straight into the future, a future in which every nook and cranny of the planet, whether ‘protected’ or not, carries a heavy human footprint. It also forced me to stare straight into the conveniently forgotten past in which my own good environmental intentions were full of ‘unnatural’ interventions, pyric and otherwise. Nature may indeed bat last, but Beyond Naturalness successfully doused my romantic notion that nature should always be the only batter. The question that permeates Beyond Naturalness more than any other is whether we should be guardians or gardeners of the protected landscapes on our planet (p. 17; sensu Zahniser. 1963. Guardians not gardeners.
K. T. Killingbeck (&) Department of Biological Sciences, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI 02881, USA e-mail: [email protected]
The Living Wilderness 83:2). The word ‘naturalness’ itself was gouged and prodded repeatedly in an effort to expose its weaknesses, the most glaring of which is its lack of clear meaning. What is natural? A protected patch of tallgrass prairie that hasn’t experienced fire in half a century? A protected patch of prairie recently exposed to fire with a drip torch? One could argue that neither is natural. Or that both are natural. Or that the latter is more natural than the first given that the absence of fire is unnatural. A key tenet of Beyond Naturalness is that landscape gardening is merely compensation for past human insults to the environment. ‘‘Intervention implies exerting human control to compensate for human impact on the land. Because naturalness implies both a lack of human impact and a lack of human control, one of the meanings of naturalness will be violated whatever is done (or not done)’’ (p. 8). Sandwiched between a concise Preface and a sizeable Index are 15 chapters penned by 18 authors from a wide variety of backgrounds and institutions. Following the two intro
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