A New Conservation
Out There
Willow Belden
4.6 • 608 Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2015
⏱️ 32 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
What should conservation look like, in a world where people have affected every inch of the planet? Environmental writer Emma Marris, author of Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, joins us to discuss a new approach to caring for the earth. She argues that we shouldn't just focus on preserving "pristine" wilderness -- shouldn't try to freeze every landscape in time. Instead, she says, we need to celebrate and foster change.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Willow Belden, and you're listening to Out There. |
| 0:20.5 | This is a podcast about the outdoors, from your window box and garden to the Hi, I'm Willow Belden, and you're listening to Out There. |
| 0:29.2 | This is a podcast about the outdoors, from your window box and garden, to the fields on the edge of town, to the forests, prairies, seashores, and wilderness. |
| 0:35.9 | On the show, we explore our relationship with nature through stories, interviews, essays, and even some fiction. We travel around the U.S. and the world with tales of love and heartbreak, passion and adversity, |
| 0:42.3 | desperation and triumph. Okay, so here's a question. What does the word conservation mean to you? |
| 1:10.5 | For me, it always made me think of efforts to preserve pristine environments. Here's a question. What does the word conservation mean to you? |
| 1:10.9 | For me, it always made me think of efforts to preserve pristine environments, to shield the |
| 1:15.7 | wilderness from human activities. |
| 1:18.8 | Our guest today has a different idea of what conservation should look like. |
| 1:23.3 | Emma Maris is an environmental writer, and she's the author of a book called rambunctious |
| 1:27.2 | garden. She argues that conservation shouldn't just focus on keeping things. Emma Maris is an environmental writer, and she's the author of a book called Rambunctious Garden. |
| 1:28.8 | She argues that conservation shouldn't just focus on keeping things like they were back |
| 1:32.6 | in the day. |
| 1:34.0 | Instead, she says, we should embrace and even encourage change. Maris' vision for saving nature starts with redefining what it means for a place to be wild. |
| 2:00.0 | We often think of wilderness as an area that's not affected by humans. |
| 2:03.6 | But Maris says that definition is problematic. |
| 2:06.6 | There is no place on Earth that's not affected by humans. |
| 2:09.6 | Even the places that are far away and look superficially, completely unaffected, |
| 2:14.6 | there's climate change there. |
| 2:16.6 | So what do you consider wild? What is wilderness? |
| 2:21.3 | When I think about wildness, I think what's most important to me is that it's autonomous, that it's self-willed, that it's not being told what to do. |
| 2:32.3 | In other words, for Maris, a wild area is an area where humans are not |
... |
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