Emma Marris > Quotes

“In the United States law, federally designated wilderness is famously defined as 'an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.' One environmental ethics text defines natural like this: 'Something is natural to the extent that it is independent of human design, control, and impacts.' Definitions like this start with a basic assumption that human beings are not part of nature. They assume, in fact, that humans are the opposite of nature, that our influence makes a thing less wild or natural. And I simply reject this premise.

After many years, I have come to see the concepts of wilderness and nature as not just unscientific but damaging.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“As the Earth responds to the changes we humans have made, does it make sense to destroy ecosystems that thrive under the new conditions? As Lugo says, “This is nature’s response to what we have done to it.” Novel ecosystems may be our best hope for the future, as their components adapt to the human-dominated world using the time-tested method of natural selection. Could we hope to do any better than nature in managing and arranging our natural world for a warmer, more populous future?”
― Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World

“To make good environmental decision, we must stop focusing on trying to remove or undo human influence, on turning back time or freezing the non-human world in amber. We must instead acknowledge the extent to which we have influenced our current world and take some responsibility for its future trajectory…We should not seek to carefully control every plant and animal on the planet. We couldn’t even if we wanted to.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“In my previous book, I challenged the idea that there is such a thing as pristine wilderness in the twenty-first century. Humans have dramatically changed the entire world.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“But without being able to definitively prove their objective final value, things get a little trickier when saving a species means causing harm or significant suffering to sentient animals. Because now we cannot say we are causing that harm to preserve a timeless universal good. All we can say with confidence is that we are doing it for ourselves.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“It was when I moved to Oregon in 2013 that I really began to examine how conservation did and did not make the lives of individual animals better.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“Jonathan Balcombe’s”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“What if zoos stopped breeding all their animals, with the possible exception of any endangered species with a real chance of being re-released into the wild? What if they sent all the animals that need really large areas or lots of freedom and socialization to refuges? With apes, elephants, big cats, and other large and smart species gone, they could expand enclosures for the rest of the animals, concentrating on keeping them lavishly happy until their natural deaths. Eventually, the only animals on display would be a few ancient holdovers from the old menageries, some animals in active conservation breeding programs, and perhaps a few rescues.

Such 'zoos' might even be merged with sanctuaries, places that take wild animal that -- because injury or a lifetime of captivity -- cannot live in the wild. Existing refuges, like Wolf Haven, often do allow visitors, but not all animal are on the tour, just those who seem like it. Their facilities are really arranged for the animals, not for the people. These refuge-zoos could become places where animal live not in order to be on display, but in order to live. Display would be incidental.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“I don’t think “naturalness” is valuable. But I do think the autonomy of individuals is.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“On the contrary, respecting the autonomy of individual animals instead of focusing on the purity of their 'wild' pedigree suggests that any positive relationship between us and them must be by mutual consent.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“So in my piece, I make a provocative suggestion: let's not base conservation on defining a species' native range. Instead of asking Instead of asking “Where does this species belong?” let's ask “Where can this species thrive without causing unwanted effects?”
― Emma Marris

“Why then, for so long, have humans just assumed -- or perhaps hoped -- that fish feel no pain and are essentially mindless? Balcombe thinks the problem is our inability to read their expressions or emotions. There's no sympathy trigger. 'We hear no screams and see no tears when their mouths are impaled and their bodies pulled from the water,' he writes. 'Their unblinking eyes -- constantly bathed in water and thus in no need of lids --amplify the illusion that they feel nothing.' Many do in fact vocalize when they are in pain, but the sound is designed to be heard under water, and we can't hear it.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“Anyone who has ever actually seen a dog hurt knows very well that they can feel. There was also has ever actually seen a dog hurt knows very well that they can feel. There was also a more mystical counterculture in the ancient Mediterranean, which considered the possibility that the human soul could have flowed through non-human incarnations. Some believers thus renounced both animal sacrifice and eating meat.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“We cannot undo what we've done; we cannot go back in time. Change - ecological, economic, social - is inevitable. Some of it will be tragic. We will lose things we love - species, places, relationships with the nonhuman world that have endured for millennia. Some change will be hard to predict. Ecosystems will reshuffle, species will evolve. We will change too.”
― Emma Marris

“In more recent years, I've increasingly reported on specific cases where the interests of individual animals seem to conflict with the goal of biodiversity preservation. In order to save species, conservationists kill a surprising number of individual animals. And they treat animals very differently depending on whether they are common or rare; 'invasive' or native, 'feral,' or 'wild.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“As a result, the distribution maps for plant species don't look the same from interglacial to interglacial. Each climate change creates a new map, with new communities of species living together. Whole suites of species do not pick up en masse and decorously tiptoe south, making sure to keep together. It is rather mad scramble - albeit in geological time.

Some of today's ecosystems have not fully bounced back from the last glaciation. One analysis suggested that thirty-six of fifty-five European tree species studied had still not spread out to the edges of their possible ranges. Beech trees are notoriously poky. In North-America they are still moving west across Michigan's Upper Peninsula.”
― Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World

“In the most notorious case of humans in zoos, a Mbuti man named Ota Benga who was kidnapped from his home in the Congo Basin and sold into slavery was exhibited in the Bronx Zoo's Monkey House in 1906. He was freed after public outcry and moved to Virginia, where he worked in a tobacco factory and hunted alone in the woods. But he struggled with the intense trauma he had endured and in 1916 shot himself in the heart.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“But 'wild' animals in the twenty-first century are not truly independent of humanity. In fact, today, I am not sure there are any 'wild animals' left.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“Hagenbeck's model was widely influential. Increasingly, animals were presented with the distasteful fact of their physical control visually elided. Zoos shifted just slightly from overt demonstrations of mastery of over beasts to a narrative of benevolent protection. From here, it was an easy leap to focusing on protecting animal species”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“When non-human animals are killed simply because they 'don't belong' and not because they are clearly causing some measurable harm, we have decided that erasing the taint of th ehuman is more important than the lives of animals (who, lest we forget, have no conception that they are in the 'wrong' place). This does not feel like humility in action. It is often the case that we hurt and kill animals because they are having effects we don't like, perhaps by predating on rare animals or eating rare plants. That's a trickier question--one we will tackle in due course.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“Wolves as symbols of wilderness are so culturally important that we humans will go to great lengths to protect the species purity, even if doing so involves restricting the freedom of actual animals. Wildness is often defined as that which is not controlled, but paradoxically, in order to protect the 'wildness' of the wolf gene pool, individual wolves must be controlled.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“But the Woodland Park Zoo faced an obstacle in the AZA, its accrediting institution. The AZA opposed elephant sanctuaries vehemently, since they took elephants out of the breeding pool. When zoos around the country started sending their older elephants to sanctuaries to retire, AZA threatened to -- and sometimes did -- yank their accreditation. (Today, the AZA has changed its tune on elephant sanctuaries. The organization even granted accreditation to The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee in 2017.)”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“In addition, they say, not everyone in New Zealand is okay with strewing poison all over the land, or even support of the goals of the [invasive-species removal] project. 'The eradication of some introduced species is also contentious because some Maori regard them as culturally important,' they write. "the Pacific rat, for example, while targeted by Predator Free 2050, is protected on some Maori lands.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“After the move, Chai began losing weight again, like she did during her time at the Dickerson Park Zoo, ultimately losing over 1,000 pounds. The Oklahoma Zoo had trained her to perform for the crowds, and during one of these performances Bamboo attacked her, knocking her into a fence.

On January 30, 2016, Chai was found dead in her cage. The cause of death was determined to be sever fat loss and a systemic blood infection.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“here the recommended management strategy is to keep the wolves looking like wolves. To Boitani, the wolves' aesthetics and the preservation of their ecological niche are the object; the preservation of purely 'wild' DNA and the freedom of individual wolves, less so.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“Some people love animals of a particular species so much that they seem unable to help themselves, even if they know the rules and risks. They simply must have them. The decision might be split-second, with people finding animals for sale and being overcome with the desire to possess them -- or even to 'save' them, according to Burgess. Imagine strolling through a market on a hot day and seeing a monkey in a little cage, looking sad and weak. 'To some extent maybe you want to rescue the animal because it looks heat stressed,' she says. 'A lot of people really genuinely love animals and want to be close to them,' Nuwer told me. 'The idea of being close to the wild and tapping into our natural selves is really compelling. It is trying to fulfill some vague longing that some of us have inside us.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“I don't think breeding animals for a life in zoos can be defended in any ethical system. It violates the rights of many animal to express their capabilities and flourish. It lacks compassion. It is the wrong sort of 'care.' Even the utilitarian argument falls short, since so little 'good' is produced by the animals' exhibition. My preference for a 'fun day out' does not justify generations of animal captivity.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“As an avid fan of botanical gardens, I humbly suggest that as the captive animals retire and die off without being replaced, these biodiversity-worshipping institutions devote more and more space to the wonderful world of plants.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“I only know one place in the United States where 'natural' wolf death is the norm: Yellowstone National Park.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“To me, this suggests that our thinking around 'invasive species' needs to be fine-tuned. Instead of a paradigm where we see all 'foreign' species as malevolent invaders that should be considered threats to ecological integrity unless proven otherwise, maybe we should instead see islands species as particularly vulnerable to newly arriving species.

Indeed, the over concept of the 'native' has some fundamental problems. It derives from precisely that frozen-in-time idea of 'ecosystem integrity' that, as we've seen, is riddled with conceptual shortcomings. Ecologists have spent decades assigning 'native ranges' to species, usually based on where they were when the first white scientist showed up to take notes. These ranges are pegged to an arbitrary point in time, a moment in the long evolutionary and geographical journey of a particular lineage.”
― Emma Marris