In an article for the Breakthrough Journal, Kareiva, along with Marvier and TNC colleague Robert Lalasz, say that even though conservationists have succeeded in putting ten times more land under protection since the 1950s — bringing the total to roughly "13 percent of the world's land mass… an area larger than all of South America" — this preservationist model is inadequate given what Fareed Zakaria and others have called "the rise of the Rest."
Brazil will no more wall off the Amazon than settlers in America walled off its forests. At the same time, Brazil will almost certainly protect more of its forests than either the US or Europe did. But "whether or not the developing world sets aside a large percentage of its landscapes as parks or wilderness over the next hundred years," Kareiva, Marvier, and Lalasz write, "those protected areas will remain islands of 'pristine nature' in a sea of profound human transformations through logging, agriculture, mining, damming, and urbanization."
Conservationists need to work with development, not condemn it as leading to the end of nature. In truth, nature's resilience has been overlooked, its fragility "grossly overstated." Areas blasted by nuclear radiation are bio-diverse. Forest cover is rising in the Northern Hemisphere even as it declines globally.
And it's time to stop prioritizing being alone over being with others. Thoreau, Muir, Abbey — the inventors of the solitude myth — were around other people in nature, from Walden to Yosemite. They suffered loneliness (sometimes of a quite prosaic sort, as in Abbey's case) when they were alone in nature. There is still room for solitude, but conservation must make room for society. "Nature could be a garden – not a carefully manicured and rigid one, but a tangle of species and wildness amidst lands used for food production, mineral extraction, and urban life. "
Happily, Kareiva and coauthors are not alone in suggesting humans may find a new kind of power through planetary gardening, not planetary preservation. Nature
correspondent Emma Marris offered a philosophical embrace of creating new natures outside of parks in her sharp-minded 2011 book, Rambunctious Garden. Too often, an attempt to protect nature in its pristine state "thwarts bold new plans to save the environment and prevents us from having a fuller relationship with nature," Marris wrote.