Nurturing Nature Summary

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In 'Nurturing Nature', the author provides an issue of everglades, which are going to extinct because of people's intervention, to discuss about the debatable restoration. It seems that if people can simulate the chaos of the nature, they will achieve their goals. However, as the author wrote, "The idea of restoration seems disarmingly simple at first, but the goals are elusive." There are two examples. Firstly, the most traditional solution to the everglades' issue is the just-add-water approach. Although conservationists try their best to introduce chaos into their solution, but the chaos is only about politics, rather than scientific. As a result, this method isn't working. Secondly, while some believe that "any growth in a disturbed area is better than nothing", the exorcists of exotics advocate the strategy of removing nonindigenous plants. However, lack of knowledge of science may not make them achieve …show more content…

In this chapter, interestingly, the author travels with some crewmen who work in a rowboat up the "tight-assed" Illinois river, which means that the boat is almost as wide as the watercourse. The author explores ecological history of the Illinois river. In the history, the river was ever prosperous: "The Illinois River was second only to the Columbia among commercial river fisheries in the United States. In 1908, twenty-five hundred Illinois fishermen caught ten per cent of the entire U. S. riverine catch." When more and more freight need to move via waterways, people try to create an open waterway for themselves by constructing levees and dredging. However, when engineers rearranged the Chicago river and made Illinois belong to one part of the sewage system of Chicago, the Illinois river was on the decline. As a conclusion, he writes,"The river is not foul, as it once was, but it has a permanent tan, a beige opacity from agricultural

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