The vexed question of nature

I'm reading Rambunctious Garden, Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World by Emma Marris at the moment, and as I was reading it on the day bed, I was compelled to think of the inconsistent ways I think about exotic/introduced/feral species. I'd love to remove most of the slash pines that have been planted as wind breaks on our property because I see them as an unwelcome European element in an otherwise 'Australian' landscape.

But, immediately I am vulnerable to an attack led by 'well just what is an 'Australian' landscape, anyway? And here I am overlooking gardens (gardens that we have planted) with frangipani and heliconia and exotic gingers, and I look at the vege gardens (oh how Aussie) and I see plants from South America and southern Europe.

And then I think back to how wonderful it is to see the yellow tailed black cockatoos chewing their way through the pine cones on those slash pines I'd like to banish...

Marris' argument is that the notion of pristine nature doesn't exist and probably never did, but that it is very much a product of a Western imagination. For Marris, contemporary nature is a hybrid of the wild with the managed and that a preoccupation with 'pristine wilderness' might be good for the spirit but not so good for the global ecology.

And then my mind turns to the cane toad and how we have no black snakes because of it. And the various weeds that I do battle with...and I put my book down and have a sleep.