Restored to Earth

Christianity, Environmental Ethics, and Ecological Restoration

Gretel Van Wieren

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781589019973
• eBook ISBN: 9781589016835
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Éthique et philosophie morale

Ecological restoration integrates the science and art of repairing ecosystems damaged by human activities. Despite relatively little attention from environmental ethicists, restoration projects continue to gain significance, drawing on citizen volunteers and large amounts of public funds, providing an important model of responding to ecological crisis. Projects range from the massive, multi-billion dollar Kissimmee River project; restoring 25,000 acres of Everglades' wetlands; to the $30 million effort to restore selected wetlands in industrial Brownfield sites in Chicago's south side Lake Calumet area; to the reintroduction of tall grass prairie ecosystems in various communities in the Midwest.

Restored to Earth provides the first comprehensive examination of the religious and ethical dimensions and significance of contemporary restoration practice, an ethical framework that advances the field of environmental ethics in a more positive, action-oriented, experience-based direction. Van Wieren brings together insights and examples from restoration ecology, environmental ethics, religious studies, and conservation and Christian thought, as well as her own personal experiences in ecological restoration, to propose a new restoration ethic grounded in the concrete, hands-on experience of humans working as partners with the land.

PART I
RESTORING EARTH

CHAPTER ONE

“LET THERE BE A TREE”

A Field Guide to Types of Ecological Restoration

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a good shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree—and there will be one.

—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Defining ecological restoration is not an easy task given that meanings are numerous and diverse, often varying dramatically from ecosystem to ecosystem and culture to culture. As a vernacular practice, perspectives on restoration shift according to the types of ecosystems (forest, grassland, wetland, river), degradations (deforestation, erosion, toxification, species loss), and repairs (bioreactivation, recontouring of land or waterways, reintroduction of native species, removal of exotics). Additionally, meanings vary depending on understandings of an ecosystem’s original or historic condition, the environmental features that are selected for regeneration, and the goals that are determined for a particular restoration project.

Further complicating any definition of restoration is the fact that restoration is not a new phenomenon, broadly understood, but has a long and varied history, reaching back at least as far as there is record of people interacting intentionally to maintain their natural environments by, for example, shifting crops, fallowing land, or managing certain animal and plant species for consumptive, medicinal, or spiritual purposes. Over time perceptions regarding environmental damage and repair, and thus restoration, have changed significantly. As recently as two centuries ago, for example, most people in the West viewed ecosystem damage as intrinsic to nature’s “hideous and dying” ways, as eighteenth-century French naturalist Compte de Buffon claimed.¹ According to this view, damaged land resulted from human neglect to improve upon an intrinsically degenerating nature. Alternatively, ecologists today understand ecosystem damage not as inherent to natural systems but as mostly the result of human activities. According to this contemporary scientific view, it is human rather than nonhuman factors that have caused natural processes and functions to become rundown and therefore incapable of internally renewing the ecological system.

This chapter clarifies the meaning of ecological restoration by presenting a field guide to types of restoration. In this field guide I explain six specific perspectives on restoration’s meaning: (a) scientific restoration ecology, (b) biocultural views, (c) deep ecological bioregionalism, (d) anthropology/ritual studies, (e) environmental philosophy, and (f) technological approaches. Subsequent chapters will build on the meanings explored here and pursue questions that they generate.

At the outset, however, I want to note several highlights in recent environmental restoration history, for these have influenced the trajectories of a developing ecological restoration program that now takes the forms I analyze here.² Cultures have had and continue to have their own history related to restoring, healing, and renewing land: Environmental historian Marcus Hall charts the divergence, for example, of nineteenth-century European and North American perspectives of restoration based on differing cultural perceptions of ideal and damaged land. On the one hand, “maintaining the garden” as an intensively managed cultural landscape was the prominent restoration view in nineteenth-century Italy; in the United States, on the other hand, “naturalizing the degraded” to pristine, unblemished wilderness was the restoration ideal.³

This said, organizations such as the International Society of Ecological Restoration (SER) point to the potential for cross-cultural meanings for ecological restoration, as I show below. The SER emphasizes the environmental historical perspective of the modern-day ecological restoration movement, which originated within North America, and the restoration thought of Aldo Leopold. Given Leopold’s significance in relation to broader restoration thought and practice, as well as in relation to this volume, I focus briefly on his work here.

ALDO LEOPOLD THE RESTORATIONIST

As father of the modern-day conservation movement and founder of the arboretum at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (considered the first and most successful ongoing restoration effort in the country), Leopold is thought to be a key progenitor of the scientific ecological study of restoration, a basis for most ecological restoration efforts today. It would be remiss, nevertheless, to suggest that the contemporary ecological restoration movement began with Leopold. Indigenous peoples on this continent (just as in various parts of the world) were in many respects the first restorationists.⁴ This is despite the fact that traditional indigenous restoration practices have historically been ignored or minimized within Western approaches to scientific environmental management and restoration techniques.⁵ More recently, however, the positive value of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) applications in ecological restoration efforts has been recognized by many conservation agencies worldwide. To this end, traditional ecological restoration practices are increasingly being used hand in hand with modern scientific ecological techniques.

Within environmental history, restoration began as an aesthetic artistic enterprise in the field of landscape design. During the early part of the twentieth century, designers such as Jens Jensen, Wilhelm Miller, Frederick Law Olmsted, Elsa Rehmann, and Ossian Simmons began creating landscapes modeled on historical landscapes such as the tall grass prairies of the midwestern United States. Prior to this prairies had been little appreciated in the American landscape aesthetic. In this way restoration became a means for “discovering the beauty of a historic landscape, or of ecosystems or processes that had been considered ugly or repellant.”⁶

Whereas early-twentieth-century restoration efforts were primarily artisticoriented ventures, restoration based on the scientific study of ecology is generally understood to have begun with Leopold and his colleagues’ experiments at the University of Wisconsin’s arboretum in Madison in the early 1930s. After decades of intensive agriculture in the midwest, historical prairie and oak savanna ecosystems, as well as species native to Wisconsin, were virtually nonexistent. In light of this, Leopold and his team (which included early conservation leaders Norman Fassett and Theodore Sperry) proposed developing the Wisconsin arboretum into “a reconstruction of original Wisconsin, rather than into a ‘collection’ of imported trees.”⁷ In his speech at the arboretum’s dedication during the height of the Great Depression in 1934, Leopold declared: “This Arboretum may be regarded as a place where, in the course of time, we will build up an exhibit of what was, as well as an exhibit of what ought to be.”⁸

Leopold was also engaged in his own personal restoration efforts at his derelict farm an hour’s drive outside of Madison in Sand County, Wisconsin. He purchased the farm “for its lack of goodness and its lack of highway; indeed my whole neighborhood lies in the backwash of the River Progress.”⁹ It was this experiment—working to restore the degraded parcel of Wisconsin farmland, home to the Leopold family’s retreat-shack (formerly a chicken coop on the property)—that helped to shape Leopold’s now-classic book, A Sand County Almanac. Each spring the Leopold family of seven would plant thousands of white, red, and jack pines and to a lesser extent tamarack and sumac, working over time to restore more than 150 acres of woodland, prairie, savanna, and wetland marshes.¹⁰

Among the most important lessons gleaned from Leopold’s view of restoration is that conservation work, including restoration, requires tending to the objective task of land health (or pathology) and the subjective task of developing a relationship with the land.¹¹ Leopold’s eldest daughter, Nina Bradley Leopold, for example, quotes one of her father’s undated papers: “There are two things that interest me: the relationship of people to each other, and the relation of people to the land.”¹² “And as I think about it,” Nina Leopold reflects, “both of these things were the main elements of the Shack.”¹³

Leopold’s contribution to ecological restoration thought and practice has been central to its development.¹⁴ Additionally, many contemporary restorationists point to the historical importance of the founding of the SER in 1988. Whereas other organizations such as the American Society for Surface Mine Reclamation and the Canadian Land Reclamation Association support variations of restoration such as reclamation, restorative repair, rehabilitation, and revegetation, the SER is concerned primarily with holistic restoration, or the restoration of whole ecosystems. The publication of the practitioner journal (really, a cut-and-paste newsletter at first) Restoration and Management Notes in 1983 by William Jordan (then a staff member at the Wisconsin arboretum) also helped to bolster the fledgling restoration movement early on. Originally a small organization based in the United States, the SER has burgeoned into an internationally active society with members from more than thirty countries. With Leopold and the SER noted, I now turn to explore the key perspectives on ecological restoration that have developed over the past several decades since the initiation of the scientific study of restoration ecology. I begin with perhaps the most prominent one, a scientific ecological understanding of restoration practice.

SCIENTIFIC ECOLOGICAL
UNDERSTANDINGS OF RESTORATION

Although meanings of ecological restoration vary historically, this does not mean that understandings of restoration are completely culturally relative; cultural relativism is not the only alternative to absolute so-called truths in relation to ecological restoration. Rather, as is evidenced in the definitions of ecological restoration that have been developed over the years by the SER, as well as in many restoration projects themselves, it is possible to develop processes of “tested normativity” whereby engaged persons and communities reflect upon, evaluate, and debate the ecological, cultural, and ethical principles that should shape ecological restoration in a particular context.¹⁵

The SER definition of ecological restoration holds particular promise for achieving a certain level of shared, cross-cultural understanding given that it is communally developed, reflected upon, and tested in consultation with a wide array of international scholars and practitioners working in the field of ecological restoration. Although I do not think the current SER definition goes far enough in terms of including certain cultural and ethical dimensions, I nonetheless view it as an adequate definition to which other perspectives can be compared.¹⁶

Over the years, the SER revised its core definition several times. In part this reflects the nature of ecological restoration in that it is an adaptive work in progress, continually being shaped by newfound understandings and practices that evolve and change with the dynamism of the land itself. Some have viewed the SER’s focus on defining ecological restoration as “endless quibbling,” but others have viewed it as “a precondition for deciding what constitutes good restoration.”¹⁷ As restoration scholar Eric Higgs argues, “Without the ability to distinguish a good project from a bad one, better projects from worse ones, or even restoration projects from those that are not, the ecological restoration movement—in science, professional practice, community volunteer initiatives, and every other dimension—risks losing its strength of purpose.”¹⁸

The first SER definition put forward in 1990, two years after its chartering as an organization, was the most controversial. It stated: “Ecological restoration is the process of intentionally altering a site to establish a defined, indigenous, historic ecosystem. The goal of this process is to emulate the structure, function, diversity and dynamics of the specified ecosystem.”¹⁹ Controversy mostly revolved around use of the term “indigenous,” given that both European and Native American restorationists found fault with the view then prevalent among white North American restorationists that it is possible and desirable to restore ecosystems to a precontact or presett...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Restoring Earth
• Part II: Restored to Earth
• Bibliography
• Index