History and Values in Ecological Restoration Workshop

From its early days, restoration ecology has found room for a wide range of perspectives and approaches, but the field has understandably exhibited its deepest roots in environmental sciences. While social sciences and humanities have increasingly been represented in the restoration literature (e.g., Gobster and Hull 2000, Hall 2010, Egan et al. 2011), the question of how to productively integrate social dimensions into restoration theory and practice remains an ongoing challenge.

With this challenge in mind, more than two dozen federal land managers and restoration scholars from the fields of restoration ecology, philosophy, history, anthropology, geography, and environmental studies gathered from June 7-10, 2012, at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado, for a workshop focusing on history and values in ecological restoration. Organized and hosted by Marion Hourdequin (Philosophy, Colorado College) and David Havlick (Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs), the workshop focused on restoration in landscapes with complex histories, with particular attention to former military sites in the United States now managed as national wildlife refuges (so-called "M2W" refuges). The workshop consisted of paper presentations, field reports from managers of M2W refuges, and a field trip to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge (NWR).

SER President Emeritus Andre Clewell gave the opening presentation of the workshop and promptly noted that it was "brave" to bring together a group with such diverse experiences and perspectives. He emphasized the continued importance of a traditional goal of ecological restoration: to restore the continuity of an ecosystem's historic trajectory. This view that restoration is not so much about restoring ecosystems as it is about recovering them quickly came into question, as philosopher Allen Thompson highlighted the role of human activity in creating hybrid and novel ecosystems (see Hobbs et al. 2009, Light et al. 2013). The recognition of novel ecosystems fundamentally challenges the role of historic fidelity in restoration, as these new systems exhibit functional characteristics outside the historic range of variation.

With historic conditions of a site bracketed very differently as essential to ecosystem recovery or irrelevant to ecosystem function, several of the key questions from the workshop began to take shape: How should historical qualities and uses of a site be accounted for in ecological restoration? Should restoration serve to erase or preserve multiple layers of human activity? And more practically, how can land managers of complex sites appropriately treat or represent social as well as ecological conditions?

Dutch philosopher Martin Drenthen first addressed these questions in the workshop by emphasizing the importance of meaning in restoration, noting that ecological restoration may generate landscape-scale changes that destroy legible signs of cultural activity. Against this prospective erasure of cultural elements, Drenthen advocated using art to represent a landscape palimpsest that retains the significance of deeper historical layers. Used this way, art can powerfully evoke meaning while still allowing room for creative re-interpretation of a site and avoiding "museumification," which may come with excessive signage (see Gobster 2007, Drenthen 2009).

Historian John Spiers provided an example from the Monocacy National Battlefield, in Maryland, to illustrate how extending the temporal scope of a site creates new challenges for restoration and interpretation. When a slave plantation was uncovered at Monocacy in 2010, Spiers noted that emphasis on a particular civil war battle could be expanded, incorporating the site's slave history to provide a fuller understanding of its historic importance, and a broader context for the battle and the Civil War. According to Spiers, focusing exclusively on Monacacy as a battlefield fails to do justice to the site's social and ecological significance.

Jozef Keulartz, a philosopher from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, documented how three aging industrial sites in England, the Netherlands, and Germany have been revitalized and restored differently. Unlike many North American brownfield treatments where eradication of the industrial infrastructure serves as an essential first step, Keulartz's European examples each maintained a semblance of the former industrial facility in place. The Geever tin mine in Cornwall has largely been retained as an open-air museum. The Westergasfabriek gas plant in the Netherlands was renovated and...