Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration: Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture ed. by Dave Egan, Evan E. Hjerpe, and Jesse Abrams (review)

In their edited volume, Dave Egan, Evan E. Hjerpe, and Jesse Abrams bring together contributions from over 35 practitioners and researchers across the globe. The authors approach the human dimensions of ecological restoration from numerous perspectives such as volunteerism, politics, social sciences, culture, art/design, economics, and education. This was my introduction to ecological restoration and I was genuinely impressed by the number of disciplines, ways of thinking, and approaches that were integrated into one book.

The editors did a fabulous job of thoughtfully organizing the contributed chapters. I’m sure this was not an easy task because there was overlap in the disciplinary elements and scope of the chapters. The editors chose the meta-themes of participation, power, and perspective. Within the theme of participation, they placed chapters into a section on volunteers and another on collaboration. Within the theme of power, chapters fell into either a section on politics, governance, and planning or a section on restoration economics. Within the theme of perspective, chapters were divided into sections on eco-cultural restoration or restoration-based education.

Running through the varied perspectives, a reoccurring theme was present, namely, that ecological restoration is not merely about repairing habitats and ecosystems but equally about repairing the way people view the relationship between humans and the Earth. Throughout the chapters, public participation ranged from involvement in the early stages of visioning and planning, the middle stages of project implementation, to the later stage of engagement in the post-management of ecological restoration. Despite financial benefits of public involvement in restoration, the chapters make it clear that restoration requires public support, philosophically, politically, and emotionally, in order to be successful. Whether examined from the perspective of economics, ecology, education, art, or sociology, the bottom line was that the human dimensions of restoration not only addressed how people relate to each other, but how people relate to the Earth.

Since it is an edited volume of many contributions, the voices of different authors come through. That was great when I liked the author’s style, but unfortunate when I didn’t. Some chapters were written like very dry textbooks, but most expressed the passion and enthusiasm of personal story-telling. At the start of the sections within each meta-theme, the editors give an overview of the chapters. These recaps of the chapters would have been of greater help to readers if the editors had provided more background, context, and definitions so that even readers with little familiarity with the discipline (like me) could easily understand the relevance and significance of each contribution.

I particularly enjoyed the section on Eco-cultural Restoration, which included contributions from Robin Kimmerer on Traditional Ecological Knowledge in North America, Ian Rotherham on cultural severance in England, Michelle Stevens and Hamid Ahmed on the Mesopotamian Marshes in Iraq, and Lillian Ball and her colleagues on artistic design in environmental restoration, including a water garden in the shape of a fish in China.

This book was brought to my attention so that I might find parallels between public engagement in ecological restoration and public engagement in scientific research, i.e., Citizen Science. I found it interesting to compare the similarities and differences between the human dimensions of citizen science and ecological restoration. I began with a vague and naive expectation that a book about human dimensions of ecological restoration would primarily be about styles of volunteerism and these styles would look similar to citizen science. Although some chapters included examples of volunteers involved in the nitty-gritty physical work of implementing restoration, the activities bared little resemblance to citizen science because they did not involve data collection. Human dimensions of citizen science often focus on understanding why people volunteer for science and whether the experiences lead to pro-environmental behaviors. I was impressed that the human...