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  • Making Nature Whole: A History of Ecological Restorationby William R. Jordan III, George M. Lubick and Society for Ecological Restoration International
  • Anita Guerrini (bio)
Making Nature Whole: A History of Ecological RestorationWilliam R. Jordan III, George M. Lubick and Society for Ecological Restoration International. 2011. Washington, DC: Island Press. $35.00 paperback. ISBN: 978-1597265133. 272 pages.

William Jordan, the founder of Ecological Restoration, a founding member of the Society for Ecological Restoration, and a continuing leader in the field, offers in Making Nature Whole, written with environmental historian George Lubick, a personal view of the history of a field and a practice he has helped to develop. In many ways Making Nature Wholeis a continuation of Jordan’s The Sunflower Forest(2003), which detailed his philosophy of restoration and how and why, in his view, it should be practiced. In both works, Jordan defines restoration as “everything we do to an ecosystem or a landscape in an ongoing attempt to compensate for novel or ‘outside’ influences on it in such a way that it continues to behave or can resume behaving as if these influences were not present.”( Making Nature Whole, p.2) He refers to this as “ecocentric” restoration to distinguish it from other varieties of restoration that may be motivated by loyalties to other than an ecosystem itself.

Jordan and Lubick spend the first few chapters seeking historical and philosophical precedent for ecocentric thinking, arguing that a critical feature is the separation of humans from nature. Until humans view nature as other than themselves, they cannot practice ecocentric restoration. Paradoxically, saving nature requires human alienation from it, because pristine nature does not include humans. Jordan and Lubick find a number of religious and philosophical traditions that value nature for its own sake. Even St. Augustine, not usually seen as a nature philosopher, argued that nature should be seen in its own right as evidence of the creator.

According to Jordan and Lubick, truly ecocentric restoration did not appear until the twentieth century, and in the United States. Generally, they argue, it is confined to North America and Australia, areas with sufficient undeveloped wilderness that can serve as a model and inspiration; the consciousness of losing wild lands is a potent motivator for restoration. They review several earlier attempts, including surprising ones such as the Australian farmer Ambrose Crawford who created a “preserve for native trees” on his New South Wales farm in the 1930s, and arboretums at Vassar College and Carleton College in the 1920s. These shared an emphasis on native plants and on ecological rather than utilitarian values: unlike parks, they were not for public use.

Jordan and Lubick’s main example of ecocentric restoration is the Curtis Prairie project at the Arboretum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jordan knows this project well, since he served as the Arboretum’s manager of public outreach for almost 25 years (1977–2001). Aldo Leopold emerges as the hero of this story and his land ethic is, according to the authors, the guiding philosophy behind ecocentric restoration. The project of the arboretum, dedicated in 1934, was unapologetically academic and even elitist: it was not a public park and its purpose was primarily for research. This, to Jordan and Lubick, is the essence of ecocentric restoration, which is not for the benefit of humans but for the benefit of the ecosystem. Aesthetics and other human values simply are not important in this view.

Their strict definition of ecocentric restoration brushes to the side other forms of restoration as merely “meliorative,” improving external conditions without bringing about fundamental change. Restoration in Europe, for example, [End Page 105]could be no more than meliorative because there was no clear temporal boundary there between wilderness and civilization: landscape change occurred so gradually, they argue, that “the historic image they provided was a dim and incomplete picture of a series of gentle plateaus receding into the distant past.” (p.39) Restorationists in Europe who are seeking answers in archaeology and palaeontology as well as the historical record may beg to differ.

From Leopold, Jordan and Lubick then trace the development of ecocentric restoration from the 1930s to the...

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