Walking in the Land of Many Gods: Remembering Sacred Reason in Contemporary Environmental Literature

CHAPTER THREE: Restor(y)ing the Self: Ecological Restoration in Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

47 Chapter Three Restor(y)ing the Self Ecological Restoration in Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood In The Sunflower Forest, William Jordan defines ecological restoration as “the attempt, sometimes breathtakingly successful, sometimes less so, to make nature whole. To do this the restorationist does everything possible to heal the scars and erase the signs of disturbance or disruption.”1 He explains that the work of the restorationist is to restore all aspects of an ecosystem or landscape, including those elements, such as fire or flooding, that might seem dangerous or nonproductive; he concludes that restoration “is a deliberate attempt to return all the features of the system to some historic condition , defined ecologically and with a studied disregard for human interests .”2 Restoring the land, then, becomes a way of reconsidering how we dwell on Earth, of how we think about the landscape around us and how we act toward that landscape. Although humans become implicated further in the land through the act of restoration—an act that paradoxically is about attempting to diminish the human impact on the land—they do so by relinquishing their own interests and listening to the stillness of the land. Although the ideal end result of the restorationist may be clear, the outcome is “paradoxical. The aim of the restorationist is to erase the mark of his own kind from the landscape. Yet through the process of restoration he enters 48 Chapter Three into a peculiarly profound and intimate relationship with it.”3 In this way, restoration of the land becomes a means to restoration of the self, for the land becomes a part of us. In a similar way, Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood intimately connects a discussion of the degradation of the landscape and Ray’s dream of restoring the land to a discussion of her life as it evolves in the telling of her story. As her autobiography unfolds and she describes a life lived on a junkyard in south Georgia, Ray intercalates chapters on the natural world surrounding her, including both elaborate depictions of the degraded land of her time and glimpses of the historic longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered much of the South. The intercalated chapters, interrupting the narrative of her life as they do, have the effect not only of revealing how the human community dwells on the land but also of suggesting how the land dwells in us. This autobiographical act becomes, then, not only an act of ecological restoration, metaphorically or textually restoring the land, but also an act of self-restoration, allowing the author to re/place herself in fundamental ways; that is, in Ecology, Ray considers how she dwells on Earth, and through an analysis of the technological horizon of disclosure that has become her worldview, she uncovers the possibility for a renewed emplacement on the land, one ecological in nature that reveals the human interdependence with the landscape. Ultimately, the writing of Ecology offers an opportunity for remaking her conception of self and reshaping the values of the human community in which she is embedded. Significantly, William Jordan’s central concern in exploring the act of ecological restoration is to unfold the way in which this act is also, like the writing of an autobiography such as Ecology, a means to the creation of values , a necessary step in the process of developing an ethical system that guides our individual and communal behavior. He reconfigures restoration, which is often undertaken as a scientific or technological pursuit, as a ritual, a ceremony, a performative act that allows us to examine our values, to criticize those values, and to open the possibility of shifting or redefining them. Ultimately, such a process allows a society to “change the deepest structures of its worldview and system of values and relationships.”4 Ecological restoration , when it becomes a ritualized performative act, affects the restorationist and the entire human community, reshaping our ideas and placing us differently on the land so that we become new beings who are “effective, knowledgeable, loyal, and responsible members of the biotic community.” Restor(y)ing the Self 49 Jordan concludes: “Crucially, what really has to be renewed is not the landscape at all, but the human community’s idea of the landscape, on which the well-being of the landscape ultimately depends.”5 Jordan’s conception of ecological restoration and our relation to the...