Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth

Restoring Earth, Restored to Earth: Toward an Ethic for Reinhabiting Place

 Restoring Earth, Restored to Earth: Toward an Ethic for Reinhabiting Place D A N I E L T. S P E N C E R INTRODUCTION The sun strikes the rust-orange tailings of the now-abandoned copper mine as the group of worshippers breaks into song at the Easter sunrise service, celebrating the renewal of their faith and of their commitment to restoring the toxic landfill beneath their feet. Hundreds of miles to the east, flames crackle across the open field, recently planted in corn, now returning to tallgrass prairie, as college students and community members fan out to shepherd the fire through the dried grasses and recently re-established native plants. Amidst the Rocky Mountains several states to the west, local citizens pause from uprooting exotic and noxious weeds from the open space of their beloved and protected mountain slopes to take in the spring green in the valley below. Nearby, schoolchildren gather in a barn-turned-laboratory to learn to identify native flora and fauna before heading out into the floodplain fields along the river to help with the annual inventory of the local wildlife refuge in an effort to return lands and waters to a more native state. In the city downstream, residents of an abandoned warehouse, now become sustainable housing, tend a rooftop vegetable garden and rip up old concrete slabs and noxious weeds that surround the building, replacing them with ecologically adapted native plants. In locales as diverse as the alpine valleys of the North Cascades in Washington State, the Minnesota tallgrass prairie, and the hillsides of western Montana, the meadowlands and wetlands of New Jersey, and 416 兩 e c os p i ri t the everglades of Florida, equally diverse gatherings of local community members are restoring damaged and degraded ecosystems at the local and regional level while reinhabiting these places with an expanded sense of home. In doing this, they reintegrate the human community into the broader natural world within a vision of social and ecological sustainability . Making up the grassroots component of the burgeoning field of ecological restoration, these communities and thousands more like them illustrate with particular vigor and promise the vision of sustainable community that ethicist Larry Rasmussen makes the cornerstone of an ‘‘earth ethic’’ in his groundbreaking work, Earth Community, Earth Ethics.1 Ecological restoration has grown rapidly in the past twenty years as a science, a philosophy, and an ethic. As a philosophically grounded ethic, restoration sees nature and humanity as fundamentally united and seeks for ecologically sustainable ways that human communities can participate actively in nature. Some environmentalists, however, are cautious, even skeptical, about having restoration become the basis of an environmental ethic, seeing it as simply the latest justification for ongoing human intervention in natural systems, rather than learning to adapt our communities to the constraints of ecological systems. Below I explore some of the dimensions of sustainable community that these local efforts at ecological restoration exemplify, and argue that they illustrate a particularly promising component of an ethic of sustainability rooted in place. Such practices in turn can ground a broader restoration ethic of reinhabiting our locales in ecologically sustainable ways that are themselves restorative : in restoring the earth, we are in turn restored to the earth. These practices and the ethic they ground can help us to rethink and reshape our views of humanity and the humanity-nature relationship that is implicated in so many contemporary social and ecological issues. In my book, Gay and Gaia: Ethics, Ecology, and the Erotic, I sought to develop the basis of an ecojustice ethic of right relationship by reclaiming and revisioning both the erotic and the ecological at all levels of our lives— from our deepest, most intimate relationships with self and other to our location in an evolutionary, expanding cosmos.2 Given the contemporary ecological crisis that contains and frames all other issues of human concern, ecological ethics must become the grounding for all ethics; what is needed is a fundamental shift from an anthropocentric, human-centered worldview to an ecocentric, all-of-life-centered worldview. d a ni e l t. s p enc e r 兩 417 I use the concept of ecological location as both an analytical and a descriptive term to help us understand the complex ways each of us is located both socially and ecologically within societies, cultures, and ecosystems. As a normative term, ecological location suggests...