Restored to Earth: Christianity, Environmental Ethics, and Ecological Restoration

CHAPTER 1: “Let There Be a Tree”: A Field Guide to Types of Ecological Restoration

35 ChaPter one l “Let There Be a Tree” A Field Guide to Types of Ecological Restoration Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a good shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree—and there will be one. —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac D efining ecological restoration is not an easy task given that meanings are numerous and diverse, often varying dramatically from ecosystem to ecosystem and culture to culture. As a vernacular practice, perspectives on restoration shift according to the types of ecosystems (forest, grassland, wetland, river), degradations (deforestation, erosion, toxification, species loss), and repairs (bioreactivation , recontouring of land or waterways, reintroduction of native species, removal of exotics). Additionally, meanings vary depending on understandings of an ecosystem’s original or historic condition, the environmental features that are selected for regeneration, and the goals that are determined for a particular restoration project. Further complicating any definition of restoration is the fact that restoration is not a new phenomenon, broadly understood, but has a long and varied history, reaching back at least as far as there is record of people interacting intentionally to maintain their natural environments by, for example, shifting crops, fallowing land, or managing certain animal and plant species for consumptive, medicinal, or spiritual purposes. Over time perceptions regarding environmental damage and Chapter one 36 repair, and thus restoration, have changed significantly. As recently as two centuries ago, for example, most people in the West viewed ecosystem damage as intrinsic to nature’s “hideous and dying” ways, as eighteenth-century French naturalist Compte de Buffon claimed.1 According to this view, damaged land resulted from human neglect to improve upon an intrinsically degenerating nature. Alternatively, ecologists today understand ecosystem damage not as inherent to natural systems but as mostly the result of human activities. According to this contemporary scientific view, it is human rather than nonhuman factors that have caused natural processes and functions to become rundown and therefore incapable of internally renewing the ecological system. This chapter clarifies the meaning of ecological restoration by presenting a field guide to types of restoration.In this field guide I explain six specific perspectives on restoration’s meaning: (a) scientific restoration ecology, (b) biocultural views, (c) deep ecological bioregionalism, (d) anthropology/ritual studies, (e) environmental philosophy, and (f) technological approaches. Subsequent chapters will build on the meanings explored here and pursue questions that they generate. At the outset, however, I want to note several highlights in recent environmental restoration history,for these have influenced the trajectories of a developing ecological restoration program that now takes the forms I analyze here.2 Cultures have had and continue to have their own history related to restoring, healing, and renewing land: Environmental historian Marcus Hall charts the divergence, for example, of nineteenth-century European and North American perspectives of restoration based on differing cultural perceptions of ideal and damaged land. On the one hand, “maintaining the garden” as an intensively managed cultural landscape was the prominent restoration view in nineteenth-century Italy; in the United States, on the other hand,“naturalizing the degraded”to pristine, unblemished wilderness was the restoration ideal.3 This said, organizations such as the International Society of Ecological Restoration (SER) point to the potential for cross-cultural meanings for ecological restoration, as I show below. The SER emphasizes the environmental historical perspective of the modern-day ecological restoration movement,which originated within North America, and the restoration thought of Aldo Leopold. Given Leopold ’s significance in relation to broader restoration thought and practice, as well as in relation to this volume, I focus briefly on his work here. aldo leoPold the restorationist As father of the modern-day conservation movement and founder of the arboretum at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (considered the first and most successful ongoing restoration effort in the country), Leopold is thought to be a key progenitor of the scientific ecological study of restoration, a basis for most 37 “Let There Be a Tree” ecological restoration efforts today.It would be remiss,nevertheless,to suggest that the contemporary ecological restoration movement began with Leopold. Indigenous peoples on this continent (just as in various parts of the world) were in...