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1 introduCtion l From Wounded Land and Spirit to Healing Land and Spirit The Significance of Ecological Restoration for Environmental Ethics We care for the land because it is good for the land. We care for the land because it is good for the Lake Mendota watershed. We care for the land because it is good for the souls of all God’s people. —Holy Wisdom Monastery, Middleton, Wisconsin E nvironmentalists have long linked the modern environmental crisis with a crisis of the human spirit—of consciousness, the personal heart, or soul. Some thirty years ago essayist and poet Wendell Berry called the ecological crisis a crisis of character.1 More recently, ecological theologian Mark I. Wallace writes that the global environmental crisis “is a matter of the heart, not the head . . . we no longer experience our co-belonging with nature in such a way that we are willing to alter our lifestyles in order to build a more sustainable future.”2 What we need to do, proposes social ecologist Stephen Kellert, is “address the roots of our predicament—an adversarial relation to the natural world—and find a way to shift our core values and worldviews not just toward the task of sustainability, but toward a society with a meaningful and fulfilling relationship with the creation.”3 The question, of course, is what on earth is going to bring about the transformation that is needed; what is going to help us, once again and anew, find our place and purpose within this beautiful, generative earth? One response that has been frequently overlooked by scholars of environmental ethics, especially religious -oriented environmental ethics, is that of ecological restoration. Ecological Introduction 2 restoration is the attempt to heal and make nature whole through the science and art of repairing ecosystems that have been damaged by human activities. It “involves all manner of work with the land,from removing roads and restoring the contours of terrain to removal of exotic plant and animal species that are eliminating or outcompeting native species; to planting trees, grasses, and wildflowers; to propagating endangered plant and animal species.”4 Restoration projects range from the massive, multibillion-dollar Kissimmee River project to restore more than twenty-five thousand acres of Everglades’ wetlands to the $30 million effort to restore selected wetlands in industrial Brownfield sites of Chicago’s south side Lake Calumet to the reintroduction of tall grass prairie ecosystems in various communities in the Midwest to reforestation and tree-planting efforts throughout eastern Africa. But beyond this, ecological restoration is the attempt to heal and make the human relationship to nature whole. In its metaphysical understanding of the fundamental interconnectedness of nature and culture and in its practice that provides an experiential bridge between people and land, ecological restoration is viewed by its proponents as providing a promising and moral model for human living with land. In the actual practice of repairing degraded lands—reintroducing , reforesting, revegetating, ripping out, and so on—people and communities are, in an important sense, restored to land. Additionally, ecological restoration as a healing practice is understood as a form of restitution for past (and present) unjustified destruction and exploitation of land and land-based communities. It also serves as an important vehicle of empowerment for communities whose native ecosystems have been degraded or damaged for the purpose of cultural and economic progress. In this way ecological restoration “is part of a larger mission to create a society that respects democracy, decency, adherence to the rule of law, human rights, and the rights of women,” as Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Green Belt Movement, wrote.5 One of the unique aspects of the ecological restoration movement in comparison with other conservation or preservation efforts is its considerable utilization of volunteers. For example, the Chicago Wilderness project, which has thus far restored more than seventeen thousand acres (with an additional eighty-three thousand acres in the long-term management plan) of the region’s historic oak savanna landscape throughout the city of Chicago, utilized upward of three thousand volunteers annually at its height. The Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie project in Joliet, Illinois, the former site of the Joliet Army Ammunition Plant, which required extensive cleanup from contamination from decades of TNT manufacturing and packaging, relied heavily on volunteers to plant its more than fifteen thousand acres of tall grass prairie. Further, as evidenced in the Kissimmee River and Lake Calumet projects mentioned above, large amounts of...

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