In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Oil and Other Pressing Matters
  • Mrill Ingram, Editor

I am pleased to introduce this full and exciting fall issue of Ecological Restoration. Guest editor Roberto Lindig Cisneros has pulled together eight full-length articles and four Restoration Notes describing a diverse range of restoration initiatives in Mexico. As he points out in his editorial in this issue, the country’s cultural diversity is tightly linked with its biodiversity, and as the contributions in this issue reflect, anyone working on restoration efforts in Mexico is familiar with the need to identify the role of communities in restoration and to work with local people in order to foster participation and ownership of restoration projects.

It is quite appropriate, therefore, that we also feature a piece on “biocultural and ecogastronomic restoration” by Gary Paul Nabhan, DeJa Walker, and Alberto Mellado Moreno. The authors report on work being carried out by the Renewing America’s Food Traditions Alliance, which identifies the overlaps in ecological restoration and cultural recovery in North America. While some of these community-based projects have been generated by First Nations or tribes seeking to reestablish their food security and sovereignty, most of the initiatives are cross-cultural and intergovernmental in nature. This is a rich area with great potential for increasing community commitment to restoration efforts and to expanding the social justice of restoration projects. But does ecological restoration need also to consider nonhuman species “for their own sake”? William Jordan III reflects on this question in a sidebar to the article on page 272.

In this issue we also bring you an article on the impacts of restoration on insect pollinators in southwestern U.S. forests by Susan Nyoka, a piece on controlling rhizome apical dominance in reed canarygrass by Craig Annen, and a research report on the impacts of herbicides on cogongrass in Florida by Eric Holzmeuller and Shibu Jose.

My excitement over the diverse and rich content in this issue has been dimmed by the expanding “blob of death” in the Gulf of Mexico, as the oil spill there was recently referred to by a research scientist. As I write this editorial (in June), BP’s broken well has released somewhere between 300 and 570 million liters (40 and 120 million gallons) since the rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 people. The company hopes to have the leak under control by August or September. This spill puts to shame the worst oil spills on record, which include the Ixtoc I oil well responsible for 413,000 tons of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico after an explosion between June 1979 and March 1980. Much worse and not an accident at all, the Gulf War oil spill was an estimated 8 million barrels of oil (1,240,000–1,400,000 tons) spewed into the Persian Gulf after Iraqi forces opened valves of oil wells and pipelines as they retreated from Kuwait in 1991. The oil slick was estimated to be 163 km by 68 km and 13 cm thick.

Looking over the public and scientific media that has developed in response to the ongoing Gulf of Mexico spill, we are reminded of several things: 1) this was predictable (and predicted); 2) this will not be the last oil-related disaster in the Gulf; 3) this is but only the most recent in a decades-long onslaught on the Louisiana coastal environment in the name of energy development; 4) oil spill restoration efforts are fraught, the technologies have changed little in the last 20 years, and often the best course of action is to do nothing; and 5) we have too little scientific information to predict the environmental impacts of this deepwater spill and to develop targeted restoration plans.

The Gulf of Mexico is the most explored, drilled, and developed of offshore reserves. There are nearly 4,000 active platforms (out of 6,400 worldwide) servicing 35,000 wells, and 46,000 km of pipelines. More than 50,000 wells have been drilled in coastal Louisiana (a.k.a. “America’s Wetland”), accessed by 13,000 km of canals crisscrossing the swamps, marshes, and bayous. Experts estimate that mineral extraction is directly responsible for one-third...

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