William Jordan (1994)
"Sunflower Forest: Eco Restoration a basis for a New Env. Paradigm"
RESTORATION AND GARDENING
- Gardening is a healthy paradigm for the relation between humans and rest
of nature
- Handles nature with respect
- W/o self-abnegation (self-denial) (or humility?)
- Manipulates nature intelligently and creatively
- To manipulate nature is a healthy relation?
- It benefits and nurtures plants and animals
- Exercise wide range of human abilities
- Leaves a distinctively human mark on landscape
- A basis of communion with other species
- Restoration is gardening of wild nature
- Reconstruction and maintenance of wild nature
- Ecosystem construction involves creative and conservative poles
- Creative pole: traditional forms of agriculture, construct
ecosystems and create/invent new ones
- Conservative pole: eco-restoration which recreates historic
landscapes
- Restoration as a type of ecosystem construction (206)
- This makes for a good target for Katz's restored ecosystems are artifacts
criticism
JORDAN'S CRITIQUE OF TRADITIONAL
PRESERVATIONIST ENVIRONMENTALISM (p. 208)
- Jordan is criticizing traditional env. (that is preservationsim) as much
as defending restoration
- Katz and Elliott embrace preservationism
- Difference conservation, preservation, and restoration as
environmental philosophies
- Preservation def.: Conserving natural systems by preventing human
influence on them
- Ideal is wilderness preservation
- Restoration def: Conserving natural systems by active human
influence of restoration
- Ideal is Cap Sauers restoration?
- One: Can't stop living ecosystems from changing
- False view of preservation: It's goal is not to freeze frame
nature, but let nature change on its own; preserve natural
processes, not a status quo
- Two: Can't prevent ES (change) from reflecting human influence
- Preservationism ignores this influence instead of
acknowledging and correcting for it
- But is small degree of influence a problem that requires restoration?
- Three: Inevitably all ecosystems will be so degraded by human influence that
management/restoration is needed
- Because everything is hitched to everything else, in the final
analysis, all historic ecosystems will be virtually eliminated by
human activity, as have the prairies and oak openings around
Chicago
- Thus they all will need to be restored (p. 207)
- False empirical claim if this means a high degree of human
influence (this is not inevitable)
- Removing exotics from national parks like Yellowstone is a far
cry from restoring/recreating) oak savannas like Packard is
doing
- If restoration includes light management, then no dispute between preservationists and restorationists, as
preservation has no problem with minor human interventions like
pulling out a few exotic weeds
- Four: Puts a distance between humans and nature
- Real nature is wilderness and wilderness is a place humans are visitors who don't remain
- Five: Ideal of nature is wilderness untrammeled by man
- Six: Offers a severely limited relation to nature;
- Minimal impact ethics: take only pictures, leave only footprints
- Largely non-participatory
- People's role confined to visitor/observer of nature, rather
than active element in community
- Seven: Concern almost solely for the land and almost none for
human participant
- But human concerns are dominant everyplace else already
- Eight: Healthy relation to nature not possible under this env.
picture
- For a healthy relation to nature must be participatory, ecological,
and engage all human abilities
- Is Jordan saying preservation can be no part of a healthy
relation to nature, or that if taken as the only appropriate
relationship, it is unhealthy?
- Env. preservation is trouble only when it is taken as the sole
model of humans relation; for it provides no model for future
sustainable human society
- Given human degradation/domination of planet today,
preservation's focus on minimal impact on remaining wildland
is an appropriate role for today
JORDANS ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF RESTORATION
- Must involve a working relation with nature
- Must involve an economic transaction with genuine exchange of
goods/services
- Why must it be economic? Best relations economic?
- Reply: Maybe our relation with nature must be economic; we
need it to survive
- Rather than trad env. ideals, such as picture taking and hiking
need hunting and or berry/mushroom picking
- Must be a positive, reciprocal, mutually beneficial relation; taking and giving back
- How do we give back? (E.g., Spraying our waste water back on
fields?)
NED'S CRITIQUE OF RESTORATION AS HEALTH PARADIGM
FOR HUMAN NATURE RELATION
- Restoration involves undoing a harm that you've done and this is not a
positive, healthy relationship, for it presupposed harming nature first
- Restoration is not mutually beneficial
- Compensating for harm done is not to bestow a benefit
- To extirpate wolves/savannahs and then restore them is not to
benefit wolves/savannahs
- To clear cut and replant is not a mutually beneficial relation
- A paradigmatic humans relationship to nature should involve
participation in nature that does not presuppose degrading nature to
begin with (as does restoration relation)
- A positive human relation to nature might involve:
- Let some ecosystem types of which we have historical samples
preserved continue to evolve on their own
- This is one thing Jordan misses
- Restore naturally degraded ecosystems/species
- Preserve classic ecosystems/species going naturally extinct
- Return of dinosaur (museum piece)
- Enhances biodiversity at expense of naturalness
(independence of humanization)
- Allow idea that humans can improve on nature
- Create new ecosystems/species
- Onco-mouse, geeps!
- Dogs/tangelos
- Gardens, farmlands
- But this is not restoration but invention, gardening
- Increases biodiversity but at a loss of naturalness
- Jordan favors inventing novel ecosystems, perhaps with GE
species, as this will increase rather than decrease biodiversity
- ONE KEY DIFFERENCE RESTORATIONISTS/PRESERVATIONIST
- Preservationists worry about any human influence on ecosystems,
restorationists only worry about human influence that damages
ecosystems
- Preservationists might argue that a certain amount human
influence is better left alone than using a much larger degree of
human influence to remove it, because preservationists are
concerned with minimizing human influence itself
- Jordan and other restorationists are worried about the effect of
human influence and getting rid of that effect
- For Jordan, it doesn't matter how much ongoing human
influence you need, as long as the product resembles historic
ecosystems you want to "restore"