Nature by Design: People, Natural Process, and Ecological Restoration

Nature by Design

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Nature by Design People, Natural Process, and Ecological Restoration

Eric Higgs

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Sabon by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Higgs, Eric S. Nature by design : people, natural process, and ecological design / Eric Higgs. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). SBN 0-262-08316-7 (hc. : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-262-58226-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Restoration ecology. I. Title. QH541.15.R45 H54 2003 333.7¢153¢—dc21 2002040783

To the Society for Ecological Restoration, an organization in which activists rub shoulders with scientists, theory meets action, and hope overtakes despair

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Contents

List of Figures xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 Outline of the Book

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1 A Tale of Two Wildernesses: Jasper National Park, Meet Disney World 15 The Bear in the Kitchen 16 The Palisade 22 A Landscape of Threats 27 Freak Landscapes 35 Restoring an Idea or a Place? 40 Wilderness as Theme 46 Colonizing the Imagination 49 Celebration? 52 One Wilderness or Two? 55 2 Boundary Conditions 59 Florid(ian) Images 59 Meandering Ambitions: The Kissimmee River (Florida) Restoration 64 Beyond the Ecological Curtain: The Morava River Restoration, Slovak Republic 68 Gardening or Restoration? The Robert Starbird Dorney Garden, Ontario, Canada 73 Normal History 78 Contingency and Ideals 82

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3 What Is Ecological Restoration? 93 Words and Taxonomy 96 The Duck Test 101 A Legacy of Definitions 107 Process and Product 110 Assisted Recovery 112 Management 116 Historical Range of Variability 118 Sustainable Cultural Practices 119 Ecological Integrity 122 The Evolution of Words and Worlds 124 4 Historicity and Reference in Ecological Restoration Photographing the Past 132 Nostalgia 143 Narrative Continuity 145 Place 148 Time Depth 154 Reference Conditions 158 Taking History Seriously 170 5 Denaturing Restoration 179 Lines across the Path 179 Commodification 188 A Taut Line: What Kind of Science Do Ecological Restorationists Require? 195 The Commodification of Nature 203 The Commodification of Practice 206 The Promise and Problems of Ecological Restoration 6 Focal Restoration 225 Discovery Island 226 Ecocultural Restoration 236 Focal Restoration 241 Ritual and Restoration 249 Participation in Restoration 255 Landscape Coevolution 259

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7 Nature by Design 265 Remembrances of Landscapes Past 265 The Ambiguity of Design 270 Wild Design 277 Restoration as Conversation: A Storied Landscape Notes 291 Bibliography Index 335

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List of Figures

1.1 Map of Jasper National Park 19 1.2 View of the town of Jasper from Old Fort Point 30 1.3 View of Talbot Lake from Mount Cinquefoil 32 1.4 Paired mosaic showing prominent changes in vegetation 34 1.5 View of the upper Athabasca Valley from Mount Esplanade 37 3.1 Proposed taxonomic relationships for ecological restoration 98 3.2 Two scales: ecological integrity and historical fidelity 127 4.1 Example of photographic cartography 134 4.2 Portion of 1915 topographic map 135 4.3 Paired photographs from Powerhouse Cliff 138 4.4 The past and future shown as two related continuums 147 4.5 Four sources of reference information 166 4.6 Paired ground-level photographs 168 5.1 Expanded conception of ecological restoration 221 6.1 A model of ecocultural restoration 238 6.2 A model of landscape evolution 261 7.1 View of the town of Jasper facing north from Whistler’s mountain 268 7.2 The four keystone concepts of good ecological restoration 271

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Acknowledgments

This book had its first glimmer in 1990 on a city bus in Vancouver. Langdon Winner and I were playing hooky from the Moral Philosophy and the Public Domain conference. I was telling Langdon about my ideas on ecological restoration, and how the meanings of restoration and nature were shifting as restoration became an increasingly technological practice. He said, “Why don’t you write a book on the subject?” It took another five years before the ideas and circumstances fell into place. The project began when I was a visiting scholar in the Science, Technology and Society Program at MIT in 1995. I am grateful to MIT professors Leo Marx and Kristina Hill (now at the University of Washington), Harvard professor Larry Buell, and Wesleyan professor Joseph Rouse. Work continued in 1996 at the Maurice Young Center for Applied Ethics. Michael MacDonald, Michael Burgess, and Peter Danielson contributed to a superb intellectual atmosphere for writing. The book would have been finished sooner had an utterly compelling field-based project not arisen. I spent four summers in the field, the last two ascending mountains in Jasper National Park with Jeanine Rhemtulla to repeat a series of over 700 survey photographs from 1915. Needless to say, this clambering ate into the writing of the book, but I think both I and the book are richer for the experience. The big pieces of the book came together during a six-month sabbatical leave in 2000 in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. I was surrounded by people concerned with restoration in one form or another, including Don Eastman (director of the Restoration of Natural Systems program), Brenda Beckwith, David

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Bodaly, Cheryl Bryce, Kim Chambers, Wendy Cocksedge, Patricia Edmonds, Ann Garibaldi, Trevor Lantz, Lehna Malmkvist, Carrina Maslovat, Nancy Turner and Paul West. My institutional base from 1990 to 2001 was the University of Alberta. I was given the opportunity to do interdisciplinary research and appreciate the generosity of many colleagues: David Anderson, Pamela Asquith, Dave Cruden, Linda Fedigan, Milton Freeman, Harvey Friebe, Jim Hoover, Steve Hrudey, Ron Kratochvil, Hank Lewis, Peter Murphy, and Carl Urion. Graduate students have been a constant source of inspiration: Claudio Aporta, Trish Bailey, Ausra Burns, Craig Campbell, Jennifer Cypher, Ginger Gibson, Lori Kiel, Christina Lindsay, Tricia Marck, Lisa Meekison, Nickie Miller, Carol Murray, and Gaby Zezulka-Mailloux. Jenaya Webb deserves special thanks for her unstinting help with logistics, lab and office management, and problem solving. Trudi Smith helped in the preparation of the illustrations for this book. Present and former staff in Jasper National Park helped at many points along the way: Peter Achuff, Jeff Anderson, Cynthia Ball, Jim Bertwistle, Kim Forster, Ben Gadd, Paul Galbraith, Alex Kolesch, Rick Kubian, George Mercer, Leigh Pitoulis, and Mike Wesbrook. I have benefited from conversations with fellow members of the Society for Ecological Restoration, including James Aronson, Andrew Bergen, Tony Bradshaw, Andy Clewell, Wally Covington, Don Falk, George Gann, Steve Gatewood, Marc Hall, Bill Halvorson, Steven Handel, Jim Harris, Donna Havinga, Kristina Hill, Andrew Light, Nik Lopoukhine, Dennis Martinez, Jonathan Perry, Edith Read, John Rieger, Ted Shear, Julie St. John, and Kellie Westervelt. Financial support for this project was provided by several grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, fellowships from the Maurice Young Center for Applied Ethics, and a Lansdowne lectureship at the University of Victoria. James Aronson, Brenda Beckwith, Albert Borgmann, Cheryl Bryce, André Clewell, Don Falk, Marc Hall, Alex Kolesch, Ian MacLaren, Jeanine Rhemtulla, Nancy Turner, Viv Wilson, and Anne Wong read chapter drafts. I am grateful also to three MIT Press reviewers who offered good advice for honing the final version.

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Staff at MIT Press were a pleasure to work with, and I appreciate in particular Clay Morgan, Sandra Minkkinen, and Elizabeth Judd. A few deserve special mention for their pivotal role in helping me develop this work. I have already mentioned Langdon Winner for his advice on fusing technology and nature studies. Albert Borgmann has been a mentor since graduate school, and his theories of technology are central to my arguments. Dick Buchanan pressed me on issues of design. Larry Haworth, who along with Robert Dorney cosupervised my doctoral studies on landscape change and technological society, stepped in after Dorney’s sudden death in 1987 and ensured the completion of my dissertation. Haworth’s ideas show through in this book, too, and I will never forget his kindness and professionalism. William Jordan encouraged my earliest writings on restoration and bolstered my courage in making controversial claims about restoration. Ian MacLaren taught me about good scholarship and faith. Jeanine Rhemtulla, an ecologist with whom I climbed so many mountains in Jasper National Park, listened, read, and understood my synthesis—this was a true gift. David Schindler, my partner for almost a decade in a joint graduate seminar at the University of Alberta, taught me about ecology, good science, and scientific activism. Nancy Turner shared her wisdom about ethnobotany and the cultural dimensions of ecological restoration. Sheila Gallagher and her family offered much to the early stages of this project with hospitality and support. I finished the writing at Berkenfels, near Ottawa, the family cottage of Stephanie Cairns, and my book was not the first to be completed in that loving, magical place. David and the late Isabel Higgs, my parents, and Sally Thornton, who has been a second mother to me, never wavered in their support. I am, all in all, very fortunate.

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Introduction

Many environmental books begin with a desperate attempt to convince us that we are either not sufficiently aware of the problems facing us or are not acting effectively to correct them. This one takes a different approach. I presume that everyone who picks up this book is doing so because they are searching for a better path, away from the problems and also from the habits of thinking that make those problems so intractable in the first place. You would be unlikely to turn to this book if you thought all was well. Ecological restoration is about making damaged ecosystems whole again by arresting invasive and weedy species, reintroducing missing plants and animals to create an intact web of life, understanding the changing historical conditions that led to present conditions, creating or rebuilding soils, eliminating hazardous substances, ripping up roads, and returning natural processes such as fire and flooding to places that thrive on these regular pulses. Interest in restoration has exploded in the last few years, following a gradual buildup of interest and expertise in past decades. The Society for Ecological Restoration, the lead international organization promoting restoration, was formed in 1987. The roots of restoration dig deep into cultures around the world, and restorationists are just beginning to learn how much is possible when we put our minds and hearts to the task of undoing the mistakes of the past. In studying and practicing restoration I have learned of profound cultural shifts accompanying the ecological work. Thousands of restoration projects take place in North America every year. Many are communitybased efforts that rely on volunteer support. The act of pulling weeds, planting, configuring a stream bank to match historical characteristics,

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or participating in a prescribed fire that returns an old process to the land helps develop a ferocious dedication to place. By investing labor one becomes part of that place. I live on the west coast of Canada, in Victoria, British Columbia, and there is nothing quite so rewarding for local restorationists as learning that salmon have returned to spawn in a stream long dormant. There is more than technical proficiency in achieving these results. To restore a run of salmon means changing the structure and ecological characteristics of a stream, but it also entails reconfiguring the economic conditions and land-use practices that determine the amount of silt ending up on the spawning beds as well as the social relationships that make up the economy. To change one thing in a complex system, as all of us have learned, means changing the whole system. In some ways I find the cultural dimensions of restoration as exciting as the ecological ones. By restoring ecosystems we regenerate old ways or create new ones that bring us closer to natural processes and to one another. This is the power and promise of ecological restoration. Critics worry that restoration will dilute our efforts at preservation and conservation and lead to an even deeper technological attitude toward nature. For the most part the problem of dilution is turning out not to be substantial. Some environmentalists opposed restoration vociferously in the early days of the Society for Ecological Restoration (circa late 1980s). What caught restoration advocates off guard was that the detractors were the very people from whom one would most expect support. Pockets remain of those who believe that restoration would blunt preservationist ambitions. For the most part the detractors, including the late David Brower, have embraced restoration. Restoration works in conjunction with preservation, as is evident in continental-scale ambitions such as the Yellowstone-to-Yukon corridor proposed in North America. Besides, we are clearly running out of places for which preservation is a viable option. I am more concerned about the second kind of objection, that restoration offers an apology for technological excess. By becoming more adept at manipulating ecosystems are we not running the risk of becoming better at controlling ecosystems for our own purposes? It gets even murkier. What if restoration is a mirror of our cultural values about

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nature? Does it not follow that even well-conceived restoration projects are in fact just expressions of human will? How do we honor our relations to place through restoration? These questions energize my concerns about the future of restoration. Moreover, this is the theme that runs throughout the entire book. Do not misunderstand me on this point. It is not that I am arguing against restoration; instead I am pointing out an Achilles’ heel, a tendency within contemporary practice that if not resolved will denature our best intentions. If anything I want restoration to succeed wildly. Restoration offers me the hope that the patterns that have made people so toxic to natural systems can be changed. And in the process we can learn how to live more generously with other living things. Ecological restoration is fast approaching a fork in the path (some would suggest the fork has already been passed), an image that came to my mind years ago sitting with good friends after a candlelit dinner in a small cabin on the Bruce Peninsula, the spit of land that cleaves Lake Huron from Georgian Bay in Canada. Someone had just finished reading several poems by Robert Frost, and again I was touched by the imagery of “The Road Not Taken.” I was completing my doctoral dissertation on landscape evolution in Bruce County and trying to figure out what possibilities lay ahead for a region devastated by intentions that came with people from away: first the displacement of First Nations by European settlers, then distant urbanization that used the resources of the county for feedstock, and finally the nuclear power plant that reshaped and ultimately withered the economy and culture of the region. The possibilities were difficult to imagine, but I knew in some way they had to spring from local sources and involve ecological restoration and cultural regeneration. People in Bruce County had been walking along the main path—what lay along “the one less traveled by?” On the main path beckons technological restoration with all the finery and sophistication expected of a practice that sops up our excesses. Here we find restoration megaprojects, mitigation initiatives, and expanding companies specializing in restoration. “If you destroy it, we can build it again,” is the ethos: confident, mainstream, and just a bit cocky. And what’s wrong with this? Isn’t more restoration better?

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I worry that we confuse grandeur with accomplishment and that we lose elements of participation and engagement that defined many early restoration projects. Focal restoration invites us along the other, less traveled path, the one of community engagement and local culture. To focus means to gather together, whether rays of light or a group of people. People connect more deeply with natural processes when they get their hands dirty, literally, and the lessons learned hold fast. Focal restoration is more precarious and difficult to nurture than other approaches to restoration. I share with many restoration practitioners the hope that our efforts will spread ecologically and socially and that complex new cultural activities that honor such efforts will emerge. For example, I hope that we will become accomplished in returning salmon to urban streams, and that we can restore connectivity to the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains to let fierce creatures move with less restriction and at the same time learn to love this wildness genuinely and publicly. These are ambitious examples rooted deeply in communities, and they require the support of citizens, local organizations, and all levels of government and industry. Perhaps eventually the strength of community-based restoration would attract some of those who walk along the main path, and as they walk on over they will break up some of the pavement and allow wild plants and creatures to flourish. Focal restoration leads to one of four keystone concepts of ecological restoration: focal practice. To restore successfully in the long run, people need to be strongly committed to restoration, which points us back to participation and community support. Focal practice joins two traditional concepts, ecological integrity and historical fidelity, which underlie most definitions of restoration. Together these three concepts extend the usual reach of restoration beyond ecological or technical matters. There is one more crucial ingredient. I argue that restoration is about intention or design. Restoring well presupposes an awareness that what is done in the name of restoration constitutes a deliberate intervention. Acknowledging our role as designers of ecological and social processes lends humility to the already-daunting challenge of restoration. In the end it would be a failure if we did not recognize that the reality of nature and society are greater than our capacity to understand and manipulate

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them. In advocating design I am proposing wild design, the kind that operates in sympathy with the vitality of life. My interest in ecological restoration was sparked during my first year as a university student in the mid-1970s after a visit to the home of Robert Dorney, a professor of ecology and environmental planning at the University of Waterloo. He had bought a modest and unremarkable two-story house brand new in 1967. It sat along a street with homes that would be familiar to anyone who has ever lived in suburban North America: cookie-cutter designs, each with the same mown-grass landscaping. Dorney, to the chagrin of many neighbors, ripped up his lawn and planted what he called a “miniecosystem,” a small forest, prairie, and wetland in a hundredth of an acre! He tended the garden carefully, collecting new plants from salvage operations (including several threatened and endangered species), and thinning, weeding, and fussing as necessary. Twenty years later the garden sported over 150 plant species and some of the overstory trees had to be removed. His inspiration for this radical experiment came in part from his undergraduate studies in wildlife ecology in the late 1940s at the University of Wisconsin, when he was fortunate to take several courses from Aldo Leopold. Dorney remembered visits to the Arboretum in Madison, to see the early prairie restorations of John Curtis, Henry Greene, and Theodore Sperry. Dorney died in 1987 cutting down an apple tree in his backyard. Leopold died at the same age, fifty-nine, fighting a grass fire near his shack north of Madison. I took Dorney’s idea for a miniecosystem and created one in my parents’ front yard in Brantford, Ontario, just twenty miles away from Waterloo. It was my first attempt at anything approaching ecological restoration. The project flourished for several years with careful tending until the house was sold in the early 1980s. Despite careful explanations, the new owners backhoed the garden and returned the frontyard to mown grass. This was an early and painful lesson about the transience of contemporary life and the importance of communicating across cultures about the meaning of place. There is some consolation: a neighbor nearby took up the idea of natural gardening with gusto and commissioned an award-winning garden in her backyard.

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Transience has been part of my life, living south of Vancouver, north of Toronto, further west in southern Ontario, in New York State and Ohio, in Alberta, and most recently on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. Over the last couple of years I have learned of ecological restoration projects near all my former homes—for example, Prospect Park in Brooklyn and the Black River in Ohio. Most dramatic for me was learning about Burns Bog, a wetland of major significance along the lower reach of the Fraser River in Delta, British Columbia, just south of Vancouver. I spent the first five years of my life in a small suburban community along the Fraser River. My childhood mental map suggested that we lived some distance from the river, but when I returned as an adult I realized the distance was just a few hundred yards. There was a cold snap one winter that lasted long enough to freeze the surface of a local pond, and my mother, who had grown up ice skating in the more wintry climes of eastern Canada, strapped me into training skates and we spent the afternoon on the ice. My memories of that experience are crystal clear, and I had no idea that it was an anomaly to skate on the lower mainland of British Columbia or that we were skating on what is now known to me as Burns Bog. I found this out just a couple of years ago when I made a presentation at the Helping the Land Heal conference in Victoria, British Columbia. A man approached me after the session and wanted to speak about a wetlands restoration project. He unrolled a large map, which had been produced on top of an aerial photograph. I asked him for some orientation, and when he said, “Here’s the town of Delta,” and I looked more closely, it was immediately apparent that the subject of a major restoration initiative had in fact been the scene of my first skating lesson thirty-five years earlier. So much whirled through my mind in that instant: the scope of landscape change from a small rural wetland to one surrounded and threatened by development, the way our values change about what is important, how it is that we reconnect with past landscapes, and the power of restoration to recover memory and sponsor hope. In half a lifetime, a place had gone from vestige to damage to restoration. These experiences have convinced me that restoration constitutes a calling as much as a profession. My intellectual development took some unusual turns and long detours, beginning in ecology and

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heading through philosophy and environmental planning until arriving, most recently, in anthropology. This is admittedly an odd placement for someone with interests in ecological restoration. Let me explain. Robert Dorney’s initial inspiration stayed with me, but for most of my education I regarded restoration and natural-areas protection work as avocational, something I would do on weekends and in my spare time. It was not until the latter part of my doctoral studies that restoration entered my formal line of thinking. It became a way of conceptualizing different meanings for nature, a metaphor for appropriate intervention in natural processes, and an animating social idea. I mentioned earlier that restoration found its way into my dissertation, and just before Dorney’s death we had planned some writing projects about the conceptual bases of restoration. I remember my astonishment on moving to New York City in 1988 and learning of a Hartz Mountain development in Secaucus, New Jersey, Meadowlands near Manhattan, which involved a complex trade of a wetland mitigation project for the permit to develop on an ecologically sensitive site. Ideas flowed together as though I had finally reached a confluence. My interest in understanding technological change, not just in terms of artifacts and devices but also with respect to the distinctive patterns technology represents in contemporary culture, led to further insight into the way restoration threatened to convert ecosystems into commodities. Of course, this did not square with my understanding of grassroots restoration, but it set alarm bells ringing—I grew concerned about how restoration could promote salutary relations with natural process and avoid the pitfalls of a technological culture that was fed on efficiency, novelty, glamour, and velocity. I began to lecture and write on these themes and soon joined the fledgling Society for Ecological Restoration. I remember being thrilled that an organization of practitioners would admit and even encourage a philosopher. My intellectual shapeshifting continued as I moved professionally into anthropology in the early 1990s. This had a profound effect on my activities, among other things by pushing me back to empirical studies. I took an avid anthropological interest in the belief systems of restorationists: what restorationists do and why they do it. I turned to the mountains west of Edmonton, specifically to Jasper National Park, where I fell instantly and completely in love with the landscape, and began to

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understand how ecological restoration might serve as a model for managing such a precious landscape (see chapter 1). Strains of theory and practice are apparent throughout this book, although some have said my philosophical voice remains strongest. Philosophers tend toward generalization and universal theories, while anthropologists focus on description and particular observation. The synthesis has been revealing as I struggle to make sense of the world and of restoration through these opposing vantage points. Philosophy has given me the courage to identify patterns that constitute restoration and that might steer us away from conceptual and practical shoals. Anthropology has strengthened my predisposition toward understanding both what we perceive and what lies beneath, the diversity of cultural expression, the importance of particularity, and the risk of imperialism in restoration. A problem that I do not elaborate on in the book but that is of growing concern is the capacity of restorationists to comprehend cultural diversity in restoration. I have made an effort at expanding my understanding of restoration projects worldwide and moving beyond a strictly North American perspective, but I fear my steps are fitful and inadequate. This book carries with it an explicit North American bias. Much more needs to be done to incorporate an understanding of what restoration means across different cultures, and not just from a North American perspective. We tend often to oppose economic globalization because it constitutes the loss of local diversity but nevertheless support the globalization of a practice such as ecological restoration. The real challenge is what anthropologists wrestle with constantly: interpreting what others believe from their own perspectives. Ecological restoration achieved its early professional identity in North America, and at the time of this writing, 90 percent of the members of the Society for Ecological Restoration live in the United States or Canada. There have been some poignant debates over the meaning of restoration between, say, North American and European members, but this is nothing when compared to the cultural differences that await the further contact of restoration practitioners in all regions. Some perceive the expansion of restoration as a challenge in navigating through or past these cultural differences, and this is where the problems begin. Made-in-America restoration has much to offer by way of sophisticated techniques, practitioner experi-

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ence, and scientific knowledge. Once removed, however, from the particularities of law and custom, it begins to break down. What an American restorationist perceives as restoration, or for that matter as nature or wilderness, is typically different from the perceptions of a Scottish restorationist working on a thousand-year-old cultural landscape, a restoration group in Eastern Europe dealing with complex new institutional demands and lack of resources, and any practitioner in agroecosystems, where cultural practices are as blatantly important as ecological processes. How we define restoration, and how we reach out with our approach to restoration, will determine whether it becomes an inclusive or exclusive practice. There is considerable risk that we will enact without embarrassment and perhaps without broad awareness, yet another chapter in a continuing story of ecological imperialism. I hope that the models presented in this book move against this trend, and contribute to a more inclusive and locally situated approach to restoration. Outline of the Book Chapter 1 begins where my heart has spent so much of the last half decade: Jasper National Park. This large (over 4,000 square mile) national park straddles two provinces, British Columbia and Alberta, just a few hundred miles north of the U.S.–Canadian border and immediately adjacent to its slightly more glamorous cousin, Banff National Park (see map, figure 1.1). The issues here are familiar to anyone working in protected areas in the mountainous west of North America and mountainous regions around the world: a rapid increase in the number of people visiting the region, escalating resource-extraction activities surrounding the park, and decades of management that have left, for example, extraordinary forest fuel loads just waiting for the right spark. Jasper is an icon of wilderness, which leads to wrinkled brows when I mention that my main interest is ecological restoration. Inevitably people ask why restoration is required in a pristine setting. First, I explain that many parts of Jasper are cultural landscapes that have known human activity for hundreds, likely thousands, of years. Next, I take apart the idea of wilderness, suggesting that it manifests our cultural values about nature and not necessarily what is present on the ground; the idea of

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wilderness is a filter for our understanding of nature. Together these issues present a formidable challenge for restorationists in terms of classic questions—for example, that of the role of history in setting appropriate goals, or that of just how much intervention is appropriate in a place that people regard as relatively unspoiled. Almost the same moment I began scribbling notes on Jasper in 1995, I realized that it served as a shining example of the challenges we face in ecological restoration. It became the story around which my account of restoration would be built. I also began to wonder how a growing culture of artificiality, the kind that produces themed environments such as Disney’s Wilderness Lodge, would influence our appreciation of wild places. Thus, in chapter 1, Jasper National Park meets Disney’s Wilderness Lodge. I have written this book to appeal to readers who are new to the idea and practice of ecological restoration, and also for practicing restorationists wanting theoretical perspectives to explain the drift, worrisome in some respects, of restoration toward the shoals of technological culture. Chapters 2 and 3 function in two ways. They can be read together as an introduction to the concept and practice of restoration. Chapter 2 presents three brief cases: the Kissimmee River restoration in central Florida, which is arguably the first restoration megaproject; the Morava River restoration projects in the Slovak Republic, which treat a cultural landscape; and the Robert Starbird Dorney Garden at the University of Waterloo, which in many conventional ways is not a restoration. These stretch some of the limits of what we mean by restoration and offer an expanded historical account of practice. Chapter 3 dives into the dark waters of defining restoration, playing with myriad definitions generated over the last two decades, including those from the Society for Ecological Restoration. These two chapters are not simply descriptive; a specific argument about restoration is advanced. At the end of chapter 3 I propose that when various conventional accounts of restoration are boiled down, we end up with two primary concepts: ecological integrity and historical fidelity. The question is whether this core is sufficient. In the process of writing this book, especially in the last year, the subject of historicity—the condition of being historically authentic—rose

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to prominence from a few paragraphs to a section and finally to a fullblown chapter. I grew concerned that the tide of artificiality would sweep away the traditional moorings of restoration and render it ahistorical. I listened to people describing their restoration work without any reference to historical conditions. Both as a tactic to inoculate restoration practice against the contemporary malaise of virtual reality, where reality seems to matter less and less, and as a way of gaining a clear sense of how and why history matters to restoration theory and practice, I focus chapter 4 on historicity. No discussion of this kind in restoration can proceed without also examining the meaning and significance of reference conditions—that is, the ecological conditions, sometime whole ecosystems, that we use to create our goals and measure our successes (and failures). Ecological restoration is moving into the limelight because it offers a hopeful response to environmental degradation. Considered a “win-win” alternative to conventional environmental practices, restoration projects have been initiated by large government agencies and corporations as well as by the more traditional, grassroots base. The monumental attempt to restore the channeled Kissimmee River in central Florida, for example, is both a remarkable scientific, technological and policy feat and also a harbinger of the future. “Ecological [or environmental] restoration” is a phrase found more and more often in newspaper and magazine articles and television news bites; it has developed a cachet. Typically, the stories are cheerful ones about small armies of experts and volunteers making good where previously only wrong had been done. Dams destructive to fish movement and water quality are being dismantled. Native plants are replacing weedy exotics. Prairies are blooming again. Lakes previously dead are coming alive again. Good news travels fast. What is particularly significant is that restoration is coming to serve as a new metaphor for our relations with natural things: we are in a restorative, as opposed to, say, a conservationist mode. Thus, we are witnessing not simply a change in an environmental management practice, which itself is significant, but a larger cultural shift to restoration. Why, then, am I worried? People have been apprehensive about restoration for several reasons. Not least is the concern that restoration activities will displace concern

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for preservation and conservation and we will end up destroying ecosystems precisely because we can build them up. I think this is a substantive concern, but it does not get to the heart of the matter. There is also the concern that our confidence about restoration is exaggerated, that we cannot achieve what we hope for in restoring damaged ecosystems. Again, I think this warrants attention, but it is a technical matter that deserves careful research. Besides, the veritable successes of restoration point to the fact that some restoration is wildly successful. I propose that we think of restoration in two ways: as technological and focal restoration. Technological restoration is poised to overtake focal restoration. In its most pernicious form we witness the takeover of reality, which is evident at Disney’s Wilderness Lodge and so many other beacons of artificiality. Think of focal restoration as a pale and poorly watered endemic plant that is facing competitive exclusion by an invading, exotic species. The fabric of our daily lives is constrained and conditioned by a set of distinctive technological patterns that are growing thicker by the day. We live in a world that is increasingly defined by commodities rather than place. What results from these technological patterns is the conversion of things, such as an ecosystem, and practices, such as ecological restoration, into commodities that are stripped of sinuous connection with social and natural processes. This is the central point of chapter 5. That we do not find such a pattern surprising is, in the end, what is most surprising. Reform must come from an outside awareness of the consequences of this technological pattern, a perspective that grows more difficult in proportion to the rise of the pattern. In chapter 6, focal restoration is presented as an antidote, or at least a precautionary alternative, to technological restoration. At best we can clear a space for the focal practice of restoration and continue to use this as an anchor for restoration as a whole. If only this were the full challenge. A merger of the two, technological and focal, is necessary. They should not be mutually exclusive options. Imbuing restoration with scientific rigor and clarity is essential. We need more and better science to understand the processes of weedy invasions, seed survival, successional pathways, long-term durability, and so on. Conversely, technological restoration needs broad engagement to ensure the success of ambitious

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projects. I am calling for an amalgam of two quite different approaches. The delicacy of this resolution, of course, is dependent on the vitality of focal restoration. The idea of nature by design is anathema to most restorationists, ecologists, and environmentalists. It suggests the capacity to bend natural things to human ends. The title of the book is intended to cut in two directions. The first amplifies the obvious: that ecological restoration is an intentional manipulation of ecosystems in accordance with our values, or what we think ecosystems ought to value. Design connotes a master plan, a framework for rewriting the book of nature. It is, in one main sense, preeminently technological. We are right to be queasy. The title reflects the inspiration of two major thinkers. First, Ian McHarg’s 1967 book, Design with Nature, was a touchstone for so many who sought a way of working and planning that took ecology seriously. McHarg was not the first to advocate ecological thinking in planning and design, but he gave it the widest professional and public expression. Second, I admire the work of historian David Noble, whose book America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism forced in me a radical reconsideration of productive processes and the character of technological change in the United States (he lives in Canada now!). Noble was one of the authors who motivated me as a graduate student to reconsider the role and significance of technology in contemporary life and ultimately to understand ecological restoration in technological terms. I propose in chapter 7 that design in the best sense is creative intervention according to common and well-discussed ideas. Good design is secured by cultural norms, physical (in this case ecological) realities, and imagination. Some projects seem to endure and stand the test of time as good examples: the Curtis prairie at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum and the North Branch prairie project in suburban Chicago, both works in progress. Others, I would argue, are moving into this pantheon, mostly because of a judicious blend of creative vision, clear intention, and sound implementation. There is every likelihood that the restoration of Frederick Law Olmsted’s nineteenthcentury design for core areas in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, which involves honoring the past ecological and cultural patterns and processes,

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Olmsted’s design, and the underlying character of the ecosystems, will also stand the test of time. This is how design cuts in the other direction as regards ecological restoration. Rather than burying human agency behind a wall of ecological justifications, design acknowledges that restoration is also and always about people working with and within natural process. Design is about intentionality. Thus, intention—or what I call wild design— becomes the fourth keystone concept of ecological restoration, joining ecological integrity, historical fidelity, and focal practices. Acknowledging that ecological restoration is a design practice is an honest admission: it reflects reality. Hopefully, taking design seriously will compel us to treat restoration as an act imbued with enormous responsibility; ideally, design will amplify and not diminish our commitment to flourishing ecosystems. In the end, I urge that we maintain restoration as a luxuriant activity, one that reflects not only ecological diversity and richness, but cultural breadth and variety, too.

1 A Tale of Two Wildernesses: Jasper National Park, Meet Disney World

What is really learned by walking over grassy hills, through sagebrush, in river bottoms, beneath the crowns of a forest? What is learned wading rivers, hiking ridges, climbing mountains, listening to waterfalls, swimming in lakes, lying beneath the stars? There is not a simple answer to these questions. Perhaps it is misguided to think there are any essential answers, however some seem to clue us in. —David Strong, Crazy Mountains The question Olmsted posed in 1865 remains unresolved: how to admit all the visitors who wish to come without their destroying the very thing they value? The moment people come to a place, even as reverent observers, they alter what they came to experience. Preventing the destructive effects of human visitation requires management of water and soil, plants and animals, and people (and this is now routine at national parks and forests). Yet the idea of management is anathema to some. This is because they see wilderness as something separate from humanity—as untouched by human labor and culture, on the one hand, and as a place where one’s behavior is free and unconstrained, on the other. Both ideas are problematic; both result, ultimately, in the destruction of what they value. —Anne Whiston Spirn, “Constructing Nature” “Wilderness is not so much preserved as created.” —Richard White, “The New Western History and the National Parks” And who among us frequents the wilderness more often than the mall? If you want to explore the particular reinventions of nature in the 1990s, you must at some point make a trip to South Coast Plaza, or to the mall and nature store nearest you. —Jennifer Price, “Looking for Nature at the Mall”

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The Bear in the Kitchen A bear walked, well more likely barged, through the back door of the Palisade Centre Research House on a particularly hot July afternoon in 1996. Returning from a seminar in another building, two members of the field team came upon her in the vestibule munching away on a jumbo bag of senior/lite dog food. There was, to say the least, mutual surprise. It took the deft hands of several Jasper National Park wardens (the equivalent of U.S. park rangers) to tranquilize her, but not after a harrowing charge by the bear out of the house and a subsequent chase into the bush. This eight-year-old female, cinnamon-colored black bear was placed in a special travel container and relocated to the upper reaches of the Rocky River, several drainages over from where we were recounting the story along the banks of the upper Athabasca River. Several months later, in early October, she made her way back to the town of Jasper, an arduous journey for any being, and found modest takings in the well-secured waste of the community.1 She was killed by one of the animal control specialists in the park, a “two strikes, you’re out” policy. The risk to human safety outweighed the risks of allowing a habituated bear to remain in the park. We had initially taken little notice of her presence. On the eve of our initial encounter she had nosed around our site as several dozen bears had done in the previous two months. The Research House was built in the 1930s by A. C. Wilby, the second owner of what is now the Palisade Centre. Wilby was a monied gentleman from England who purchased the former farmstead from the original homesteader, Lewis Swift, and converted the 158 acres of working farm to something that resembled a country estate: enlarged, solidly constructed buildings, high fencing around the perimeter, and a greenhouse to support horticultural interests. The marks of Wilby’s gentility are evident several decades following his death, after years of changing ownership and operation. The grounds, for example, were once a cultivated respite from the tangle beyond, and today well-crafted rock walls poke through the overgrowth and strange cultivars pop up amidst the weeds and local species. Kathy Calvert and Dale Portmann, both park wardens in Jasper and the previous tenants of the Research House, spent considerable time caring for

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the gardens, which is why one can still glimpse what it must have been like a half century ago. The South Lawn, as we grandly termed the expanse of mown grass outside, sports a bountiful crop of dandelions, a delicacy for bears of both species. Bears seemed to cross our lawn not only in search of edible greens but also as an easy east-west travel route. One summer evening, Jeanine Rhemtulla, an ecologist on the field team, took a short, contemplative stroll to the abandoned horse paddock a stone’s throw from the house. There, grazing in the old corral, were three grizzlies: a sow and two second-year cubs. Jeanine stayed her distance, about fifty yards, and watched undetected and without fear for fifteen minutes.2 This was a more typical experience with bears that summer. Of the thirty or so bears we spotted in June and July, all but the one under discussion stopped for a munch, perhaps a casual sniff at the house, and continued to the next feeding grounds. In most cases a deliberate human noise— a door closing or a whistle—would send the bears away. Not so with this one cinnamon-colored bear. My first glance, late in the twilight as she emerged from the shrubs at the edge of the lawn, fooled me: was this a grizzly bear (it wasn’t)? The next morning, however, she made a number of deliberate attempts to get into the Research House, apparently in search of the smells that emanated from the breakfast table. This forthrightness was unusual, and all eight of us who were working out of the house became decidedly edgy. It took noisemakers and rubber bullets to shun this bear. Three defensive tactics later we found her munching dog food. The reaction to this encounter was mixed and opinions flowed for days. Wes Bradford, seasoned park warden in charge of animal control, noted it as the first record of the bear. Apparently, countless roadside and trailside reports keep him in good touch with most of the regular bears in the park. He speculated she had come in from areas adjacent to the park, areas where habituation to human activities is greater. Suzanne Bayley, a wetlands biologist attending the seminar that afternoon and recently a panel member on the celebrated inquiry into the state and future prospects of Banff National Park (the sister park immediately to the south of Jasper), the Banff-Bow Valley Study, observed with distaste yet another tragic experience for park wildlife: the bear was ultimately

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doomed by the simple fact of dog food lying in wait behind a closed door. The point was made brusquely that our very presence, and our actions, were a death sentence for the bear. As director of the research operations I became immediately defensive, offering up a variety of explanations and underscoring how careful we had been in running a clean operation, recounting how many bears had come through the site without incident. The experience caused my research group consternation. It was 1996, the first year of a three-year interdisciplinary research project to map and understand the relationship between human activity and ecological processes in the montane ecosystems of Jasper (see figure 1.1).3 Our work was designed to help with decisions about restoration and management of the park. We were, and are, acutely aware of human footprints on the landscape, and now in the wake of a completely unexpected and bizarre event, had come to distrust our sense of things. The wild had broken into domestic space, literally: the bear in the kitchen. Was it our fault? Had we done as much as we could have to avoid such an event? Had this sort of thing happened to people who had been living previously in the Research House? Was this a chance event? Was it a habituated bear, or one that was desperately hungry from a poor berry crop? Is the loss of a single black bear an acceptable loss, acceptable in terms of having a regular human presence in the park? What do we know of cumulative effects: how many single losses are acceptable? Could the bear’s behavior have been caused or amplified by specific habitat losses? Is there a way of restoring conditions in the park that would reduce such incidents? What can be done to improve specific human activities? Is there a way of restoring human practices and beliefs, culture in effect, to make coexistence with the bear possible? In sum, was this experience serendipity or destiny? These questions radiate out from a singular instant, one in which wild (bear) and domestic (people) collided. This simple dualism masks the bedazzling complexity of public land management. If parks, especially huge national ones of international renown such as Jasper, are to promote wilderness, the answer to the questions above is deceptively easy: get rid of people wherever encounters might occur. This hands-off approach is attractive for several reasons. First, it matches our traditional

A Tale of Two Wildernesses

Figure 1.1 Map of Jasper National Park and main points of reference.

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beliefs about wilderness: places without people. Second, we are running out of areas that might rightly be considered wild, which makes their protection at any cost more reasonable and imperative. Third, in a era of growing artificiality, where nature is being manufactured and (re)presented, we pine for the nostalgia of real wilderness. Moreover, a growing chorus of citizens, activists, scientists, and park managers are calling for the exclusion of people or at least for a drastic reduction in the number of people permitted to visit certain wilderness areas. One group of writers suggest that “the leading champions of biodiversity advocate making the preservationist legacy of national parks and other roadless areas the starting point of much-expanded “big, fierce, wilderness” reserves—not for recreational, aesthetic or spiritual enjoyment by human pilgrims, but as habitat for evolutionarily viable nonhuman species populations.”4 This preservationist impulse is coupled to rewilding projects such as the continental program of the Wildlands Project5 to restore core areas, expand or create buffer zones, and establish corridors to link one critical area to the next. Jasper National Park, if all goes according to plan, will be a strong link in a continuous chain of preservation running from Yellowstone National Park (United States) to the Yukon (Canada). Those who worked with me on the Culture, Ecology and Restoration project in Jasper understood the precarious and precious qualities of this landscape. Biodiversity and ecological integrity were central concepts for us. At the same time, we were also skeptical about the extent to which Jasper could be called “wilderness” in the sense of being a place where the imprints of people are few and far apart; witness our experience at the Palisade Centre with its mown grass, elegant buildings, and dandelions. Moreover, wilderness as an idea obscures and sometimes erases the significance of culture and the presence of people, or as Ian MacLaren, one of the project collaborators, points outs, “Parks are not refuges from our daily lives; no less than the pavement or the chemically treated lawns and plants of our urban front and back yards, they mirror who we are. Wilderness is us.”6 What we were after in the operation of national parks and critical protected areas is not wilderness in the old exclusive sense of term, but rather places that encourage measured, respectful, and conservative human relationships with natural processes. This is not the

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same as advocating a glib “parks are for people” policy. Instead, it pushes a reconsideration of human influence in so-called wildernesses, and the determination of balance between incarcerated nature7 and tourist excess. In Jasper there is much more human presence, many more historical and contemporary footprints, than meet the eye. The problem, of course, is to make operational such a way of thinking about wilderness. Could ecological restoration be a viable approach? To restore the landscape—that is, to address some of the obvious damage accomplished by oversight or careless action by returning to some predetermined time in the past—means incorporating human activities and in this way changing our minds about what counts as wilderness. But is this a sufficient aspiration? Should we do more than mimic past human activities? Restoration of wilderness, taken too literally, involves the design of a kind of historic theme park replete with replicas of long-forgotten forest groves, the proper distribution of grasslands, watercourses that follow ancient channels, and peaceable natives. This runs against the grain of our most accomplished understanding of wild places, rubbing uncomfortably against artificial wildernesses such as Disney’s Wilderness Lodge (in Orlando, Florida), which simultaneously reinforces the hands-off view of wilderness while encouraging, perhaps inadvertently, escalating consumption of wilderness. This chapter focuses on two wildernesses, one that lays claim to preeminent status as a wilderness area, Jasper National Park, and one that seems to have figured out what people want to think wilderness is, Disney’s Wilderness Lodge. Lessons learned from both indicate that the idea of wilderness prevalent in North American culture is doing harm to the thing it purports to represent. Here, in the very exemplars of wilderness, one natural and the other technological, we glimpse most pointedly the challenges facing ecological restorationists. In Jasper, the wilderness-as-untouched-nature discourages active management of ecosystems that might return them to health in whatever ways health is defined. At the Lodge, wilderness is treated as a commodity, one that is sold on the basis of concepts that make it problematic for managing natural areas. The challenge is to devise meanings for wilderness, and nature more generally, ones that are sufficiently open to salutary human activities,

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that are mindful of the past, and that filter against insidious and destructive patterns and activities. Simon Schama, author of the remarkable study Landscape and Memory, suggests that much of our understanding of landscape is bound up in memory and imagination and therefore requires careful consideration of both cultural and natural history: “It is not to deny the seriousness of our ecological predicament, nor to dismiss the urgency with which it needs repair and redress, to wonder whether, in fact, a new set of myths are what the doctor should order as a cure for our ills. What about the old ones?”8 History matters to restorationists, and it should: we track patterns of ecological change, record shifting processes, and all the while, if we are astute about such matters, we appreciate how our beliefs about the landscape have changed, too. The past tempers our ambitions and on occasion reveals clues about ways of engaging with the landscape that make good sense in the present. Restoration, then, is as much about the retrieval of beliefs and practices as it is about the regaining of physical conditions. Some of these may yield important clues and prevent us from continuing to stumble in our search for ways to restore and care for places valuable to us. There are important things about the future to be learned in the ecological and cultural history of so-called wildernesses. Let’s take a closer look at the place where the bear walked into our lives on that hot summer day. The Palisade The Palisade Centre, an environmental research and education facility operated by Parks Canada, is nestled on the east side of the Athabasca Valley, in the shadow of the Palisade, a massive limestone cliff formed from a thrust fault roughly 500 million years ago.9 As recently as perhaps the 1950s, it would have been possible to view this great cliff a kilometer distant from the window in my office at the Palisade Centre, but now it is obscured by the forests that have grown up in the path of a massive 1889 fire. The centre is hemmed to the east by the twin-tracked Canadian National transcontinental rail line, and just beyond is the Yellowhead highway, an alternative east-west travel route to the TransCanada highway further south. As a concession to park wildlife, the

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highway is two-lane through the park, but twinned and four-lane immediately east of the boundary. I get up very early on crisp, fall mornings to hear the bull elk bugle their intentions. It is the only time of day when the traffic does not overwhelm their plaints. Lewis Swift, originally from Ohio, settled the land that lies beneath the Palisade Centre in 1895, immediately following the great fire of 1889.10 He found the valley to be moderate in temperature and able to support a reasonable harvest of northern vegetables and grains. In less than a decade, the farmstead became a provisioning point for various expeditions into the mountains further west. He married a Métis11 woman, Suzette Chalifoux, and together they farmed the area until 1935. Swift had several neighbors when he moved to the region who operated farmsteads along the river. The Moberly brothers who operated two of the farmsteads were Métis descended from a railway surveyor, Walter Moberly.12 The Moberly family had been active in the fur trade that took place in the valley throughout the nineteenth century in the wake of David Thompson’s successful crossing of Athabasca Pass on January 8, 1811. The nineteenth century in Jasper was shaped by the Hudson’s Bay trading posts that operated at several points along the valley. Little is known of earlier inhabitants of the Athabasca Valley, partly because there were no permanent communities of Native peoples, and partly because the lineage of the Métis peoples is closely connected with the fur trade and with the Cree and Iroquois peoples from farther east. There are scattered references to tipi rings and Indian trails,13 ceremonial sites, and hunting activities. Reports also exist of a relatively unknown group known as the Snake Indians who were supposedly wiped out by a competitive group of Stoney natives. Relatively little oral historical work has been done in the region, but what has been accomplished shows considerable use of the valley at least during the nineteenth century, the interval that directly connects descendants in the Grand Cache, Entrance, and Lac Ste. Anne areas to the east of the current park boundary. Ethnolinguistic studies in and around the park hint that as many as four separate languages may have been used by groups who traveled, hunted, resided, or traded along the upper reaches of the Athabasca River Valley: Secwepemc, Cree, Stoney, and Ktunaxa.

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Archeological and paleoecological evidence, of which much more is needed to fill in our understanding of the prehistory of this critical region, is strong for human habitation, or at least use, back to glaciation (approximately 11,000 bp).14 There are, for example, over sixty historical and prehistoric archeological sites in the small study area in which the Culture, Ecology and Restoration project was centered. The region resonates with human presence. Recent research proposes extensive and intensive traditional management of the valley,15 although the only direct evidence was obtained by Henry Lewis, a colleague and specialist in aboriginal use of fire, in the early 1970s, and later by Peter Murphy, a forestry professor at the University of Alberta, who interviewed one Edward Moberly in 1980 at his home in Entrance. Moberly reports that “in the spring that’s the first thing everybody does is burn the meadows. . . . This way the meadow doesn’t grow in—willows and things doesn’t come in—it’s always the same site and it’s always clean.”16 Later in the interview Moberly recounts almost a dozen different functions for controlled burning: disease control in wild sheep, production of firewood, opening up areas for travel, maintenance of regular hunting areas, and so on. With this direct evidence and research emanating from areas west17 and northeast18 of Jasper, it is quite likely that a variety of different management techniques were employed in the Athabasca Valley over considerable stretches of time. We might speculate that the pastoral openness of the Athabasca Valley that greeted Ross Cox in 1817 after descending from Athabasca Pass was a consequence not only of a wildfire mosaic but also, perhaps primarily, of anthropogenic fire: “The genial influence of a June sun relieved the wintry perspective of snow-clad mountains, and as it rose above their lofty summits, imparted a golden tinge to the green savannahs, the open woods, and the innumberable rivulets which contributed their waters to swell the Athabasca.”19 It is remarkable how little formal scholarship is available on the upper Athabasca. This makes the task of piecing together an understanding of traditional management very difficult. Relatively little is known about the history and prehistory of the Jasper region, and only now are scholars, local historians, and park staff beginning to assemble a composite view. One of the reasons for the lacuna is

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obviously the eviction in 1910, three years following the creation of a Dominion Forest Reserve in 1907 (later to become Jasper National Park), of the Métis peoples from the upper Athabasca Valley. As a result rich, continuous oral history has mostly been lost. Swift, a white man, and his family were permitted to stay and eventually were given free title to 158 acres of land along the Athabasca River. This was the only freehold in the park. The evictions, coupled with the apparent lack of direct connection to First Nations’ communities that existed prior to the Métis settlements in the nineteenth century, contribute to a cultural amnesia. What motivated the expulsions? In the case of Jasper, the motivations were more complicated, involving turn-of-the-century perspectives on wilderness and on the role of people, especially Native peoples, in wild lands. The Métis dwellers were evicted to make way for a “proper” wilderness but also to lay open the possibility of commercial and recreational opportunities. We will no doubt add this to the list of lamentable and shameful activities perpetrated by the Canadian government on Aboriginal peoples, and learn again that racism and uncompromising images of landscape are often bound together. At the least we should embrace the humility that comes from understanding that our ideas about landscape change—how will our present ambitions be regarded a century from now?20 Railroad development followed the expulsion of the Métis families and defined the character of human use in the valley in the twentieth century. Visitors to Jasper nowadays are mostly unaware that by 1915 there were two entirely separate railways—the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific—that operated in the valley. Intense competition fueled the rush for a rail line over the Yellowhead Pass, one of the lowest mountain passes along the entire stretch of the Rocky Mountains in Canada. The Yellowhead was recommended as the preferred route by Sanford Fleming in the 1870s, but the complexities of railway politics in Canada resulted in 1885 in the construction of the Canadian Pacific line further south over the Crowsnest Pass. By the early 1900s the obvious commercial advantages of forging links between eastern and western Canada prompted the development of these two transcontinental railways. These were not gentle rivalries. In the end only one survived, and the rail alignment now serves as the roadbed for much of the Yellowhead highway

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through the park. Now overlooked and almost entirely forgotten is the sheer ecological influence of these massive rail-construction projects. The valley was logged for rail ties, bridges, weirs, construction camps, and firewood. Gravel was mined for the railbeds. The ecological wealth of the valley was laid out in two long strips.21 Lewis Swift’s 158 acres have had a colorful history. In 1906, then again in 1908, Swift ran railway surveyors off at gunpoint and subsequently the line was relocated slightly to the east. It seems that the original plan would have the rail line run directly on top of one of his cabins. To modern sensibilities Swift might have appeared a victim of zealous development. In fact, it appears he had grand ambitions of his own. His plan was to capitalize on the new travel route by creating a cottage development called Swiftholm, which would occupy the better part of his acreage. In design it resembled a contemporary suburban neighborhood, with cabins jammed against one another. Swift had attracted financial backing from Charles Hays, then president of the Grand Trunk railway. No doubt multiple factors, including the outbreak of World War I, influenced the ultimate demise of the development, but Hays’s death aboard the Titanic in 1912 was arresting news. Swift is perhaps best known for his fastidious and monumental irrigation system that took water from the eponymous Swift Creek, and via a series of lateral hillside channels, deposited water on the flats along the present railway tracks. The need for such extensive irrigation provides clues to one prerequisite at the time to successful agriculture in the valley. With the sale of the property to Arnold Wilby in 1935, the original function of the land as a farmstead was lost, although Wilby did continuously attempt to convince park officials of his agricultural and horticultural aims. In fact, Wilby constructed a country estate and dude ranch, and the infrastructure built in the 1930s and 1940s is with us today. The property was sold privately one final time on Wilby’s death in 1947, and from there to Gordon Bried (1951), and back to the park in 1962. Although the land is again held in public trust and unlikely to be bargained away, similar leasehold properties elsewhere in the park have recently traded for multimillion-dollar amounts. There is delicious irony that one of the areas most intensely and variously worked over the last century or so would now be the focus of

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park-wide research on long-term human influence. The Palisade Centre, this 158-acre vestige of private land ownership, bisected by the lines of modern technology, covered by the preoccupations of five generations of residents and many more whose lives have not yet been revealed through archeological studies, is a microcosm of montane ecology in Jasper. It is at once distinctive, as all places are, and in some ways typical of many areas in the park that are laminated by the activities of people. The task ahead for park managers and researchers is figuring how best to incorporate such knowledge of cultural and ecological history into long-term management. And part of the challenge is in reinventing ways of understanding wilderness. This is the central lesson of our experience in Jasper: ecosystems change, which confounds ecological restoration, but so too does our cultural understanding of those ecosystems. A Landscape of Threats Those who have visited Jasper recently, or who live nearby in the city of Edmonton or in any of the smaller communities to the east and west, will know that pressures on the park are mounting. The sheer size of the park, over 4,000 square miles, will work as a pressure-relief valve as long as the heat of visitation and development remains beneath a certain threshold. But who knows what that threshold is? Like so many spectacular protected areas in proximity to population centers, there is a continual three-way tug between those who seek to protect, those who seek balanced development, and those who quest after limitless amenities. That this tension remains undiminished over a century has as much to do with a dual mandate for Canadian parks—leaving ecosystems unimpaired for future generations and enhancing visitor enjoyment—as with the economic struggles among ideologically divergent groups. Even today, when the dual mandate is theoretically resolved in favor of ecological protection, the actual patterns of development have not substantially altered. The matter is more acute in Banff National Park, Jasper’s neighbor to the south and Canada’s first national park (established in 1885). Critical attention has been poured on Banff in the form of the Banff– Bow Valley Study,22 a two-year, multimillion-dollar task force charged

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with producing future management recommendations, which it did in the fall of 1996. Other sources of attention have included an eye-opening article in the National Geographic.23 The parks and protected areas along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United States represent a gradient of human influence: the pressures felt by those who manage Yellowstone National Park in southern Montana are greater than those felt by the staff in Glacier, and in turn, Glacier has wrestled with issues that are just now moving north to Waterton National Park and Banff. One can get a sense of what Jasper is going to face in the future by peering south.24 Jasper National Park is one of a cluster of national and provincial parks in Canada that together form a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Site. This is scarcely surprising. Like Yellowstone and Yosemite, Banff and Jasper, in particular, are emblematic of Canada and are familiar to people around the world. The natural features are compelling: the Columbia Icefields, Maligne Lake, Lake Louise, the Burgess shale, canyons, waterfalls, enormous geological complexity, and functionally complete ecosystems, including large carnivores. Banff, and to a lesser extent Jasper, were created not only to protect these features for posterity, but also to promote enjoyment and profitable tourism. For years the only reasonable access to Banff, Lake Louise, and Jasper was by train, and it was no coincidence that the massive hotels built in these locations are still owned by a railway company.25 Early in this century, these national parks were embarkation points for adventurous travelers who wanted to explore more remote reaches of the country. Now they are oases of ecological diversity roped on all sides against encroaching industrial, agricultural, and resource-extraction operations. It is indeed an image of siege or contagion that prompts so many to defend the ecological integrity of places such as Jasper. Armed with management tools—environmental impact assessment, the ecological management paradigm, surveys (social and biological), restrictive policies, enforcement—beleaguered park staff hole up against the new onslaught of seemingly endless budgets cuts. The erection of barricades, literally and figuratively, has much to do with values that some refer to

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as natural regulation, a deliberate hands-off policy that allows natural processes alone to shape ecosystems. As David Graber points out, The unifying principle of national park management today is the perpetuation of native ecosystem elements and processes. That is, keep all the native species; seek the free play of fire, water, wind, predation, and decomposition, the processes of the ecosystem; fend off alien organisms; and then permit the ecosystem to sort itself out. As management policy, it is rarely if ever fully expressed, but it has been a goal at which managers could aim.26

However, the maintenance of natural structures and processes is extremely difficult to achieve with a continually escalating rate of visitation. More serious, though, and perhaps the strongest argument against rigid natural regulatory policies, is the difficulty that some ecosystems have in rebounding against the imposing odds of having inappropriate seed sources, lack of good refuges for sensitive animals and plants, and weedy species. Moreover, natural regulatory models ignore the extraordinary and often unrecognized amount of historical human influence in park ecosystems. A “natural” model may have included people but people doing different things than they are now doing. Above I described some of the changes that had resulted from Swift’s farming operations at what is now the Palisade Centre. Taken across the entire Athabasca Valley in Jasper, not to mention the subalpine and alpine zones, the extent and intensity of human influence are staggering. Most of it is closed to the common “view from the road.”27 Visitors to Jasper I have spoken with typically emphasize the grandeur of the scenery and the restorative powers of the unbridled wilderness. But take a walk up Old Fort Point, a small knoll that provides a panoramic overlook of the valley and the town. From the road one is surrounded by a forested landscape, but the view from on high is arresting. A town of 4,700 people, replete with a sizable railyard, and the massive Jasper Park Lodge hotel complex—including an eighteen-hole golf course—sprawl across the valley (figure 1.2). This perspective adds urgency to the concerns of the park’s staff. The Athabasca Valley is relatively narrow, and in the bottomlands lie the ecologically richest montane ecosystems. Here, battling for living space and movement, are the dwindling populations of grizzly bears and wolves. Human developments at the center of the park are serving as a barrier to shy carnivores. Not surprisingly, humans

30 Chapter 1 Figure 1.2 View of the town of Jasper, from Old Fort Point, one of the dozen low-altitude survey stations (most of the survey stations were from mountain peaks). The top photo, from 1915, is by M. P. Bridgland (see chapter 4), and the repeat image (below) is from exactly the same location in 1998 (J. Rhemtulla and E. Higgs).

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and the rest of the animals are drawn to the moderate temperatures, ease of movement, and diversity of the valley. Walking away from the road, one quickly finds traces of many other human activities, though in some cases it takes a studied eye to pick out the effects. The most obvious are the transportation corridors, including abandoned, secondary, and service roadways. Less obvious are the pipelines for oil and gas, which leave long swaths cut out of the landscape, and the communication cables buried alongside. We have also uncovered old networks of trails, and the many signs of the two railways, one of which is extant. Similarly, most people can pick out, at least if they are looking for them, the changes to the Athabasca River and associated wetlands brought about by road and rail construction. The Yellowhead highway in several places runs along dikes that were constructed to create a more direct route but that cut off small lakes from the hydrology of the Athabasca River. Talbot Lake is an example in which no thoughtful attention was given to the water flows, flood and otherwise, that connected the lake and the river (figure 1.3). The level of the lake rose several feet and is now different from what it was before road construction. How different? We do not know because no studies were undertaken prior to construction. Erased from immediate view by decades of impressive flooding are the wood and rock berms that ran almost a mile upstream along the bank of the Snaring River to prevent floodwaters from washing out the railway bridge. This impressive labor made a significant difference in streamside vegetation and banks. More pervasive and less obvious still is the extensive fishstocking program. Over a span of several decades, exotic sport fish, rainbow trout for example, were raised in a park hatchery and released into dozens of lakes. The effects of these new organisms were dramatic and led in many cases to a radical transformation of the structure of aquatic ecosystems.28 Many are surprised to learn that hunting continued to be a factor affecting wildlife populations until the mid-twentieth century, even in the wake of the decimation of wildlife in the early 1800s for the fur trade. Predator control continued until the late 1950s, when a circular was issued to park staff indicating that practices such as the use of cyanide guns and other forms of poisoning were no longer necessary in wildlife management.29

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Figure 1.3 View of Talbot Lake from Mount Cinquefoil. The top composited photo from 1915 is by M. P. Bridgland (see chapter 4), and the repeat image (below) is from exactly the same location in 1999 (J. Rhemtulla and E. Higgs).

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One of the most dramatic and talked-about influences is fire suppression. Just after the establishment of the park, fire-suppression policies were implemented in Jasper, as they were in most other jurisdictions in the mountain west. Fire proved a very real threat to settlements and infrastructure, and in areas where logging was a priority, wildfires meant loss of revenue. Fire suppression in Jasper primarily addressed the former concern, although it seems plain that fire was regarded as a cultural threat as well; it challenged the autonomy and control of people living in wild regions. Ironically, reducing suppression activities would have allowed less damaging fires on a regular basis, and we would not now be in the position of having a staggering load of flammable material in the park. As one warden put it to me, “It is not a matter of whether we will have a huge fire, but when.” Suppression is often said not to have been truly effective in Jasper until after World War II, which is somewhat misleading. The large fires that swept the valley in 1889 left relatively little to burn. It would be decades before large areas of the valley would again present a serious fire hazard. The results of suppression techniques are clear: there have not been any major wildfires in the montane ecosystems in eighty years. The valley bottom, which previously resembled a complex quilt of grasslands, forests, and savannas, is now almost a carpet of green trees (figure 1.4). A study conducted by Jeanine Rhemtulla to compare photographs from 1915 and repeat images taken by her eighty-two years later in 1997 shows a stunning shift from early to late successional forest types. Crown closure has become more pronounced in coniferous stands. Some forest encroachment into grasslands is apparent, and herbaceous and shrub cover has declined. Anthropogenic activities have increased significantly. Finally, the area she studied has become more homogeneous.30 Other influences represent the same pattern, in some cases involving obvious characteristics, in other cases characteristics subtle or unobservable to the untrained eye, or instill other cases characteristics that have been mostly erased by the flow of time. Logging was common in the park for construction materials in earlier periods. Elk and wolves were hunted to extirpation and reintroduced. Without the same level of predation accounted for by declines in the number of predators, elk populations have surged to what some believe to be historically high

34 Chapter 1 Figure 1.4 Paired mosaic comprising four composited images from 1915 by M. P. Bridgland (top) and J. Rhemtulla and E. Higgs in 1998 (below). Changes in vegetation are especially striking.

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levels and are causing a threat to human safety and the integrity of browse vegetation such as young aspen trees. Coal was mined in the park until 1928, and aggregate continues to be extracted from within the park for road construction and maintenance. Let us not forget about the town of Jasper. Visitors from afar are surprised to find a full-featured town nestled in the middle of the park. Once dominated by railway employees and park staff, it is now home to a booming year-round tourist industry. It is caught at the moment between the comfort of a small town and the impetus of development. Proposals abound for new facilities: expanded ski areas, golf courses, and accommodations. So far, only strict park policies and the relative lack of external pressure have kept the lid on expansion. The circumstances are so delicate that any number of small changes—connection to the provincial electrical grid (thereby removing the limits imposed by local power generation), twinning of the highway, changes in park policy—could produce an avalanche of commercial activity that would rival activity in Banff and points further south. The way I have presented human influences tends to split them into discrete activities and pressures. The concern turns especially ominous when we consider the cumulative effects of a century of industrial-era development. Each separate change is typically a relatively minor blip, but over time these blips join together to form a composite and often dramatic pattern of change. Some argue, for example, that Jasper is approaching, perhaps has tumbled over, a critical threshold that would ensure the integrity of umbrella or indicator species such as the grizzly bear. No single factor has led to the precarious state of the grizzly, but a suite of separate influences. This makes resolution of the matter, in this case the fate of the grizzly in the Jasper region, much more complicated. And, so far, few approaches have proved successful, from policy or legal perspectives, in dealing with cumulative-effects assessment. This condition holds for many analogous species and ecosystems. Freak Landscapes The combined weight of human influences presses us to consider how to think about long-term management interventions, assuming that

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interventions are both necessary and inevitable. It was Cliff White, a longtime warden in Banff National Park and specialist in prescribed-fire techniques, whom I heard first use the term freak landscape to describe the condition of a region that has been extensively altered.31 Freak is an apt word in the sense that it conveys the idea of abnormality, which of course leads quickly to the idea of normal. Are we supposed to be managing Jasper in terms of normality, which presupposes a definition of normal? Can human influences in a wilderness national park be normal? There is little doubt that the montane valleys in Jasper are freak landscapes. This is because the rate of change in the past century, especially in the last couple of decades, far exceeds the long-term rate of change. Understanding this requires a comprehensive and integrative view of human influence. Not all changes are manifested as obvious “sores,” such as an unreclaimed gravel pit. Others, such as fish stocking, are known (at this point) only to a few keen park visitors who can break through the conceptual barriers created by a culture of fishing to understand that stocking of lakes is of concern, and further to realize that beneath the surface of many lakes lies a community of organisms radically different from what would have been observed prior to stocking. Less obvious are the faint traces in the montane valleys of small-scale, mostly subsistence agriculture and trapping from around the turn of the century (figure 1.5). Mostly Métis, the dwellers of the valley who engaged in these practices were astride two cultures: traditional Native practices and the Euro-American economy.32 Should this human influence be placed in the same category as, say, fish stocking? Is it so clear that turn-of-the-century agriculture belongs in the same category as subsequent, more pervasive human influences? If not, then where is the line drawn? This same categorical problem could be pushed back to the active fur-trade era (1810–1870) or earlier, to when people were using the valley almost 11,000 years ago. Regardless of the interpretation, to take culture seriously is to acknowledge at least a different meaning of wilderness, if not to raise “the fearsome possibility—that there then is no wild nature in parks: parks are constructions.”33 Documenting these subtle changes—cultural and ecological—is painstaking, expensive scientific work but remains the only sure and durable way of moving beyond the question-asking stage. Awareness is

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Figure 1.5 View of the upper Athabasca Valley from Mount Esplanade. The inset shows the site of the Ewan Moberly family farmstead, with one of the fields still plainly visible in the recent photograph. The left photo from 1915, is by M. P. Bridgland (see chapter 4), and the repeat image (below right) is from exactly the same location in 1999 (J. Rhemtulla and E. Higgs).

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increasing about the extent and qualities of human activities in socalled wilderness areas, but it has yet to be decided what counts as normal human activity in a landscape. Judgments often prevail after information has been gathered. Negotiations, coupled with respect for clear knowledge of a place, will yield sensible ideas of normal (or perhaps challenge the very foundation that normality provides). The more we study, the more we understand that the landscape in Jasper is the result of decades of cultural belief and practice at work: shifting management philosophies, types and modes of visitation, national-level park policy, and the simultaneous desire to use and preserve nature and wilderness. Jasper park managers want to reintroduce certain processes in the landscape for many reasons, and in my experience not all these reasons have been articulated clearly. The most obvious and easily justifiable to senior managers and to the public concern the loss of ecological integrity, often expressed in terms of the precipitous decline of a particular species: the grizzly bear or harlequin duck. Some managers are motivated by an obligation to right demonstrated wrongs: it is not difficult to convince people that suppressing fire in the montane landscape was a wrongheaded policy and that corrective measures are warranted. Others who have intimate knowledge of the park are compelled by its “freakishness”; they cannot abide the thought that something is the result of caprice or is a monstrosity of our own creation. In combination, these motives point toward restoration: “the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed.”34 Restoration, as we will see in subsequent chapters, is a complicated and at times vexing term. To restore something, for example a painting obscured by years of grime, is to bring that object back as closely as possible to its original condition. Choices are made constantly in the art and architectural restoration world about the most appropriate goals for restoration. For example, in the case of an old building that has been altered many times since its creation, to what point in the past is one striving to return?35 The analogy with ecosystems is not precise for one important reason: ecosystems are dynamic. There is no original condition for an ecosystem in any meaningful sense; one cannot fix a specific point in time. This returns us to the problem of normality: Is normal a

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helpful concept in a dynamic landscape and does it serve as a basis for setting goals? Let’s take Jasper, for example. Motivated by the freakish quality of the landscape, a team of managers, scientists, and local residents wishes to devise a plan for the long-term restoration and management of montane ecosystems—for instance, the mixed grassland and forest complex in the Henry House area. Here, in an area of no more than 100 acres, are found an emergency airstrip, an old trade waste pit, decommissioned and active roads, historic railway sites, and the first controlled burn project in the park (from the late 1980s). If this is not sufficient material with which to work, add the transnational railway and highway that bisect the area. What would be the primary goal of restoration? Is a point in time—for example, the year before the establishment of the park, 1906— a good choice? Once this structural decision is made, exhaustive historical ecological studies would be required to document the conditions at the time (e.g., more grasslands, less forest cover), and techniques deployed to bring these conditions into being. Trade-offs would have to be made, of course: Are there mitigating measures that could lessen the effects of the highway and railway? Is it feasible to decommission the airstrip? An obvious problem with this approach is that it requires regular management to keep the ecosystems within a narrow range of variability, or else one is merely turning back the clock. Careful monitoring is required, and measures such as frequent, low-intensity fire would be necessary to maintain the conditions of an earlier period. Of course, 1906 may not be a great choice because settlement and fur trading had significant influence on vegetation and wildlife throughout the previous century. And to push back past 1800 begs the question of climate change and Aboriginal land-management practices. Would returning these anthropogenic practices to the valley be appropriate, and even if it were, would we want to do so? A process-oriented approach would call for a return of dominant processes to the landscape as they might have existed prior to the practices that have resulted in the freak landscape. Less temporal precision is required here. For instance, we could calculate the fire-return intervals across the landscape, fire being a crucial process, and ensure either that wildfires are allowed to burn or that prescribed fires are set, to accord

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roughly with this historical frequency. This is an attractive option, for it avoids some of the traps of a structural approach. But it has some critical flaws. Are we running the risk of imposing yet more influences on the landscape, a higher level of freakishness if you will, without being certain that this is going to result in a better landscape, however better is defined, however landscape is defined? And is this restoration in the strict sense of returning to some past condition or dynamic state, or is it enlightened meddling? I will be dealing with issues of terminology and definitions in chapter 2. Restorationists in Jasper—indeed, in any so-called wilderness area— face two contemporary challenges. First, how can we effectively link up the myriad site-specific considerations such that they form an integral landscape, one subject to natural (however defined) processes instead of managerial vicissitudes? This is the problem of temporal agreement: If one ecosystem or ecosite is restored according to prepark criteria, and another ecosite is restored according to process considerations, will these two projects be discordant? Thinking on a broader scale, a landscape level, is required to reconcile site-specific relationships. Presumably we do not want restoration activities to be restricted to a national park; the park may be a good catalyst in promoting coherent restoration of adjacent landscapes. The best approach is to work across scales, or at least to ensure that one’s work is positioned well in relation to various scales. The second challenge is how to incorporate human influences into restoration planning most effectively. This involves developing appropriate ways of conducting sensitive environmental histories, forming closer ties between natural and social scientists, and working with the idea that perhaps wilderness is not about the abolition of people but about good ways of working with people in a natural setting that ecologist Daniel Botkin describes as “a new perception of nature.”36 Restoring an Idea or a Place? Those entrusted with the care of wilderness parks—park wardens, maintenance crews, interpreters, researchers, senior managers, politicians— cannot make the hard decisions about restoring ecological integrity without also addressing changing public views about wilderness, nature,

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and parks. Parks serve a critical prudential function of securing and preserving habitat for species and ecological communities that would wither under less protective policies, although we know also that good-hearted attempts to manage them can produce freak landscapes that do not provide the proper conditions for fragile ecosystems and rare cultural landscapes to flourish. They embody a vision of the world in two parts, with protectionist rules for nature inside the park and exploitative rules for nature elsewhere. In a culture that accepts this dichotomy, people may exult in the wild beauty of the protected places and support parks with cash donations, but continue otherwise in a lifestyle that erodes the foundations of ecological integrity. The result, sooner or later, is a set of highly fortified islands of threatened wildness surrounded by a sea of relatively heedless industrial activity. Does restoration, properly conceived, offer the reflective and practical basis for a rethinking of wilderness parks and by extension other so-called natural areas? To restore something means to consider what that thing is and what it means. This is perhaps the primary value of restoration, a way of reflecting deeply on appropriate action. Restoring an ecosystem or an ecological process or many ecosystems within a larger landscape requires clarity about goals: What are we after? How effectively can we, if at all, act as a proxy for the places being restored? An understanding of the past is useful in helping to relieve some of the burden of such questions. Richard White writes: Because so much of our understanding of the national parks is caught up in the idea of wilderness and wild nature, this history has implications for the park. Parks, of course, do preserve wild habitat and even some wilderness in the sense of land unaltered by human activity. But if many areas of the parks were shaped by Indian use, then they were not pristine areas of wilderness. They were and remain contingent, historical landscapes. Furthermore, the changes that have occurred in the national parks since the incorporation of the parks can only be understood in relation to the suppression of various Indian practices: burning, hunting, and grazing. Wilderness is not so much preserved as created [my emphasis].37

Setting appropriate goals is predicated on a creative fusion of scientific and cultural knowledge. Knowing the history of a place is a prerequisite to understanding it, and knowing its history means taking people as well as ecosystems seriously. A goal for an ecosystem will

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always depend on value judgments no matter how much we cloak our judgment in a patina of scientific precision. Deciding the appropriate percentage cover of grasslands in the montane valleys of Jasper is rooted in historical knowledge about the distribution of grasslands, but it is also informed by the likelihood that Aboriginal burning practices created and maintained a particular, changing mosaic. Factored in such a decision will be economic concerns about maintenance costs, and judgments about how much change visitors are willing to accept. More difficult still is the challenge of comprehending and managing for a turbulent future. American environmental essayist Stephanie Mills writes: “Add to this the baleful fact that global warming threatens to move vegetation ranges faster than vegetation can move, and the paradigm to which to restore blurs.”38 Setting goals will, and should, be an adaptive process. Thus, the concept of pristine wilderness begins to pale as we learn more about human influence. Our guiding images of vast unspoiled reserves, shaped by long and complicated Euro-American cultural values, are in need of renovation. The restoration of wilderness parks may be as much about the restoration of an idea as of a place, and of course we must give careful thought to whether wilderness is the idea we want to prevail. Wilderness is a constructed notion as well as real place; in the parlance of literary theorists, it is both the signifier and the signified. Michael Soulé and Gary Lease were keen on exposing what they regarded as an invidious postmodern trend to comprehend nature and wilderness as cultural phenomena. The contributors to the volume Reinventing Nature show the matter to be much more complex than an academic theory gone wrong (assuming it has gone wrong).39 The truth, contingent of course, must lie between an essentialist view of wilderness in which everything we take to be present is real, and a constructivist view that holds that wilderness is a mere construction. Wilderness is simultaneously constructed and real, or as Wallace Stevens expressed it, “the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”40 I work in Jasper National Park because the rocks and topography and quality of light and countless ineffable things draw me here. Yet I know that my perceptions of this place are colored richly by my early life in the lower Fraser Valley of British Columbia, and later in thickly popu-

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lated southern Ontario, where nature was always something to drive to and wilderness was far away, up north. My experiences shape my beliefs about Jasper, and to really see this place it is necessary for me to question my perceptions. It is, but it is also what I make it to be. At one level it is intuitively obvious that we color our perception of things with experience. I have been curious to know what a person who drives the famous Icefields Parkway between Jasper and Lake Louise in a thirty-foot motor home, festooned with the air-conditioned comforts of home, really sees. What is their take on the flocks of wild mountain sheep that lick the salt from the road and block the highway from time to time? Do motor-home travelers take time to feel the qualities of sound and smell that are elusive to indoor senses? Are they experiencing the solitude and solace that draw me into the backcountry? Down the Yellowhead highway ten miles, toward the town of Jasper, is the Jasper Park Lodge. It is redolent with the history of gracious railway travel in Canada, and recalls an era when wealthy easterners and Europeans would ride by rail to magnificent luxury hotels.41 In the 1970s, Jasper Park Lodge was upgraded for year-round use. Renovations continue. Boasting of almost 500 guestrooms, hotel managers are hoping for approval of a major expansion that would more fully occupy what is already the largest leasehold in the park. Guests can swim, play golf on a well-appointed eighteen-hole course (watch out for elk!), dine on exquisite offerings, ski in the winter, and partake of all the usual amenities of a top-notch resort. At the high end, one can stay in Point Cabin, which comes with its own chef, for roughly $1,500 a night (taxes extra). What perceptions of the landscape do those who play here form? Surrounded by anthropologists over the past few years, I have grown accustomed to issues of cultural relativism and try to avoid stereotyping, criticism, and dismissal of the experiences of people I do not know. As someone who prefers the spare comfort of a backpack on a mountain hike to the excesses of a motor home, it is difficult to steer clear of judgment. At the same time I realize how little I know about the experiences that others have in this place.42 And at 1.6 million visitors a year and growing (estimated in 1999) with another 1.2 million who pass through the park on the Yellowhead highway, such knowledge is crucial.43

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The constructedness of reality was plainly evident in the bear-in-thekitchen incident related at the beginning of this chapter; the presence of that animal meant many things depending on where one stood in relation to it. For some it was yet another example of the despoiling consequences of human activity in Jasper, and for others it meant an awkward and frightening border struggle between the wild and the domestic. A line stretched taut between essentialism and constructivism has been hovering above us for all of the modern period. Here is Wordsworth writing at the end of the eighteenth century: Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the senses, the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.44

This power to “half create” suffuses the modern era and inspires a fundamental ambiguity on which our knowledge of nature and wilderness is situated. We understand two seemingly inconsistent verities about things: that there is nature out there that lies beyond our ability to cocreate, and that our forms of perception make it resemble what we choose. Wordsworth was writing as the dominant economic structure of capitalism was in formation, and before industrialism had become the predominant mode of production and consumption the preeminent ethos. The passage out of the modern era in the latter half of the twentieth century provided us with a less secure sense of reality by illustrating at almost every turn that what we think is real is either a distortion, a figment of our imagination, or a clever projection. In the last three decades in North America, longer in Western Europe, scholars in literary studies, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and science studies have pointed to the process of creating or constructing our world according to habits of thought. In more radical guises, constructivism involves the idea that reality is socially negotiated

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and contingent. The divide is vast between essentialism—the view that reality is given and immediately grasped—and constructivism, and this fissure has shot through much of academia. Moving too far along that taut line toward constructivism means that reality, that fungible, tangible experience of a place such as Jasper, diffuses in a mist of virtuality. The strength of the contemporary economy is built increasingly of virtual leisure and work, and this view of life is beginning to pervade the Athabasca Valley and every other place to which we attach real significance. In Jasper, the park is buffeted to an extent greater than most desire by the winds of change. Perhaps the most difficult one to understand, and ultimately the most important if we take seriously a connection between deep belief and action, is the way that people’s values about wilderness are changing. The late Alexander Wilson, a formative thinker in the Society for Ecological Restoration, suggested that the North American concept of nature is conditioned by the automobile and changes in mobility and vantage points, the aesthetic conditions of suburban living, the rise of formal nature and outdoor education, television and media programming, and theme parks.45 These are difficult matters to study and chronicle, not least because they are largely immune to quantitative analyses. A good place to begin any study of institutions that change our attitudes toward nature is the Disney Corporation. There is little doubt that Disney through its films and television programming of anthropomorphized animals has done as much as any other source to alter our perceptions of nature and wilderness, and mostly in the name of entertainment. Disney dominates the culture industry at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which is one reason why Jennifer Cypher and I took on the task of studying the Wilderness Lodge at Disney World. A group of designers at Disney sat down to decide what broad cultural values people (primarily from the United States) would associate with wilderness and produced an exceptionally compact and grand view of wilderness in the form of a themed hotel—a design that builds on carefully constructed, repetitive ideas. Could it be that more people will learn about wilderness from Disney than from so-called wilderness areas

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themselves? The restoration of damaged ecosystems in a national park such as Jasper, an icon of wilderness in Canada—which in turn stands for untrammeled nature (mistakenly, I would argue)—depends to a certain extent on the public values used in setting goals and allocating resources to realize those goals. Moreover, the very tendency to set goals or prescribe what natural places can or should do is an indication of an increasingly programmed view of wilderness. Disney’s Wilderness Lodge constitutes another kind of wilderness, and a very salable one. Wilderness as Theme The Wilderness Lodge is a four-star hotel set in the growing entertainment complex of Disney World in Orlando, Florida. An ingredient in the stunning success of Disney World is hotel development, in which hotels are imbued with the character of specific time, place, or event. There are thirteen large commercially successful hotels, each with a distinctive theme (e.g., the Grand Floridian, reminiscent of times past in the host state). The Wilderness Lodge is designed to convey the experience of staying in a grand Western U.S. national park hotel, a remarkable feat considering it has over 700 rooms and is located in steamy central Florida. Apparently the idea for the project was strongly supported by Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney, someone who relates to the outdoors through boyhood experiences in the Adirondacks.46 The Lodge seeks to capitalize on deeply held American beliefs about wilderness, simpler lifestyles, the frontier, and Native Americans. Wilderness is transmogrified into a theme. Disney’s constructed realities have reached their North American acme at Disney World, in which the Disney Corporation has produced three separate theme parks, a shopping village, and several other attraction areas on a 28,000-acre property wholly owned and managed by Disney. Disney’s latest nature theme project, opened in 1998, is styled as an animal preserve, Animal Kingdom, where guests can go on safari and observe actual “wild” animals in their “natural” habitat. The motto of the Lodge is “Don’t just stay, explore!”, a phrase eerily similar to so many advertising slogans devised by states and provinces over the last few years to advertise the natural splendors of their regions.

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The Lodge fits into Disney World in a very special way, far removed from the more obviously landscaped areas, straddling a fine line between wanting to look natural in its surroundings and wanting to toot the Disney horn about how much “imagineering” it took to create a forest in a Florida swamp. Without the care and planning of a Disney product, the Wilderness Lodge might fly in the face of the overall message about nature presented throughout Disney World, in which a particular view of progress is naturalized. Yet Disney absorbs the Lodge into this doctrine of progress by emphasizing certain elements of the story of the Lodge. The human struggle against the wilderness is the tale told here, and the bringing of the frontier under human control, by both physical and ideological means, places the Lodge and its history firmly within the ideological bounds of Disney. Timberline Drive leads the visitor away from the buzz and excitement of Disney World to a more tranquil setting. Gradually, design elements begin to do their work in convincing the visitor that she or he has entered a new realm. One passes through a dramatic gate (very similar to the kind of gate that arches over the road leading to the Jasper Park Lodge). The trees become taller and more conifer. Road signs have changed from the typical metal-on-metal to ones that are supported by rough-hewn poles. There are a few redwood trees in the median strip close to the main entrance of the Lodge, struggling in a foreign environment. The Lodge appears to be constructed of logs and is covered with a manyleveled green roof. A valet dressed in a faux–park ranger uniform greets visitors on their arrival. The lobby lies beyond massive, permanently open wooden doors and sliding glass doors that separate the hot, humid Florida day from the airconditioned space within. Here is what Jennifer Cypher reported on entering: It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the light, which filters into the room as if through mountains and forest. The lobby is enormous. Over seven stories high, wooden balconies at each level encircle it. Huge stripped logs support the room at its perimeter, and bundles of logs topped by animal carvings reach for the timbered roof. At the far end of the lobby is a fireplace, its chimney nine stories of stratified rock formations. Two totem poles face each other from across the lobby, each reaching almost to the ceiling, decorated with carved and painted images familiar to those who have seen the carvings of the Native people from

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North America’s Northwest Coast. The stone floor is rough granite around the room’s perimeter, giving way in the center to highly polished stone inlaid with designs suggesting Navajo and Hopi blanket patterns. Iron and stretched skin tipi-shaped light fixtures hang from the ceiling; the ironwork depicts Native people on horseback pursuing buffalo.47

The attention to detail is exquisite. Food served in the Whispering Canyon Café features a cowboys-and-Indians decor and frontier-style cooking. The gift shops specialize in Western objects and environmental games, toys, and souvenirs. Inside, guest rooms repeat the themes. The bedspreads resemble patchwork quilts, the furniture is mission style, and the paintings are specially prepared copies of turn-of-the-century works that depict nature without the gore. The fireplace represents the stratigraphy of the Grand Canyon, which is second only to the drama of Silver Springs Creek. The creek gushes forth from its apparently real source in the lobby of the hotel and heads for the courtyard outside, where it drops over rocks and tumbles wildly toward the lake on which the Lodge is located. Just before it reaches the lake, the creek culminates in Fire Rock Geyser, a 180-foot, every-hour-on-the-hour, hydraulic extravaganza. Taller and more reliable than Old Faithful, the poignant symbol of Yellowstone National Park, Fire Rock is operated by a hidden apparatus that mimics its better-known if somewhat estranged relative, despite the humid environment of Florida. Materials for the Lodge are not what they appear. It is a tribute to Disney’s “imagineers” that stream rocks are made of carefully painted concrete, and the logs are not real logs but simulated wood made of concrete. Some of this is done to create building efficiencies and meet safety regulations, but elsewhere there are Disney flourishes that become part of the entertainment mystique. Guests are encouraged to spot the subtlest details. In the grand fireplace, which offers itself as an educational experience in the geology of the American West that guests can view from balconies at each floor, there is a Mickey Mouse silhouette carved into one of the geological layers. Such is the transmogrification of wilderness. Interpretive materials paint a purple past. The Silver Creek Star is a newsletter distributed to guests that explains how the Wilderness Lodge was established to preserve the beauty of its surroundings, obviously

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playing off the significance of wilderness parks. A complicated tale is told of fictional Colonel Ezekiel Moreland, who set off on the trail left by Lewis and Clark with a crew of naturalists, former soldiers, and explorers. Moreland is a rugged individualist who challenges the toughest tests the West has to offer: “I take to the wilderness alone. . . . The good earth will provide me with everything I need to survive. . . . I have my gun, I have my courage, and I have my determination.”48 Moreland discovers Silver Creek Springs and ultimately brings his daughter Genevieve west to help create the Wilderness Lodge, an edifice that will encourage the preservation of the natural beauty of wilderness. This unabashed story adorns the narrative about wilderness created by the Lodge itself. It reinforces the ideas of nature without people, wild and dangerous unknowns, noble Indians, gritty settlers, and the soul of the American people who sought to preserve beauty against rapacious developments. Each of these individual elements is insufficient to carry the narrative, but when combined, they recreate an imaginative wilderness. If wilderness is the apex of experience, the Lodge represents a distinctive and extraordinarily well-crafted retelling of such experience. In making a spectacle of this experience, indulgence is raised to new heights. And indulgence sells extremely well if the numbers of guests are a reliable indication.49 However, we really do not have much idea what guests think of the Lodge beyond their immediate embrace of the facility. The Disney Corporation was generous with their staff time and access to facilities, but they frowned on independent surveys or studies of guests. Cypher was able to observe and to a limited extent interact with staff and guests at the Lodge, but there remain important questions to answer: What meaning(s) of wilderness do the guests take in? Are they ecotourists? What is the relationship between the preconceived views of the guests and the themes expressed at the Lodge? Colonizing the Imagination The Disney version of wilderness rests on a complete fabrication not only of experience but also of place. At one level this should cause us no concern. Fabrications in the form of circuses, carnivals, and world’s fairs have been around for a long time. They are intended to be entertaining,

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Fun for the Whole Family. To read the Wilderness Lodge as mere entertainment is, of course, to miss some fascinating and disturbing features. A development such as the Lodge builds on ingrained public ideas about wilderness, which is to be expected, but such a project in the hands of an agency as powerful as the Disney Corporation has the potential to reshape meaning. Such meaning is bound up with larger cultural patterns of commodification and consumption, as well as with the search for a simpler past, control over nature, and historical amnesia about the role of peoples in settling the West. In many cases it was not a bountiful, productive, and friendly conquest of new land, but comprised violent struggles to assert one way of life and view of the world on other peoples and landscapes.50 That this pathology of conquest goes largely unmentioned in the Lodge is a tribute to Disney’s ability to bend perception, especially at a time when there is growing awareness of the complexity, ambiguity, and contingency of historical records. The appeal of such a simple story of benign settlement in a breathtaking wilderness setting may be that it anchors the world to a story that is at once simpler, kinder, guiltless, and congenial to the idea of wilderness.51 After all, what story do people want to hear when on vacation, as most are when they visit either Disney attractions or national parks?52 Also striking is the fact that in visiting the Lodge one is not really having an experience of a simulated wilderness but of a simulated representation of wilderness. During her visit to the site, Cypher found it difficult to engage with anything natural—that is, uncontrolled, unweeded, unplanned. There is a nature preserve, Discovery Island (sponsored by Friskies, the cat food company) on Bay Lake, but once outside the hotel there are few places to walk, no place to go without an escort or plan or car. Hence, the Wilderness Lodge offers little in the way of experience at the level of direct contact with animals and plants, even to the extent that one has in visiting a zoological or botanical garden. Disney, like the tourist and entertainment industries in general, is in the business of selling programmed experience: consummation through consumption of reality, or more accurately, virtual reality. In doing this, Disney is intimately involved in the production of landscapes and the selling of stories about nature. Disney World uses space to create and

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reinforce ideologies especially supportive of capitalism and consumption. Capitalism is emphasized, of course, because it represents the acme of the American economy and is probably the only route to creating such concentrated entertainment. Consumption is what makes the Wilderness Lodge and similar attractions possible. I think of this every time I visit one of the new style of interpretive centers popping up in parks everywhere: state-of-the art buildings, expensive video productions, entertaining children’s displays, interactive information kiosks, fetching graphics, alluring memento shops and snack bars. Education is the guise, but I feel that most often consumption is driving these facilities. The idea begins, as it did in the multimillion-dollar Icefields Interpretive Center at the world-renowned Columbia Icefields in Jasper National Park, with multiple and conflicting demands: education, traffic flow, basic visitor services, cost recovery and profit. Elaborate educational displays are designed to explain the phenomena outside the window, but the display is so compelling that the visitor center becomes an end in itself. Designers artfully craft messages that are tuned to contemporary interests, which are in turn conditioned by popular culture. As people become inured to destination consumption—as with Niketown stores, where selling shoes is only an aspect of the cultural experience of being there—visitor centers fall in step. Thus, the Icefields Center is itself a destination, and the consumption of ideas and goods is a comforting experience in an otherwise hostile world of ice and mountains. Why visit the glacier when the glacier is reproduced safely and comfortably inside a building or through the virtual engineering of video? These thematic centers of consumption are of one piece with the Wilderness Lodge, though admittedly smaller and perhaps therefore more benign. Cypher and I refer to the pattern that connects all of the diverse attempts to manufacture experience as colonization of the imagination.53 Disney’s imagineers and designers working at other institutions are not merely regulating impressions of experience, they are reconfiguring people’s imaginative capacities. The Wilderness Lodge is changing what people understand wilderness or nature to be, and this in turns shapes their views of the real thing. This has less to do with a conspiracy and more to do with the extraordinarily successful empire created by Disney

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and fed by consumer impulses, reinforced by exposure to other aspects of the entertainment marketplace: Disney films, videos, stores, and countless references in popular culture. It is too easy to stop here and ignore the ideological intentions of Disney, and also the effect that this enterprise and others are having on the ways we comprehend reality; after all, Disney is not alone in commodifying nature.54 The colonization of the imagination is part of a larger pattern of colonialism and imperialism that characterizes the development of North American life and that is spreading all over the world through the processes of economic and cultural globalization.55 Dramatic as it may seem, in colonizing the imagination what the Lodge and similar projects are accomplishing is a friendly takeover of the reality that underlies themed experience. By turning wilderness into a conceptual product, one that is adaptable and pliable, Disney is also creating a new reality. The wilderness outside the empire becomes subject to the interpretations of the empire, and our capacities for imagination and action are dessicated. Celebration? The reach of Disney comes precisely because the corporation has figured out how to imbue entertainment with deeply held beliefs, and then to take these beliefs and shape them to meet corporate interests. There is an ideology to Disney beyond big business, and this is sometimes forgotten in the rush to embrace the so-called magic of entertainment. There is an evangelical Disney. Walt Disney, Disney’s founder and now chief archetype, imagined a future dominated by small-town America: white picket fences, single-family homes, safe streets, and wholesome entertainment. He believed in this vision fervently and used it to design entertainment that would appeal to an America (now the world) lost in struggles for identity. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in Celebration City, a $2.5 billion dollar development just outside Disney World in Florida. It is an experiment that Russ Rymer terms “redemptive urban design.”56 Ironically perhaps, Celebration City is the proof of a promise Walt Disney made to Florida just before his death in 1966—that EPCOT, the popular theme park depicting a high-tech future, would also be a real community, one that would embrace 20,000 people. If Celebration

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is the wave of the future for communities, as Michael Eisner believes, then it is almost purely nostalgic: “Disney pervades. The Celebration town seal, emblazoned on everything from coffee cups to manhole covers, is a cameo of a little girl with a ponytail riding a bicycle past a picket fence under a spreading oak tree as her little dog chases along behind. It is an icon of innocence and freedom, and it bears a Disney copyright.”57 The designers of Celebration City have taken their job seriously: establishing a small town requires more than the manipulation of “hardware.” The creation of “software”—community spirit, organizations, social cohesion—is a delicate and challenging matter for any designer and not one that many have been able to execute, if today’s sprawling, disorienting cities are any indication. Disney designers searched for the soul of small-town America by studying communities that did demonstrate such integrity, much as the designers of the Wilderness Lodge visited national parks and national park lodges for inspiration. Typically, in Disney imagineering a “backstory” is written, one that creates a mythic past. This was a primary technique used to generate the Lodge. However, in Celebration City, such a gambit was rejected, with developers relying on an implied past rather than on one that is fabricated. I have not been able to get over the eerie feeling of Celebration. I entered a skeptic and left, well, an unwilling believer. The layout of the town is superb. The mercantile district welcomes the pedestrian with smells of fresh-baked organic bread and mesquite grill. The theater conjures up the 1950s, a purportedly simpler time. The artificial lake anchors the community. Bicycle and walking trails permeate the development. Posing as a prospective house buyer, I found myself secretly admiring the clever flourishes, the artfully designed houses. So much thought went into the design that it struck me that perhaps it does take massive capital and heroic intention to design a good community, even if the housing prices are out of reach for many Americans and few can find work locally (Celebration is, after all, a bedroom community for Orlando). Perhaps the strangest experience occurred on ordering a morning coffee at a quaint café overlooking the lake. Wanting to soak in the ambience of Celebration, I asked for my coffee in a real cup. The server replied, “Sorry, sir, we don’t have real cups. You’re the first person to ask for one.”

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Celebration City may appear to those of us who eschew such total planning as a crass attempt to spread Disney ideology. Yet it has proved popular with prospective buyers, who entered a lottery just to have an opportunity to buy a house. Apart from a high-minded rejection of the project, what real criticism can we offer, criticism that might point to the center of what is troubling about developments such as Celebration and the Wilderness Lodge? The question of authenticity comes to mind immediately—a point that Rymer emphasizes: Of course, “bona fide,” like “authenticity” and “rigor,” is a complicated concept in Celebration. What do such terms mean in a town whose history is retroactive, whose tradition is that of the entertainment company that founded it, whose lake is dammed and whose creek is pumped, whose creators say “lifestyle” for “life” and insert the phrase “a sense of” before every vital principle? Celebration is billed as being in the great American tradition of town building, but it is a town whose mission isn’t the pursuit of commercial advantage, or religious or political freedom, or any idea more compelling than a sense of comfortable community. Its ambition is, in the end, no greater than to be like a town.”58

But what does it mean to be “like” a town instead of being a town? A similar question can be asked of the Wilderness Lodge. At one level its ambition is to be nothing other than a very accommodating hotel, one that attracts by constructing a salutary mythology of wilderness. After all, what could be wrong with wilderness? In studying the Lodge together with real issues in a real national park, another level is apparent: the real consequences of artificiality and themed experience. The immersion of more and more people in an atmosphere such as the Lodge, coupled with the power of media images portraying complicated, often contradictory messages about wild nature, results in a compounded problem. Not only is the myth of wilderness promulgated, with all the attendant dangers of wild places, but nature is also rendered as something subject to our ultimate control. Wild things are all right as long as they are not too wild and the choices we must make to keep them wild are not too difficult to endure. As Cypher comments, it is “wilderness without the dirt or danger.”59 This is the central dilemma I think managers in places such as Jasper must come to terms with. The public on which they rely for their support through political institutions may become increasingly fickle about management alternatives, and perhaps less tolerant of the discomforts of

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real park experience. Might the combination of privatization and themed experience produce demands for money-back guarantees and insurance policies on hikes along the Skyline Trail, one of Jasper’s famous highaltitude treks? Weather may be alterable but not controllable. Ian MacLaren commented to me that the bear-in-the-kitchen experience was cinematic because we were conditioned by so many similar Disney television stories—could my retelling of the tale reflect a learned disposition to seeing nature as an artifact of commercial production? Park wardens are inclined to agree, noting that themed experience, whether through television, museums, school curriculums, or theme parks, is causing people to do bizarre things while traveling through parks such as Jasper such as walking right up to a black bear munching berries at the side of the road; it disrespects the integrity of that being, and denies knowledge of its fierceness, fragility, and wildness. The plight of Jasper is very real. Nearly a century of on-the-ground practices, rooted in traditional values of wilderness, have produced a freak landscape, one out of character with the long-term ecological and cultural history of the region and one that may ultimately thwart attempts to conserve and restore biodiversity and create appropriate cultural practices. It is one thing for the public to be open-minded about prescribed burning as a way of reintroducing fire as a process in the landscape, to take one example, but quite another to accept charred landscapes, extensive smoke, and the knowledge that much remains experimental. “It would,” as MacLaren speculates, “be like visiting Paris during a museum workers’ strike.”60 The world of a real national park is not nearly so innocent as the world of wilderness represented by Disney. One Wilderness or Two? In the decades ahead, people will be increasingly preoccupied with electronic mediation in the form of electronic games, Web design and maintenance, virtual reality simulations, e-mail, Internet browsing, and multimedia conveyances. Our knowledge is becoming indoor knowledge: fewer people move beyond television and computer screens,61 biology departments are shifting from field to lab projects, students in

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universities—my university at least—are receiving far less experience in the field or even direct hands-on education than they did ten years ago, and fewer people venture into the backcountry of Jasper National Park. These are the physical manifestations of a large cultural shift in our disposition toward places and things we regard as nature. David Orr, a leading American environmental educator, urges us along another path toward greater “ecological literacy,” knowledge of things as they are through felt experience. What he proposes is anathema to the sound bite, the snapshot nature program on television, the quick-fix textbook, the single-issue lobby group, or what people used to call indoctrination: “The fact that this kind of intimate knowledge of our landscapes is rapidly disappearing can only impoverish our mental landscapes as well. People who do not know the ground on which they stand miss one of the elements of good thinking, which is the capacity to distinguish between health and disease in natural systems and their relation to health and disease in human ones.”62 Comprehension of the intricacy, “authenticity, indigeneity, fierceness, and spontaneity; resilience and health above all,”63 of wild places, writes Stephanie Mills, requires personal, intimate, slow-paced knowledge of exactly the kind that we are largely extinguishing in our institutions and our lives. I fear that we are becoming endlessly proficient with geographic information systems, the maps, and in the process becoming progressively estranged from the places to which they refer, or even reality itself. Wilderness—nature without people, untamed wild open spaces—is clouding judgment and best intentions: But the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. . . . Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land.64

Cronon’s work raises a disquieting question that ecologists and environmentalists are quick to point out: What do we do about areas that do, in fact, come close to matching the traditional ideal of wilderness?

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Writing as Cronon does from Wisconsin or California,65 both regions of intense cultivation and dense settlement, one is apt to have a different view of wilderness and working landscapes than someone who inhabits less peopled places. This is one of the main reasons I chose Jasper National Park as a central example. It is in many respects a paradigmatic example of contemporary wilderness. As David Strong writes, “A transcendent encounter with wilderness and wild things is possible in our time, now and then, because we have voluntarily not brought absolutely everything under control, having protected from this unsettling, rearranging process, some wild places in the form of legal wilderness areas, wildlife reserves and national parks.”66 For reasons of geography and fate, Jasper has had modest human involvement with ecosystems, except in the heavily used montane valleys. The gaze of the visitor is usually directed upward toward the awe-inspiring mountains, which immediately erases the sensation and fact that one is traveling along a national highway and alongside a major railway, buried pipelines and fiber optic cables, and dozens of archaeological and historical sites. Even if we were to create two zones, as park managers have largely done—front country and back country—in which the populated valleys are treated as use zones and the majority of the landscape (>90%) is wilderness, this distinction would miss both the ecological significance of the peopled valleys and the continuity that has always existed between the main valleys and those that are more remote from present-day travel routes. There will always be regions that are so craggy, forested, and formidable that people will turn away; these are the regions that fit the archetype of wilderness. But, few of these places have been free of people over the long haul. Traditional travel routes for indigenous peoples that led to summer camps, hunting areas, and sites of sacred significance must have created a landscape perceived very differently than the one we know today. The idea of wilderness obscures these subtle historical and ecological facts. In advancing the concept of wilderness to describe Jasper we are, as Cronon suggests, getting back to the wrong history. Comparisons to works of art are dubious, but Jasper is like a priceless painting; it represents both rarity and extraordinary integrity. Yet it is in a crucial way not very constructed; its reality is palpable to those

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who choose it over television or some other mediated experience. It may in fact have sufficient “commanding presence and telling continuity”67 that its character penetrates even the windows of an automobile or motor home. Jasper challenges our notion of wilderness precisely because it is at once both a remarkably wild place and a place that has been marked and shaped by human activities for thousands of years. The concept of wilderness needs redefinition. The redefinition process that began with the efforts of a few scholars and managers thirty years ago has begun to percolate through management activities in so-called wilderness areas and will eventually seep into public consciousness. I am not alone in recommending abandonment of the term wilderness and replacing it with more precise and less loaded phrases. Wildness is the condition of being unconstrained and unconventional, perhaps wayward. One does not easily predict wildness. To be part of it, one must engage in reciprocal relations, giving as much as one takes, listening as much as talking. It requires what Gary Snyder terms “the etiquette of freedom.”68 Wildlands are those where such relations take place. This book is about the power, potential, and limitations of ecological restoration. By choosing to describe a place that most people think is a preeminent wilderness, I have introduced indirectly an acid test and a conundrum for restorationists. The question should not be, “can we restore wilderness,” but can wildness be restored? An expanded view of restoration must account for the possibility that people can be part of wildness, that they can be participants in modest, regenerative, respectful activities over long intervals in precious areas. My hunch is that if we can solve both the practical and abstract issues of restoring a place such as Jasper, which will necessarily involve bending the traditional meanings of both restoration and wilderness, the challenge in other locales will be that much easier. Back in the park, ecological restoration is synonymous with the restoration of hope; the icy-edged mentality of inevitable development and consumption can, over time, melt away to expose a respectful, reciprocal engagement with this landscape. Then the aim will not be to protect threatened reserves per se, but to change the imagination and ambitions of people, and in so doing permit the flourishing of wild places. The call must be for education, not indoctrination, the latter being the province of themed experience.

2 Boundary Conditions

The collapse of the famous estuary produced the predictable dull-eyed bafflement among bureaucrats. Faced with a public-relations disaster and a cataclysmic threat to the tourism industry, the same people who by their ignorance had managed to starve Florida Bay now began scrambling for a way to revive it. This would be difficult without antagonizing the same farmers and developers for whom the marshlands had been so expensively replumbed. Politicians were caught in a bind. Those who’d never lost a moment’s sleep over the fate of the white heron now waxed lyrical about its delicate grace. Privately, meanwhile, they reassured campaign donors that—screw the birds—Big Agriculture would still get first crack at the precious water. For anyone seeking election to office in South Florida, restoring the Everglades became not only a pledge but a mantra. Speeches were given, grandiose promises made, blue-ribbon task forces assembled, research grants awarded, scientific symposiums convened . . . and not much changed. —Carl Hiassen, Lucky You

Florid(ian) Images The Ninth Annual Conference of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) was held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in November 1997, a nearly ideal time for a northerner to head south for a week of sunlight and heat. I had missed the chance a couple of years earlier to visit the Wilderness Lodge at Disney World with Jennifer Cypher, then a graduate student working with me on describing how the business of creating nature related to the business of restoring nature. For her the creation from scratch of a themed hotel playing on American values of wilderness represented the most extreme view of restoration, the deliberate creation of a historical image (see chapter 1). I arrived in Orlando a day early to stomp around Disney’s Wilderness Lodge and Celebration City before

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heading south to the conference. After navigating the airport and finding motel accommodations along the neon strip running east from Disney World, I headed to the Wilderness Lodge just after sunset to eat a themed meal at the Whispering Canyon Café (I couldn’t afford to stay at the Lodge). Touring the Lodge was everything Jennifer had promised: an eerie conjunction of the real and fake, or what Jim McMahon has called designer ecosystems.1 The word simulacrum—a copy with no true origin—haunted me. Everything was designed and created; even the rocks were made of concrete and painted to look real. I gawked at the nine-story-high fireplace representing the stratigraphic layers of the Grand Canyon. The grandiosity of such designs and the ardor by which Disney’s “imagineers” bring them to life wore me down. After a couple of hours I found myself succumbing to the magic of Disney. There is a kind of giddiness that accompanies boundary-crossing events, when the imagined collides with the actual to produce a new portrait of reality. As a corrective, I spent the evening wandering around outside searching for elusive signs of indigenous Florida, something real to hold onto. The search ended at the end of the farthest boat dock facing Discovery Island, a nature preserve, with flickering lights on either side of the shadowed island, as I tried to imagine the pre-Disney landscape. Back at the rundown motel room, jet-lagged with a glass of rum in hand, I pondered whether someone could visit the Wilderness Lodge and walk away with a deeper feeling for wild places. Breakfast the next morning was in Celebration City, Disney’s planned community, at a chic pondside café. Coffee is recommended before visiting Celebration City lest the apparent authenticity of the place, the vivid conjuring of its designers, overwhelm one’s critical capacities. Unnerved by pull of the region, I grabbed the rental car and began the long drive south to Fort Lauderdale, stopping of course at Cape Canaveral, one of the sites of NASA’s space program. (More questions: Why were the waterways around the Space Center posted as “snake-infested”? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to think of the land surrounding the waterways as “space program–infested”?) Two hours from the Greater Miami area, the traffic and development intensified. The changes were imperceptible at first, but at least an hour outside of the city traffic was clogged and the roadsides festooned by satellite communities, hotels, strip malls,

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and billboards. The density and glitter were overwhelming. Wending past exotic car dealerships, motorcycle emporiums, and malls, there was nothing to indicate I was less than two miles from the ocean, or that this strip cut across a narrow coastal plain, a band of sand separating the Atlantic from the Everglades.2 Fort Lauderdale turns its back on the Everglades; everyone is moored to their view of the ocean. The swamps and other wetlands just a few miles inland constitute a dark, confusing, forbidding place. Along the coast the world is utterly manicured. Marinas dot the Intracoastal Waterway and seep into the dozens of canals that make Fort Lauderdale the “Venice of America.” The beach is tended each morning by tractor-drawn rakes. Even the ocean looks domesticated with brightly lit passenger and cargo ships moored just offshore. It was an odd location for the annual SER conference. What drew me first to the Society for Ecological Restoration were the remarkable successes of community groups and scientists, government employees and corporations, who by careful work and commitment had reversed some of the damaging ecological effects of human activity. Community, too, was being rebuilt in the process. The annual conferences rejuvenate weary restorationists. In Fort Lauderdale, I took in sessions on southern longleaf pine restoration, historical ecology, educational initiatives, restoration projects from Eastern Europe, and an evening of enchanting readings by members of the Orion Society’s Forgotten Language tour. Restoration work in south Florida, perhaps because of the scale and pace of development, is as advanced as restoration is anywhere in North America. George Gann’s nonprofit Institute for Regional Conservation has compiled a comprehensive database for native and exotic flora in south Florida. Kellie Westervelt’s Cape Florida Project, operated under the aegis of the American Littoral Society, is a model for volunteer participation. The Archbold Biological Station in Lake Placid, Florida, has developed a sophisticated prescribed-fire program that integrates community values and scientific knowledge, and builds in stochastic functions with an up-front humility about what can and cannot be accomplished. It is difficult not to be inoculated against cynicism after seeing some of the ambitious plans and successful projects.

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Walking late at night along the edge of the Intracoastal Waterway, my view of the water and manatees blocked by gleaming yachts, each worth more than I will earn in my lifetime, I began to imagine what Fort Lauderdale would become if it turned itself into the Everglades and stopped trying to control an unruly ocean. Exclusive hotels connected by overhead walkways to the manicured beach would be pushed aside in favor of the life that teems amidst maritime dunes and people who are willing to track respectfully along the shores: inhabitation instead of consumption. Such dreaming comes easily at SER meetings, where nothing seems unattainable in the face of intelligence, cooperation, and hard work. I used this dreaming in my own region as well, trying to imagine Jasper National Park a century from now. The sting of disbelieving laughter at seemingly outrageous proposals is softened by an awareness of the scale of historical change: imagine your place a hundred years earlier and use this image to think of the next century. I grasp the belief that virtually anything can happen over the course of a century, and we would be wise to remember this. Alas, my dreaming did not last long. At 28,000 feet above the coastline of Florida, heading for home, I saw the stark line of development cordon the inland wetlands like a bleeding Magic Marker line along the eastern shore. Cynicism crept back in as I pondered the efforts of restorationists against the juggernaut of land speculation, Sunbelt condos, shameless wealth, and strip malls. Carl Hiassen’s novel Lucky You, the story of intrigue, land speculation, and lottery tickets in south Florida, was perched on my lap in the airplane and I realize now that his darkly lit and twisted view helps me understand the line between wildland and development. The heroes in his book occupy the inbetween zones: the bushed ex-governor who haunts the wetlands, a Seminole man who understands crocodiles (as much as anyone can understand crocodiles), a black woman veterinary assistant named Jolayne Lucks who desperately wants to save a small tract of wet forest from a money-laundering real estate scam. Restorationists occupy the border zones of contemporary life, mediating between a view of nature as untouched wilderness and one as gridded garden, their activities praised neither by zealous developers nor by protective environmentalists. On the way home to Alberta,

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crossing literal and figurative borders, I realized how much my own understanding of why and how we restore nature is conditioned by boundaries: between nature and culture, one region and another, past and future, authenticity and simulation. What makes restoration so fascinating and troubling at the same time is such border crossing through the boundary zones of conventional activities and beliefs. Restoration pushes the limits of our understanding of nature and reality, which is why debate around restoration is so lively and so many people are attracted to it as an alternative environmental practice. Living in the boundary layers has its problems, too, most notably when the perimeters are ill-defined and continuously shifting. Life at the interstices is never clear and single purposed. Restorationists are tugged in all directions and operate from a wide variety of ideological positions, so much so that it is unclear generally and specifically what counts as restoration. Is intentional human intervention necessary? Where is the line drawn between projects faithful in creating or recreating previous ecological assemblages, and those that bow to aesthetic or prudential considerations? When is restoration merely aiding and abetting development? Is fidelity to history a necessary condition of restoration, or is a mere nod toward the past tolerable? Must restoration depend on professional competence, or are the meandering experiments of amateur practitioners acceptable? How are process and product best weighed? Should cultural practices be encouraged? Moreover, how many burdens should be placed on ecological restorationists to restore not only ecosystems but cultural practices and beliefs as well? These are among the questions that come to mind when considering the character of contemporary restoration. They pop up like unwanted plants, weedy questions. The best place to begin the search for answers, acknowledging that the search itself is as important as the answers, is by looking at several restoration projects that suggest boundaries. These projects provide a basis for addressing the conceptual questions about restoration practice that occupy this and the next two chapters. The journey begins with the Kissimmee River restoration project near the headwaters of the Florida Everglades, arguably the largest and most complicated restoration project undertaken to date. Such a project offers a sense of what is possible when large budgets and scientific weight are thrown behind a

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project. The Morava River restoration projects in the Slovak Republic illustrate how difficult it can be to decide on appropriate goals for restoration in a thoroughly cultural landscape. In this case, ecological integrity of riverine meadows was being threatened by diminished human activity, not the other way around. Finally, I visit the Robert Starbird Dorney Garden, a memorial garden in southern Canada that touches the borders of contemporary restoration practice. These three cases do not represent the panoply of restoration projects, but they do illustrate some of the main tensions and issues. They are ones I am familiar with, so that they allow me to write in the first person. They illuminate the universe in which restorationists operate. A brief history of restoration, which follows, shows how this universe came into being. Meandering Ambitions: The Kissimmee River (Florida) Restoration During the 1997 SER conference in Fort Lauderdale I engineered a daylong escape to the Kissimmee River. The Kissimmee River is a located at the top (north) end of the Everglades drainage. Its fame is now secured by a huge restoration initiative, possibly the first restoration megaproject, estimated to cost upwards of several billion dollars.3 A large team of scientists and government officials will continue to work over the next decade to restore the natural conditions of approximately 45 miles of river channel and over 25,000 acres of associated wetlands. The river was channeled in the 1960s from the headwaters south of Orlando to Lake Okeechobee, creating a series of impoundments and a simplification of what was once a biophysically diverse, braided river channel. Almost 35,000 acres of wetland ecosystems were lost or significantly altered.4 The greatest lesson learned from this reengineering of the river is that the financial and ecological costs of restoration are far greater than those of prevention, a sobering fact. Farsighted, ecologically aware decision making in the early 1960s could have averted enormous expenditures on restoration less than three decades later. The analogy with contemporary health care is obvious: the costs of prevention are almost always less than the costs of intervention (i.e., restoration of health). The channeled river in its austere simplicity—a 300-foot-wide, 35foot-deep canal—is inversely related to the complicated structures and functions of the Kissimmee River in its meandering state. The U.S. Army

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Corps of Engineers, which took a lead in the original channelization and is now involved, ironically, in the restoration, provides a litany of ecological and cultural effects: Loss of naturally fluctuating water levels Loss of large areas of wetlands Deterioration of water quality in Lake Okeechobee and the Kissimmee Basin Changes in land use resulting in increased drainage Loss of natural river meanders Lower groundwater levels and reduced groundwater quality Potential need for increased flood protection Potential reduction in frost protection Potential increase in mosquito populations Reduced recreational navigational opportunities5

Such compromising influences are common in channelization projects. The continent is streaked with the marks of engineering projects aimed at controlling the irregular and unpredictable flows of rivers. The Kissimmee case is distinctive, however, because the river itself is unique in North America and the intervention so complete. In times past seasonal floodwaters would inundate much of the 1–2 mile-wide floodplain, remaining in pools in certain places during dry years or continuously covering the plain in wetter years. Only the peripheral areas would undergo regular seasonal drying. During peak flood conditions the river looked more like a long, narrow lake. Rapid post–World War II development in the region, coupled with a severe hurricane in 1947 and higher-than-normal water levels from 1947 to 1949, motivated public calls for a flood-reduction program. The State of Florida called on the federal government for assistance, and shortly after that the Army Corps of Engineers was commissioned to plan and design a comprehensive water-control scheme that transformed the river into a series of impoundments connected by canals. The work was finished in 1971, and it was in that same year that public concern was raised about environmental and recreational effects of the massive diversion project. Arriving at an agreeable restoration program for the Kissimmee basin took longer than the design phase for the construction of the diversion. Citizens, regulators, and scientists walked through a maze of mathematically modeled options and feasibility studies, shaped no doubt by shifting political and economic realities, to produce an agreeable compromise.

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The field trip I took was led by Lou Toth, a senior scientist with the South Florida Water Management District and leader of the 1984 Kissimmee River Demonstration Project. The 1984 experiment was undertaken to show the feasibility and implications of diverting water from the canal back into the former river meanders. The results are being used in the larger-scale restoration, which began in 1998 and will take more than a decade to complete. Heavy equipment is needed to backfill sections of canal, reconstruct former river channels eliminated by the canal, and dismantle water-control structures. The idea is intuitively obvious, but the hydraulic, hydrological, and ecological dynamics on the Kissimmee are large and complicated, and the effort involved in remaking the prediversion conditions boggles even a vivid imagination. We departed as a small flotilla just upstream from the S65B watercontrol structure and soon entered a serpentine channel that joined other serpentine channels in a complicated network of wetlands. The inexorable, sluggish southward movement of water suffuses thousands of acres of hummocky floodplain, alligators, and a riot of other aquatic, riverine, and wetland species. We met a number of recreational fishers in well-outfitted motorboats who plied these waters regularly and understood the human opportunities created in ecological diversity. Water and life had returned in abundance to hundreds of small meandering channels. I observed half a dozen species of herons, sometimes three species crowding the same tree. The richness of color, sound, and smell in the back channels made the canal that much less inviting, although I suspect my view would be different had I owned property in the floodplain. As our weary field-trip crew drove back to Fort Lauderdale in the late afternoon, I wondered whether local people had actually preferred the Army Corps aesthetic, whether the concrete rectilinearity reminded them of progress? Will the diversion be recorded in history books as a folly, a mistake? If so, how can we square this object lesson in the ecological and economic cost of restoration against rampant development in Florida? Such object lessons are tough to communicate and even tougher to assimilate by others. Impounding rivers and building dams is seldom, at least in the long run, a healthy practice.6 As the work proceeds, it is an opportunity to observe how well a restoration megaproject will succeed. Chances are good. A scientific

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advisory panel recommended a multi-stage process to thoroughly evaluate the restoration over the lifetime of construction, from 1998 to 2011 and beyond: by establishing historical reference conditions; studying unaffected analogous systems; using prediversion data and appeal to theoretical approaches; establishing current baseline conditions; assessing construction impacts; applying broad-spectrum, postconstruction assessment; and finally, employing adaptive management to ensure longterm success. For a project of this magnitude the need for clear goals is crucial not only for achieving some measure of ecological integrity, but also for ensuring efficiency in the restoration. The overriding goal is to return the channeled river back to a former condition, but the question is, what historical condition? Clifford Dahm and colleagues write: When considering the outcome of restoration efforts, it is instructive to consider not merely the pre-channelization “historical” condition of the Kissimmee River and its flood plain but conditions prior to European settlement. As much as possible, the restored system should encompass those attributes of presettlement conditions that would contribute significantly to recovery of ecosystem function and plant and animal communities.7

There are clearly technical limits on what it is possible to restore. No reasonable effort will completely erase the effects of channelization. Economics have, and will, mitigate certain options that might yield a more effective restoration, or at least one that would proceed toward specified goals more quickly. The challenge faced by the Kissimmee restorationists was arriving at ecological criteria that could be measured against historical conditions as faithfully as possible, and this meant concentrating at least as much on reestablishing processes as it did on ensuring that prior structures were in place. Is historical fidelity accounted for? Yes, of course it is, but staggering financial implications impose boundaries around historical fidelity. In the end, any steps—in this case large, expensive steps—toward improving ecological integrity, and presumably recreational opportunities, are better than what is in place now. Moreover, prescriptions for or limits on recreational use are difficult to achieve. I was surprised to learn that no zones of environmental protection are being created that would provide differential limits on access and activity. At present, the restored area is open to motorized watercraft,

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hunting, fishing, and, in some cases, cattle grazing. No plans exist at the moment for nonmotorized recreation. I was also surprised to learn that no areas are being set aside as long-term scientific preserves to study the effects of restoration. A restoration project is always a study in realpolitik; the discussion and negotiation among dozens of recreational, farming, and residential groups have produced a workable compromise. Presumably, some effort, as long as it is carefully thought out, is usually better than no effort at all. The difficulty with very large projects is maintaining momentum as key individuals move on, governments change, and budgets shrink or expand. Water that flows to us or past us has its own history. What we see or feel or smell or hear has already been somewhere and brings us clues. The Kissimmee River restoration project tells us more than we think if we inquire into its legacy. It tells us, for instance, that in the early twentyfirst century we are willing to invest half a billion dollars (or more) remedying a problem created, in some cases, by the same individuals and agencies that are involved in the restoration. We know that people rate immediate perceived values—flood control and certain types of recreation—as lower in importance than maintaining predisturbance ecological processes. Despite some significant technical challenges, restoration planners and scientists were able to backstop their designs with a number of small, proven projects. A large project needs smaller, proven projects to proceed. Most poignant, to my mind, is the realization that prevention makes eminently more sense than restoration. It is good to know we can restore complicated wetland and riverine ecosystems as well as we can, but the compressed time frame of the Kissimmee restoration—the fact that the impoundments were barely dry before people began demanding their removal—tempers any belief that restoration is salvation. Restoration works exactly in accordance with the care of our actions and the fidelity of our relationships with ecosystems. Beyond the Ecological Curtain: The Morava River Restoration, Slovak Republic In June 1997 Nik Lopoukhine, then chair of the board of the Society for Ecological Restoration, and I were invited to offer a course on North

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American perspectives on ecological restoration for a group of scientists and environmentalists in Bratislava, Slovak Republic. Funding for the course came through the Global Environment Facility Biodiversity Protection Project, which was in effect World Bank money steered through a quasi-governmental agency, in this case the Ministry of Environment for the Slovak Republic. Funding was intended to stabilize environmental management practices in countries undergoing rapid political, social, and economic change. Nik and I had heard that the two organizers, Zuzana Guziova and Peter Straka, had managed to accomplish much in the Slovak Republic since the division of the former Czechoslovakia in 1993, and following the famous “velvet revolution” in 1989, which resulted in the secession of Czechoslovakia from the former Soviet Union. Midway through the five-day course we embarked on a field trip to the westernmost regions of the Slovak Republic to view several interconnected restoration projects being undertaken by the DAPHNE Foundation, a nongovernmental organization supported by the Global Environment Facility. These projects were to serve as case studies for the remainder of the course. While there had been an expectation that Nik and I would serve as expert reviewers for these projects, what we found instead, as is often the case when foreign specialists are brought in to advise on local projects, was an extraordinary level of professionalism, technical proficiency, ingenuity, and creativity. The Morava River floodplain projects are an example of how ecological restoration can serve ecological and social goals despite enormous socioeconomic upheavals. The projects described below are less ambitious technically than the Kissimmee River restoration, but the human dimensions make them fascinating cases. The biodiversity that is being restored and protected arose precisely because of human agricultural activity. Thus, this restoration focuses, as in many parts of the world where people have lived for a long time in a close agricultural relationship with land and water, on a cultural landscape. Some of the assumptions about what is valuable in restoration from a North American perspective must be turned upside down in places such as the western Slovak Republic. The Morava River forms the border between the Slovak Republic and, in its lower reaches, Austria. In the floodplains of the river, especially in

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the many meanders, are biologically rich wet meadows that have been subject both to periodic flooding and to agricultural practices, primarily mowing for livestock feed. These cultural practices have been decisive in maintaining the ecological character of the region for the past thousand years or so. Much more recently, for almost forty years, the floodplains were locked inside the Iron Curtain, the heavily militarized zone that prevented unauthorized movement of peoples in and out of the Slovak Republic. This is the same Iron Curtain that blocked movement of people, goods, and ideas throughout the post–World War II period in Central and Eastern Europe. There were two main consequences of the military occupation of the region, one that had positive and the other negative implications for ecological integrity. Certainly a major and unexpected benefit was the isolation of the sites along the river from intensive development. There is little question that postwar, industrial forms of agriculture would have caused a net loss of species and ecosystems. Now, fortuitously, the Morava River floodplain is the largest and best preserved complex of wet meadows in Central Europe.8 The second implication, negative from an ecological point of view, was an extensive channelization project along the Iron Curtain to ensure a betterdemarcated border and less intrusive flooding. The channelization was successful, resulting in the drying up of many meadow sites along the river and an overall lowering of groundwater level. One of the sites we examined, part of the Abrod nature reserve, an extraordinarily diverse protected area located almost two kilometers from the river, was showing severe effects from the drop in water levels. The challenges for restorationists are difficult: How to elevate the water levels to a point sufficient to support wet meadows throughout the former wet-meadow complex? How can sustainable agricultural practices be nurtured to provide the cultural process that maintained the meadows? Restorationists along the Morava River are attempting to remove the effects of channelization by compelling water to flow in the abandoned meanders of the old river channel. Funding for this project is a fraction of that available to the Kissimmee River proponents, which makes intensive ecological, engineering studies and public consultation infeasible. Instead, the impetus is very much trial and error. Hand labor and limited heavy equipment diverted water from the main channel into the old

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meanders, requiring shoreline modifications, bank stabilization, and dredging. It is a beginning, at least, to what will over time be an important restoration project. Meadows are widely distributed along the lower Morava River, which in wetter areas are subject to regular inundation and higher water levels. These meadows are influenced primarily by flooding and water levels, and are maintained as meadows through twice-yearly mowing for domestic animal feed. The origin of this practice dates back hundreds of years. Without mowing, the meadows are subject to rapid successional processes that result first in shrub encroachment and ultimately in wet, forested ecosystems. The main proponents of the restoration, Jan Seffer and Viera Stanova, cofounders of DAPHNE, knew well the technical characteristics of the various sites and the challenges faced in restoration of traditional ecological and cultural processes. After all, these wet meadows were in abundance primarily through a quirk in national development and agricultural practices. The meadows were cultural artifacts, ecosystems that were given their character by long-standing cultural activities. One option would have been simply to ensure preservation of the region from intensive development and allow the meadow complexes to succeed with lower water levels and in the absence of mowing. This option, however, means lowering the overall biodiversity of the Slovak Republic. Counter to North American sensibilities, restoration in this case means the preservation and possibly enhancement of a cultural activity. The questions here are thorny: How do we decide which species should be favored? Is biodiversity the best measure of restorative success? Would cultural practices matter if the biodiversity that resulted was in fact less than what one would expect in the absence of those practices? Ecological restoration, with its North American bias toward so-called wilderness, has few conceptual enzymes to digest such a problem. The sacrosanct concept of biodiversity will be ground down under such conditions, and will become, I believe, one of the main issues with which restorationists will wrestle in the next decade. The decision to restore the region to ecological conditions that flourished prior to World War II invokes issues of technological change. Agricultural practices have changed dramatically over the past half century

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from predominantly hand mowing and draft-animal cartage to tractorpowered mechanical cutting, loading, and transport. Transformation in the agricultural sector in the next few decades may produce very different circumstances. For instance, volatile national and international agricultural markets may produce a decline in requirements for animal feed, and this in turn would result in a loss of support for meadow-based crops, especially those harvested with low-intensity methods. While it had not been studied, anecdotal observations by biologists suggested that tractor-drawn mowers produced a different ecological effect on the meadows. Ground-nesting birds, for example, are less likely to survive the pass of a mechanical mower than hand scything. Issues such as these create difficulties for restorationists who are trying to create long-term sustainable conditions for the flourishing of diminishing ecosystems. In a volatile, technologically driven national economy, is it possible to maintain an earlier form of harvesting technology, one that is ecologically beneficial? If such a practice could be made durable, either because it satisfies local economic conditions over the longer term or because it can be a public demonstration area that honors both ecological processes and cultural practices, maintenance of the practice is reasonable. However, given instabilities in the Slovak Republic and the rapid change of agricultural technology and agricultural commodity markets, it is more reasonable to contemplate techniques for mimicking rather than reproducing former mowing practices. Research would be needed to ascertain the kinds of cropping intervals—and other techniques of management, including fire and grazing—that would protect biological diversity. The Morava River restorations challenge typical North American notions of ecological restoration. Success in a cultural landscape depends on protecting ecological diversity, but at least as important is understanding and protecting cultural processes. Another layer is added to the value system of conventional ecological restoration: the historical condition may incorporate rather than exclude human participation. Both the well-funded, large-scale Kissimmee River restoration project and the smaller, incremental approach taken by the Morava River restorationists have strengths. Both are appropriate in terms of their local regulatory and socioeconomic setting. Both are achieving their goals. It seems there

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is no ideal type, which makes boundary setting more than a little challenging. Gardening or Restoration? The Robert Starbird Dorney Ecology Garden, Ontario, Canada Immediately following the sudden death in 1987 of Robert Dorney, one of Canada’s most prominent environmental academics and my Ph.D. cosupervisor, a ragtag group of family, students, faculty, technicians, and community volunteers in Waterloo, Ontario, decided to offer tribute by creating a garden. Dorney had pioneered ecological gardening, landscaping, and restoration in Canada,9 and so we proposed to build a small ecosystem on the campus of the University of Waterloo. For over twenty years Dorney’s office in the Isaiah Bowman Building at the university had overlooked mown grass and exotic Scotch pine (Pinus sylvestris) trees, a challenge for any ecologist with an interest in the protection of native species. After years of personal success with building miniature native ecosystems across Canada, he regarded the grove of pine trees as a personal failure.10 After his death, we decided to set the record straight. To the horror of many environmental groups on campus, we cut down over a dozen Scotch pine trees immediately adjacent to the Bowman building and rototilled the mown grass. Hundreds of hours of volunteer time went into the design of the garden, the collection of seeds and plants, soil preparation, construction of physical elements, raising endowment money, planting, watering, and weeding. We created a range of ecosystems: a shortgrass and tallgrass prairie, a dry woodland, and a wet woodland, all floral representatives of Waterloo County, a region that straddles the divide between the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence forest zone and the more southerly and diverse Carolinean forest zone. We designed seating places for quiet contemplation and walking paths for careful observation of the 200 or so species of plants. The Robert Starbird Dorney Ecology Garden is a living memorial, including a commissioned meter-high ceramic sculpture and several of Dorney’s favorite native plants. The Dorney Garden is a deliberate design, a social construction, an artificial ecosystem—we do not know for sure what stood much earlier

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on that piece of ground. However, it is a project that privileges unpredictable ecological processes. Our intention was to encourage caprice and honor wild things. In a space of just over 3,000 square feet there is remarkable diversity. The garden is home to a number of rare and threatened plants. Its wild appearance is a potent antidote to the manicured park landscape that makes up much of the landscape of the University of Waterloo. The contradictions between artifice and wildness challenge us to wonder whether such a project really is a restoration. A distinction between process and product helps bridge the divide between social and natural. The product, the garden, comprises material chosen and placed by individuals: someone set each rock and plant in position. The processes of the garden, both social and ecological, have a successional and self-regulating quality. Once set in motion, the original patterning of the garden has become a buried artifact. This distinction is less obvious from the standpoint of social interaction. The garden was a volunteer project. It brought together the members of a community united by the memory of Robert Dorney. The political economy of its operation was an important factor affecting its outcome. Early decisions to promote open governance with decisionmaking powers vested in those who participated in the planning and physical labor reduced hierarchical control. Talent and confidence levels were diverse. Skilled natural gardeners and botanists were involved with the team, and so were people for whom this was a first experience with creating an ecosystem or garden. The bond that allowed professional botanists to work evenly alongside second-year philosophy students was created by the engagement of mind and body. The project cut across traditional professional affiliations and status. Each person stretched in their own way to figure out the placement of a plant or how wide to make a path. Consultation was pandemic, although there were certainly the requisite meltdowns as with any volunteer project. Perhaps most important in determining the success of the project was the presence of a moral center for the garden, the belief that this constituted a sensitive inscription of human knowledge on nature, and that it manifested the ideals of Robert Dorney, a man who inspired many people to think and rethink their understanding of ecological knowledge and practice.11

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I visited the garden recently after several years’ absence. It still serves as a focal point for people in and around the Bowman building. But I noticed that the paths were looking unkempt, the benches were bleached and blistered by a decade in the sun, and the grounds had been invaded by a strain of goldenrod, unruly sumacs, and bird-sown wild grape. I asked Greg Michalenko, a professor in the Department of Environment and Resource Studies, an avid gardener and one of the founding participants in the Dorney Garden project, about the state of the garden. He cited a long list of difficulties, including insufficient monies to hire a regular caretaker, lack of coordination of volunteer help, and an ideological clash over the extent of management appropriate in the garden. He viewed the garden as a functioning ecosystem, but one obviously way too small to support self-sustaining grassland and forested ecosystems. Intensive management is required to ensure biodiversity and representation of the intentions of the designers, especially the goal of preserving a suitable memorial to Robert Dorney. A stalemate over how best to manage the goldenrod (Solidago spp.), a plant that turned out to be especially weedy in the garden, has led to a decline in support for the project as a whole.12 I had thought the dedication to the garden so fierce at one time that nothing would threaten its long-term survival. Now, a decade later, many of the original proponents have scattered, and the institutional supports necessary to ensure a clear mandate for management and durability have come up short. The garden could reach the point where it offends the sensibilities of campus landscapers or those who walk past it each day. It may be replaced by another form of garden, or could revert to mown grass. The lessons learned here are difficult and are often repeated in any kind of long-term restoration project. The more obvious issue with the Dorney Garden is whether it is in fact a restoration. The small size of the project and the degree of contrivance would tend to suggest not. However, it does reflect historical ecosystems, the assemblages of plants are intended to be reasonably self-sustaining (at least low maintenance when possible), and it honors the spirit of restoration through the life of Robert Dorney. The Dorney Garden is a good example of a restoration near the outer boundary of ecological restoration. It challenges the meaning of restoration: Do we want a liberal definition

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or one that is exclusive? What is the importance of arriving at a clear definition? These three cases help us draw boundaries around contemporary restoration practice. I chose them to exhibit a variety of challenges in defining restoration. We know that ecological restoration is about repairing identifiable damage to ecosystems, although the terms repairing and damage are problematic. Historical conditions, both ecological and cultural, are important to understand despite the difficulty of taking all the relevant conditions into account or even recovering all of the important information. The scale of restoration varies greatly, from the Kissimmee megaproject to the volunteer Dorney Garden. Some projects are top down and driven scientifically, while others are bottom up and conducted by amateur volunteers. Cultural values and practices do matter, which is evident in all three projects. These values and practices determine what should be restored—the fixation of wilderness in North America is replaced by attention to cultural landscapes in Europe, to take one comparison. Any complete description of ecological restoration must of necessity include a host of factors, in effect a large matrix of possibilities. The techniques and challenges of restoring a coastal salt marsh are different from those involved with a coastal freshwater marsh project. There are as many restoration protocols as there are ecotypes, although there are some general rules, concepts, and approaches.13 Soils vary widely, even on relatively small sites, and a wide variety of specific techniques may be required to create successful growing conditions. The type and irascibility of weedy species will influence how much effort is required and whether herbicides or weeding or both are necessary. Some projects are focused on reintroduction of a specific species, while others attend to restoring a whole ecosystem. The old adage among ecologists is apt: “An ecosystem is not only more complex than we know, but more complex than we can know.” The Robert Starbird Dorney Ecology Garden may not be an example of ecological restoration. Some would argue that it is a “natural garden,” an example of natural landscaping, or perhaps something closer to landscape architecture. It is, many would suggest, too contrived to be a restoration faithful to regional historical conditions. It makes too many

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concessions to people, both as a memorial to an individual and as a highly used walk-through and recreational spot on a busy university campus. The garden raises two critical issues in defining restoration. First, when is a purported ecological restoration project not an ecological restoration project? Second, what use is there in guarding the perimeter of ecological restoration? Why do boundaries need to be maintained? Another way of looking at this matter is to decide whether one accepts an inclusive or exclusive definition of restoration. The argument, briefly stated, for being inclusive—that is, to accept virtually anything, including mitigation projects, replacements, de novo ecosystem creations, formal naturalized gardens—is to ensure that the greatest amount of creativity and broad public attention are given to restoration. Against this are arguments that call for tighter boundaries and definitions, ones that make it relatively easy to discriminate among projects. This is an advantage if one wants to ensure strict professional standards and if there are concerns about ecological restoration drifting into meaninglessness or being co-opted by socially fashionable landscape trends. These arguments are very real for restorationists, and will grow more so as the practice of restoration develops and expands. Looking backward to the development of restoration highlights the meandering course of its development, the strands of practice and thinking that influence our contemporary understanding, and a better sense of boundaries. No general account of restoration would be complete without some attention to history. I take history seriously not only because it charts the drifts and tendencies of the field but also by virtue of its central place in the very constitution of restoration. The idea of restoring something is to return it to a prior condition, however specified. Any robust restoration project must consider changes over time, which embeds historical meaning deep within practical matters. History helps us understand that restoration is itself a dynamic practice that is changing as I write these words. What it will mean in fifty years is almost certainly going to be different from its sense today. Defining it, now and in the future, requires an understanding of various tendencies that have become apparent through practice. I further define restoration in chapter 3; historical issues are addressed in chapter 4. The following diversion into the history of restoration practice paves the way for both chapters.

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Normal History Many restorationists, at least those from North America, trace restoration back to the experiments conducted by Aldo Leopold and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin’s Arboretum in Madison in the 1930s. Native prairies were in short supply after several decades of zealous agricultural clearing. In dedicating the Arboretum in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, Leopold spoke: This Arboretum may be regarded as a place where, in the course of time, we will build up an exhibit of what was, as well as an exhibit of what ought to be. It is with this dim vision of its future destiny that we have dedicated the greater part of the Arboretum to a reconstruction of original Wisconsin, rather than to a “collection” of imported trees.14

Restoration began in earnest in 1935 at the direction of Norman Fassett, a botanist at the Arboretum, and Theodore Sperry, a new recruit to the project. Sperry’s influence continued through his nearly sixty-year association with the Arboretum restorations; these achievements have been recognized through various honors bestowed on him by the Society for Ecological Restoration.15 Work at the Arboretum was given a boost by the regrettable ecological and economic commingling of the Dust Bowl of the early 1930s. Several years of back-to-back drought caused millions of acres of topsoil to blow away from arid lands, leaving many areas infertile and dehydrating the dreams of so many thousands of settlers.16 The general turndown of the North American economy of the time forced a reconsideration of farming techniques and a search for answers to the obvious failures in the region. Monies were allocated by the Roosevelt administration in 1935 to assist in reclaiming damaged lands for agriculture, and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was formed both to provide labor to the cause and to alleviate unemployment. Thus, a CCC camp was established at the Arboretum to service the projects underway. Restoration projects are always hungry for labor. A combination of circumstances produced success at the Arboretum. Skilled and influential scientists were involved from the first instant in sorting out how to convert abandoned farmland back to earlier ecological conditions. Perhaps this was not the intention of the Washington donors, who were more interested in improving economic conditions

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than in regaining ecological potential. However, the University of Wisconsin Arboretum provided an opportunity for experimentation and has remained a center for research on restoration to the present day. The science of ecology, which favored a whole-systems view of land health, was coalescing and rising in popularity in scientific and landmanagement circles. As a public institution and one that had, as part of a Land Grant university, a mission to educate a wider public, the Arboretum was able to spread the word effectively to aspiring restorationists. There was, finally, a boldness and novelty in the early prairie restorations. Prairies are a subtle landscape, typically underwhelming for the casual observer. They were busted, turned over, and replanted by settlers apparently without much remorse. Despite their subtlety, shortgrass and tallgrass prairie reward the person who stops to look at the floral explosions, the buzz of insects, and the undulating patterns of movement in the wind. It took a dedicated and careful eye to see the potential for large-scale restoration in the prairies. Restoration has flowed along many channels since the 1930s in the United States. Restoration elders, whether scientists, landscape architects, range managers, reclamationists, or gifted amateurs, point us to a time when the term restoration, let alone ecological restoration, was heard infrequently and had no widespread public recognition. Bill Niering, founding editor of the scientific journal Restoration Ecology, traces his restorative work back to the 1950s. The founding moment for most contemporary restorationists is 1988, when the Society for Ecological Restoration was chartered as a nonprofit society to enhance the interests and goals of restorationists. Initially a U.S.-based organization that operated annual conferences with an enthusiastic core of volunteers and few resources, the organization has blossomed into an international body with members in more than thirty countries. The formation of SER signaled that restoration was an idea whose time had come. William Jordan III, a staff member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum and restoration proponent, began publishing Restoration and Management Notes in 1983 as a service to those interested in the field. Early issues were a cut-and-paste operation, a newsletter more than a journal. By the late 1980s, Jordan’s publication became a practitioner journal with a solid and growing subscriber base. His efforts were

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strengthened by the publication of several books aimed at both public and scientific audiences. John Cairns, Jr., and Tony Bradshaw, two large figures in the scientific development of restoration, published books in 1980 that represented, respectively, American and British perspectives. John Berger’s Restoring the Earth, originally published in 1979, drew on widespread public concern and action in the 1970s regarding environmental issues, to produce a popular description of restoration possibilities. Jordan, along with Michael Gilpin and John Aber, convened a symposium and later produced a widely received and comprehensive portrait of restoration for a scientific and practitioner audience. A variety of more specialized scientific summaries have been written more recently, as well as books that address philosophical, social, and lyrical dimensions of ecological restoration.17 The success of the ecological restoration movement has depended crucially on scientific accomplishment, the intuitive appeal of restoration, and a public sensitivity to environmental issues. The 1960s and 1970s marked a coming of age internationally for environmental issues, organizations, and legislation. What restoration offered conceptually was an intuitive and hopeful prospect of solving many of the worst problems brought to light at the time: toxic-waste contamination, species loss, habitat loss, and a decline in urban and suburban quality of life. Restoration, then, became not only a promising practice but a helpful metaphor, one that appealed especially well to a growing technological mindset. At worst, restoration was viewed as an apologia for industrial excess and a justification for further activity; after all, if we could clean up the mess or repair the problem, why not maintain business-as-usual? Much of the earlier and less self-congratulatory writing on restoration, as well as the debates that took place at early SER conferences beginning in 1989, focused on how ecological restoration could manifest social and scientific ideals. The founding, in 1993, of the journal Restoration Ecology marked an important developmental step for a young movement. This official SER publication has provided a venue for reporting on scientific experiments and results, as well as providing an increasingly broad forum for discussion about the theoretical and conceptual dimensions of restoration.

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This theoretical impulse is what defines, in part, the maturation of the practice. Joan Ehrenfeld has produced a historical typology of restoration consisting of a four-field development. Restoration, she argues, has roots in conservation biology, geography/landscape ecology, wetland management, and rehabilitation of resource-extracted lands. Within each of these four contributing fields, a clear progression is evident. For example, over the last two decades in conservation biology attention has shifted from protection of endangered species to endangered communities. When she applied this four-field typology to three years of published articles in Restoration Ecology, Ehrenfeld discovered that contemporary scientific practice reflects these historical sources and remains heterogeneous. This affects the way practitioners think about goal setting, arguably one of the more important features of a successful restoration project and certainly one of the more contentious elements in the development of restoration theory. As Ehrenfeld writes, “The specification of goals for restoration projects is frequently described as the most important component of a project, because it sets expectations, drives the detailed plans for actions, and determines the kind and extent of post-project monitoring.”18 Instead of promoting a set of universal goals for restoration, she proposes three major themes—the restoration of species, the restoration of whole ecosystems or landscapes, and the restoration of ecosystem services—each of which requires a different approach. It is not feasible to overgeneralize and promote a single approach to restoration. To make matters more complicated, Ehrenfeld describes the varied goals for restoration ecology, not necessarily ecological restoration. It is important to distinguish between these two terms, which are often conflated in the literature. I refer to restoration ecology as the ensemble of practices that contribute to the science of ecological restoration.19 Ecological restoration is the total set of ideas and practices (social, scientific, economic, political, and so on) involved in the restoration of ecosystems.20 This apparent linguistic confusion masks a more serious issue. There is a risk with growing professionalization of placing the science of restoration ecology above the practice of restoration. The rich texture, success, and public acceptance of restoration have much to do

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with volunteer participation, small-scale uncontrolled experiments, and changing aesthetic values. As much as these points might be debated, restoration is more than restoration ecology, and the success of restoration efforts over the long run will require recognition of their heterogeneity. Put simply, restoration ecology is a necessary but not sufficient condition for good restoration. And since many of us, including myself, become defensive when the dominion of science is called into question, let me hasten to add that good science, including strong theoretical development, is vital for the successful development of ecological restoration. However, the field of restoration will be diminished if restoration ecology increasingly displaces ecological restoration—that is, if science becomes the exclusive center of restoration activity. The history of the field shows a plural practice, one reflecting the best of scientific perspicuity and creative tinkering. This is precisely the tension that has created so many problems in defining ecological restoration. Contingency and Ideals Historical interpretation is much more than a sequencing of events and ideas. The contingency of restoration is exposed when a comparative historical account is invoked, for example, between two national approaches to practice or between like-minded individuals with different professional inclinations. No unified perspective is sensible. The cultural ideals that shape our relations to places exert multiple meanings on restoration; restoring a former brownfield looks different to an ecologist and a landscape architect. So, too, restoration is practiced differently from region to region and country to country. This makes any coherent account of restoration very difficult, but such complexity is preferable to oversimplification, a quality that has characterized some historical writing about restoration. There are a number of reasons to assume the University of Wisconsin Arboretum was the birthplace of ecological restoration. It makes a good and obvious story. There are remarkable individuals, such as Aldo Leopold, Henry Greene, John Curtis, and Ted Sperry, to lionize. The first home of the Society for Ecological Restoration21 and the founding of the

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journal of restoration, Restoration and Management Notes, were here. And prairies did attract much restorative attention. Stephanie Mills makes good use of these elements in her account of the development of restoration.22 Working from a few brief historical essays,23 she also calls attention to earlier influences—for example, Edith Roberts’s restoration of native plants in Dutchess County, New York, in 1920, and Frederick Law Olmsted’s fascination with native flora and naturalistic garden design in the late nineteenth century. Oddly, relatively little information is available about the earliest roots of restoration, the connections with reclamation and beautification programs, gardening and parks movements, changing canons of aesthetic taste and environmental value, and the ways restoration, such as it was, varied from one place to another. Does this represent a shortage of historians of restoration?24 Personal experience suggests that valuable information waits beneath the surface. At the outset of my brief career as an environmental impact assessment specialist working for a small consultancy in southern Ontario in the late 1970s, I remember coming across a reference to a farmer near the shore of Lake Erie. Early in the twentieth century, this farmer had filled a manure spreader with cattail tubers and distributed them on fields he had reflooded. His logic was that the previous landscape, a wetland, would yield more value from hunters’ fees than from standard cropping. Does this fit the mold of restoration? Was he alone in his efforts, or were there other similar ventures around that time? What came before, and did his efforts connect with what followed, joining a rivulet that would become a main channel of history flowing past the restorations in Madison in the 1930s? In his comparative investigation of restoration in the United States and Italy, Marcus Hall argues that the short shrift given to restoration history “arises more from the lack of understanding of early restoration, than from the lack of early attempts to restore.”25 Hall succumbed initially to the same historical pressures as other restorationists: In fact, I had once imagined that restoration “originated” when some important figure like Aldo Leopold simply combined the insights of his predecessors to create this field. But now I’m certain that such notions oversimplify the development and diffusion of ideas and the contexts in which they were created. I believe, instead, that one can trace restorative techniques and restorative

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principles far back in time, and that to understand their development it is necessary to search the wider history of conservation for the events, episodes, and insights that have led to current ideas of restoration.26

Many other sources for ecological restoration will no doubt emerge as we search for them. Finding them will mean shoving aside our inclination to focus on culturally definitive events. I heard William Jordan once describe the Arboretum at Madison as the “Kitty Hawk” of restoration, referring to the location of the first sustained powered flight by Orville and Wilbur Wright in North Carolina in 1903. As deserving of celebration as such events are, glorification obscures earlier, now forgotten, experiments that led to these defining moments. The richness of historical development is compressed into a single, artificial beginning. There are at least four problems with this approach. First, though perhaps this is less true for events such as the Wright brothers’ flight in 1903, there may be preceding events that constitute equally crucial or even more significant marks in the development of a practice. Second, the normative boundaries around a practice tend to be solidified by reference to a particular event or series of events, potentially leading to a skewed description of the practice. This is especially important for us in examining what restoration means. Third, the history of a practice may have occurred over a wider geographic area than is commonly acknowledged. For example, the history of ecological restoration comprises many activities that have taken place outside North America and thus outside the view refracted through the Madison experience. Finally, and perhaps most important, is the counsel of contemporary historians to avoid “Whig” history, or history that presumes the present leads straight to the past. There is little doubt that what restoration meant at the turn of the twentieth century is not what it means at the turn of the twenty-first century. Meanings shift, and the imposition of our view of things on the past as if there is one continuous stream of understanding is naive and potentially dangerous. We can trace the etymology of terms and examine the general practice of converting damaged lands to a former ideal condition. We should not, however, presume there is a solid core of restoration knowledge and practices moving through time, slowly changing and improving. Restoration derives its meaning through the people who think of themselves as restorationists and use this term and related ones

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to describe the activities of their time. For all its forerunners, restoration as we know it is a new endeavor. The challenge of history, of course, is finding appropriate documentation to illuminate past activities and perhaps to provide a justification for present goals. Alas, though some practitioners kept good records that are well preserved, others were busier doing than writing, and so their work is largely missing from records. Social and political factors also shape how an event is later recorded and interpreted. Why, then, do we still regard the moment in the Wisconsin prairie in the 1930s as the starting point for ecological restoration? This is the kind of question that we should keep in mind as we explore the history of the field. Hall peers into the nineteenth century for indications of how people sought the conversion of damaged into ideal lands. In his words: “The historian in me questions just how old restoration may be, or rather how the endeavor of restoration has changed over the decades. The environmentalist in me wonders whether the experience of these early land managers could help us improve our own practice of restoration.”27 He proposes a typology of restoration based on his comparison of Italian and American restoration. He suggests that there are three views of restoration based on differing ways of viewing damaged and ideal land. Different views will condition what needs to be restored, and how. The elegance of his typology lies in its capacity to account for cultural differences in the way restoration is perceived and practiced. This helps provide valuable insight into diverse perspectives—for example, the current focus on cultural landscapes in Europe and wilderness in North America, or the apparent incompatibility between the restorations practiced now and in the past in different regions. Of course, I commit the sin of generalization here, knowing that in the last fifty years in Europe there has been growing concern with restoring wild places and that in North America more attention is being given to the significance of cultural practices. Such dichotomies are at best helpful in understanding complexity. Hall terms the first of his three types of restoration, prominent in nineteenth-century Italian land management, “maintaining the garden.” A highly managed cultural landscape, a garden, is the ideal, and restoration implies improvement to natural degenerative processes. It is not

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difficult to stretch the garden image back to the Garden of Eden: one is striving to recreate the original garden. In this approach, cultural practices and values operate alongside ecological processes and patterns in settings such as small-scale farms and animal husbandry. Land is damaged through neglect and restored by careful artifice. Hall’s second and third types acknowledge that culture is responsible for degradation, but they entail different solutions. In “gardening the degraded,” the second type, the ideal condition is a garden, as in the first type, but perception of the landscape changes to account for human damage. Mining reclamation is a good example. Another example is the Italian Bonifica Integrale movement initiated by Mussolini in the 1930s that strove to reclaim lands damaged through heedless human actions. Here, however, reclamation had primarily cultural and not ecological aims. The third type of restoration, prominent in North America, involves “naturalizing the degraded.” Natural processes are championed as a way of counteracting tendencies to improve the landscape to create a garden, or to degrade it to a wasteland. The ideal landscape is the untouched landscape—the Garden of Eden, if you will, which was the pristine wildness that existed before the corruptions of Adam and Eve. All three of Hall’s types depend on culturally shaped notions of degenerated, degraded, and ideal landscapes. His argument is complex because it is difficult for contemporary North Americans to imagine how land can be damaged naturally or how cultural practices can represent an improvement. The issue is also complicated by changes in restoration practices over the last two centuries or so: Italians have shifted their approach to land management from the first to the second type, while North Americans have moved from the second to the third type. As Hall explains, Where Americans and Europeans once felt that humans could only improve the land, they have come to believe that humans could both improve and degrade the land. . . . Where many Europeans still see ideal land as a domesticated garden, many Americans have come to believe that ideal land is untouched and wild.28

Changes of this nature make any simple history of restoration suspect, and act as a corrective to dogmatic views about the meaning of restora-

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tion. Moreover, this panoramic approach presents a moving view of restoration, a living history with respect to which our own practices need to be positioned. A wider history of restoration must include practices outside North America, which is why Hall’s comparative study reveals a richer history for restoration and displays a broader typology than some other approaches have done. How broad is reasonable? Can a restorationist from Wisconsin make sense of restoration in Scotland and vice versa? What of work even farther afield, where the national histories and local cultures have divergent views about the goals of restoration and the meanings of culture and nature (assuming such terms even make sense in a different cultural milieu)? Can those restoring salmonid habitat in the Pacific Northwest of the United States fully comprehend the problems of tree planting in desertified landscapes? This is the problem of incommensurability, of the lack of a common measure. Take, for example, the Morava River restoration projects described earlier in this chapter—projects that integrate ecological integrity with cultural livelihood. Is protecting a highly managed wet-meadow complex, despite its regional ecological significance, of much interest to restorationists suffused by notions of wilderness? The end point for the Kissimmee River restorationists is different from the intentions of those along the Morava River. The Kissimmee restorationists aim at rewilding the river and associated ecological communities, while those along the Morava River are seeking a fine balance between historical agricultural and ecological practices. Each group inscribes specific values about the land, land taken broadly in this setting, giving rise to restoration projects that reveal contemporary perspectives on landscapes. The beauty of comparative perspectives is that they highlight a range of alternatives. When I meet scientists from other countries—Zev Naveh from Israel, Carolina Murcia from Colombia, and Richard Hobbs from Australia—I realize how much is going on and how much there is to learn; each of these regions has its own distinct history and future of restoration. Restoration is not an American or North American phenomenon, but an international practice with many separate branches. Those of us operating from a North American base must be careful not

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to try to impose our views too firmly,29 or even to make claims that restoration is a unitary international phenomenon in case it turns out to be a poor way of mapping local practice.30 European history alone reveals diverse restoration strategies—strategies mirrored in North America. It turns out that Italians were working out ways of “imitating nature” as early as 1816 with the work of hydrologist Franscesco Mengotti. In France, as well, there was a movement by midcentury to rehabilitate eroded slopes and overgrazed lands (and the term restauration was used). George Perkins Marsh, arguably one of the most significant early forces in the North American conservation movement, was ambassador to Italy from 1861 to 1882. Comments on European land-management practices permeate his writing. The first sentence of his best-known work, Man and Nature, declares “the possibility and importance of the restoration of exhausted regions.”31 There is little doubt that North American and European ideas are fused in the work of Marsh, and it is likely also that continental techniques and approaches produced much inspiration in the United States. One way of cracking open the shell of belief to expose the cultural contingency of restoration practices is to dig into history. Even North American restorationists who today espouse reestablishing unpeopled ecosystems as the preeminent goal of restoration are shaped by a “dual tradition” consisting of land and resource managers honed by utility, on the one hand, and by landscape architects and designers shaped by aesthetics, on the other. Similarly, Italian restorationists find their own approach to restoration, based on historical, culturally saturated landscapes, eminently sensible. North American ecologists and restorationists have lived through extraordinarily rapid changes to ecosystems with the spread of development and urbanization in recent decades. As a child in early 1960s, I remember a farm across the road from my family’s house north of Toronto being converted to 1,500 homes. Toronto swallowed my old family home just a decade later. It is not surprising that under such circumstances, restorationists would call for a return to a prelapsarian or at least earlier condition. But North Americans, like Europeans, have lived so long with transformed flora and fauna that a return to previous states makes little sense. Neither group—North Americans and

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Europeans—can make sense of the other, regarding the other’s approach with suspicion and at times disapproval. Restoration, then, can proceed from different notions of damage and of the contingent ideals practitioners might strive to reach. This is a crucial insight, for the way we view damage, whether as a result of too little or too much human activity, will shape which areas we set out to address and how we address them. For many Americans, damage is about any kind of human action that interferes with strict notions of ecological integrity. For many Italians, where pastoral and agricultural landscapes are the norm, the land is compromised without such practices. For Italians, the cultural and ecological features produce value. Complicating the conventional account of restoration further, what we restore also depends on whether we believe that having people in the landscape can improve the land, or assume that ecological processes are most effective in restoration. For Hall, this creates a distinction between gardening and naturalizing: If one believes that human activities can best improve land, then one restores in a process likened to gardening; yet if one believes that natural activities can best improve land, then one restores in a process that might be called naturalizing— or perhaps rewilding. A gardener promotes culture on a natural landscape, whereas a naturalizer promotes nature on a cultural landscape.32

Americans naturalize, whereas Italians garden, which is an approximation but also the most succinct way of characterizing these two contrasting approaches to restoration: “Because restoration is the process of bringing back ideal land, one can now better appreciate why Italians might feel that Americans bring back too little culture to their nature, or why Americans might feel that Italians do not practice true restoration at all.”33 No wonder it is difficult to identify a single view of restoration! And in comparing North American and European views of restoration (assuming that U.S. practices are emblematic of North American restoration and that Italian practices reflect European restoration), we have ignored the Southern Hemisphere, where so much restoration work is being conducted. As more pages are added to the history of restoration, different constructs of damage and new ideals drawn from a wide range of cultures will find a place in our understanding of restoration.

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The influences giving each cultural tradition its special character are complex. Landscape architects and gardeners have played a pivotal role in shaping ecological restoration in North America. U.S. landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted was regarded as radical in his time, and his work remains highly acclaimed as an example of how nature can be brought within the reach of urbanites. Despite this acclaim, however, Olmsted used a remarkable contrivance in all of his projects. New York’s, Central Park, his best-known work, was literally created from bedrock; all the rivers, ponds, and wooded areas were engineered. Most would argue that this was not restoration. Olmsted’s vision of naturalized landscapes helped create a minority tradition in landscape design, however, that has produced an array of compelling projects, many of which present either naturalized or designer landscapes making use of native vegetation. Parks, in general, have provided a rich inventory of images for people inclined toward restoration. Few could walk through Vancouver’s Stanley Park without being impressed by the wild features of the place, which include some prepark forests, as much as by its manicured sections. Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature, published in 1967, influenced an entire generation of environmentally minded landscape architects and environmental designers.34 The integration of ecological concepts into landscape design programs has propagated broader concern for ecological integrity and continuity. It is no surprise that so many landscape architects are members of the Society for Ecological Restoration. Gardeners from all traditions in North America have contributed to a growing awareness of natural process and form by bringing nature into the heart of domesticated space and forcing recognition that only so much in any garden can be fully controlled. Many gardeners are amateurs, and their innocence and lack of formality often result in remarkably independent experiments and approaches. In a group of restoration volunteers, like the hard-core volunteers chronicled by William Stevens in his account of the North Branch Prairie restoration in Chicago, one usually finds serious gardeners. These are the gardeners who do their own seed propagation, study scientific names for plants, and keep detailed records of their endeavors.35 This was certainly the case for the Dorney Garden, where many of the volunteers had primary experience

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as gardeners; they were used to working with soil and plants and were accustomed to hard physical labor. The movement toward naturalized gardening has begun to have an impact on contemporary restoration efforts. Style is a crucial component of gardening, including everything from Southwest xeriscaping to Northeast rural tangle. Aesthetic judgment also looms large in all gardening efforts, no matter how pure the intentions to recreate a miniature ecosystem; one is always trimming, pruning, installing borders, moving plants, and so on. What of highly evolved gardening forms, such as Japanese gardening, in which the objective is to create a microcosm, to enfold the complex textures and senses of nature into a single space—do these bear any relation to restoration? If we extend a line between gardening and restoration, somewhere along the line, the border separating the two is going to become a matter of convention and judgment. The various points along the line are constituted of different values, practices, and histories. Thus, restorationists, reclamationists, ecologists, landscape designers, and gardeners have different ideas in mind for how nature should look and function. Each has a different way of approaching problems, of seeing what needs to be done, and of justifying answers. Yet each also has elements that are bound to the concerns of restorationists; they are turning to a prior condition for guidance and are focused to a greater or lesser extent on ecological integrity. The challenge is not, in my view, to describe which type of restoration is purer; rather, it is to be clear about the kinds of assumptions that generate the perceived needs and goals of any specific restoration project. We would be guilty of hubris if we were to suggest otherwise—to insist that we have somehow got everything right and know for certain the enduring meaning of ecological restoration. Grasping the meaning and extent of ecological restoration is at the same time easy and elusive. There is an intuitive appeal to restoration that rests on the desire to return to a better, prior condition. Beneath this shimmering surface, however, lies a knotted legacy. The science of restoration ecology has evolved over decades from a variety of perspectives, including conservation biology, applied ecology, range management, wetland rehabilitation, reclamation, and other allied pursuits.

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Ecological restoration is more than this, though, incorporating community-based initiatives, urban regeneration, natural gardening, landscape design, and social justice perspectives. Definitions of restoration should encompass all these approaches, which is why so much ink has been spilled and so many arguments have erupted over the core and limits of ecological restoration. The challenge of defining restoration is to come to grips with its border-crossing character, the way it frustrates the conventional separation of nature and culture, upsets the way we think about human involvement in precious places, and goes to the heart of the modern, or as some would have it, postmodern, condition. By inhabiting the boundaries of contemporary cultural belief, restoration invites criticism of our technological society. Several boundaries have impelled my thinking about the meaning of ecological restoration: the boundary layer between possibility and legacy at the SER conference; along the border between the Everglades and Fort Lauderdale that I saw on the flight home; between the reality of restoration along the Kissimmee River and the contrivance of the Wilderness Lodge at Disney World; and between the heartfelt efforts of restorationists at the SER conference and the enormity of restorative challenge suggested by the glittering yachts along the Intracoastal Waterway.

3 What Is Ecological Restoration?

The essential quality of restoration is . . . that it is an attempt to overcome artificially the factors that we consider will restrict ecosystem development. This gives us a powerful opportunity to test out in practice our understanding of ecosystem development and functioning. The actual restoration operations will often be dominated by engineering or financial considerations, but their underlying logic must be ecological. —A. D. Bradshaw, “Restoration: An Acid Test for Ecology” A stable terminology would undoubtedly be useful, but no one currently seems prepared to agree on one. We suggest that endless quibbling over what to call our work in the field of restoration ecology is a time-wasting diversion from the real work at hand. —R. J. Hobbs and D. A. Norton, “Towards a Conceptual Framework for Restoration Ecology”

What distinguishes a restoration project from something else, say, a reclamation project? What is a minimum definition of restoration? What are the core concepts? Should we care about how restoration is defined? Hobbs and Norton are right: there has been seemingly “endless quibbling” over what restoration means. Terminology varies widely from one region to another. Some people interchange restoration ecology and ecological restoration as though they mean the same thing; others are careful to distinguish between them. Is environmental restoration the same as ecological restoration? Restorationists in North America are generally comfortable with the goal of returning landscapes to their indigenous condition, which means restoring to a time before human degradation. In chapter 2 I argued that such a notion is less palatable for most European restorationists, who work with landscapes that have been peopled for millenniums, indeed as is the case in most parts of the world

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(including the Americas). In fact, the notion of indigenous does not make much sense in most regions of the world. Some regard ecosystem health as the proper goal of ecological restoration, while others champion ecological integrity. How different are these concepts, and do they result in different kinds of restoration? Despite agreeing with Hobbs and Norton that “endless quibbling” has taken place, I think they are wrong to downplay the seriousness of the terminological confusion. Confusion over proper description and definition reflects an inadequate understanding of concepts, which after all is the kind of clarity promoted in their widely cited article. It is as though a botanist could claim to understand taxonomy and not really have a grasp of systematic nomenclature. Others besides Hobbs and Norton have commented cynically that the messy debates over definitions are merely semantic squabbles. At one level this is true. The work of restoration is sufficiently important that it should not be worn down by endless technical debates. But I do not think many realized in the late 1980s how difficult defining restoration was going to be. Only now are some of the theoretical issues being aired. Dismissing conceptual debate ignores the power of language in shaping belief and practice. Words take their meaning from a context of use and dry up if they are separated from the people who use them. This suggests that we should learn to be careful with them. In expressing distrust of social and environmental movements because they often veer away from the things they set out to value, Wendell Berry, an American essayist, argues, “The worst danger may be that a movement will lose its language either to its own confusion about meaning and practice, or to preemption by its enemies.”1 His inspiration was finding out, to his horror, that the term organic farming, which he took to be both a social and an environmental practice, could be assimilated to an industrial monoculture and thus co-opted. This is also the case with ecological restoration: there is every possibility that restoration will be construed in ways that defy the intentions of its proponents. Just as restoration projects require monitoring to ensure that original intentions are being maintained, restorationists might also monitor restoration concepts to keep ideas faithful to intention. Ignoring the power of language also passes over crucial differences in the way restoration is perceived.

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An acceptable definition is a precondition for deciding what constitutes good restoration. Without the ability to distinguish a good project from a bad one, better projects from worse ones, or even restoration projects from those that are not, the ecological restoration movement—science, professional practice, community volunteer initiatives, and every other dimension—risks losing its strength of purpose. In this chapter I examine variant meanings for restoration with the aim of identifying central concepts that are widely applicable. My conclusion is that two ecological concepts emerge: ecological integrity and historical fidelity. When the complicated mix of restoration practice and theory is sorted out, what is left is a concern for the quality of the ecosystems resulting from restoration (integrity) and for the extent to which they reflect the history of the place (fidelity). Concern for historical conditions is one of the main attributes of restoration separating it from related practices such as reclamation and rehabilitation. I touch on historical fidelity in this chapter by mentioning historical range of variability, a concept of growing importance to restorationists and environmental managers. Along with the idea of reference conditions, it receives more detailed treatment in chapter 4. Beyond ecological considerations are cultural factors that shape the character of restoration. In chapter 6 I propose a third keystone concept, focal practice, to ensure that good restoration encompasses social participation and highlights the ecological and cultural value added in the act of restoration. Finally, in chapter 7, I propose the addition of wild design. Restoration is fundamentally about design, and the challenge ahead is to enlarge our capacity for good ecological design. Terminological clarity seems important for several reasons. First, words shape worlds, and attentiveness is necessary to comprehend how we use language to describe theory and practice. Feminist theorists have taught us this, and it is important to be vigilant about how language is used. For example, if we were entirely prescriptive about restoration resting on predisturbance conditions, essentially invoking a strong view of wilderness, many agroecological projects around the world would fall outside the bounds of restoration. Second, in highlighting the variety of definitions of restoration and the controversies surrounding their use, it is easier to show just how malleable the field is. Much is up for grabs.

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Third, I favor inclusive definitions, those that allow as many kinds of projects as possible to thrive. This is a precarious position. If anything goes, there is the danger that restoration will be co-opted by those who see only commercial value in the restoration of ecosystems. Finally, defining good restoration depends, in my view, on expanding our outlook to include social, cultural, aesthetic, economic, political, and moral values. The emphasis in this chapter, then, is on coming up with a definition that is explicit about the cultural significance of restoration, although explication of this must wait for later chapters. This journey into concepts begins with the way restoration is defined conventionally, and with how this relates to our general sense of ecological restoration. Ecological restoration is related to many similar practices that are also competing for attention in the burgeoning field of environmental management. I suggest a taxonomy of restoration in which various practices are related. Next, I turn to a revealing exercise conducted in 1994 at a Society for Ecological Restoration conference. Several cases were assessed critically to ascertain core restoration concepts. Many formal definitions of restoration have come and gone, and a review of some of these definitions gets to the heart of contemporary restoration. I concentrate on official SER definitions produced in 1996 and 2002. From these emerge ideas that seem basic to restoration: the distinction between process and product, assisted recovery, management, historical range of variability, reference conditions, and ecological integrity. Finally, in the interest of simplicity, these concepts are reduced to ecological integrity and historical fidelity. Words and Taxonomy Ecological restoration is a relatively new practice, and thus it is not surprising that dictionaries have been slow to catch up with a definition that meets our needs. However, the word restoration has a substantial history. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests six distinct meanings, the fourth of which is “the action or process of restoring something to an unimpaired or perfect condition.”2 This refers most directly to the restoration of a building, work of art, nearly extinct animal, dental structure, or anything to which a return to a former condition is appropriate.3 The search

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deepens when we switch to a variant although archaic spelling, restauration. Derived from the French restauration, which also gave rise to the English word restaurant, use reaches back to the fourteenth century with decidedly theological connotations. The second of four definitions comes closest to reflecting a contemporary perspective, despite its common use beginning in the late fourteenth century: “the restoration of something material to its proper condition.” These various definitions confirm the nagging sense that the meaning of restoration depends on changing social conventions. It is certainly a plastic word, employed widely and under varying conditions.4 Of course, restoration is a noun, and the verb restore also has a variety of meanings, allowing more scope than the noun. For instance, the sixth of nine definitions listed in the Oxford English Dictionary suggests much more than a return to original conditions: “to bring back (a person or thing) to a previous, original, or normal condition.” This definition better fits the idea that ecological restoration is not necessarily about taking ecosystems back to any kind of original condition, even if this were possible. The idea of “normal condition” is potentially compatible with such ideas as ecological integrity and ecosystem health. Let’s suppose that in a conceptual world there are species of restoration that inhabit the genus ecological restoration (figure 3.1). This genus is found in the family ecosystem management, together with myriad other genera such as conservation biology, reclamation, and mitigation. The family is held together taxonomically by the knowledge that all practices within it are environmentally salutary—that is, they are considered, at least by their practitioners, to be beneficial. Many of the disputes in this conceptual taxonomic world center on whether the practices are in fact ecologically and culturally beneficial. Of course, sensibilities about what is good change over time, resulting in a continuously shifting classification. Besides, this taxonomy is regionally variable, not universal, which means that a practice defined as belonging to the family by one group of people may fall outside it according to another. The arrangement of genera varies widely, too. Some would argue, for example, that conservation biology is an umbrella practice that incorporates a host of other practices. Taxonomists of this stripe, mostly conservation

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Ecosystem management

Conservation biology

Restoration ecology (experimental)

Ecological restoration

Rehabilitation?

Community-based projects

Family

Reclamation

Mitigation

Agroecosystem restoration?

Professional projects

Other genera...?

Other species...?

Genus

Species

Figure 3.1 Taxonomic relationships for ecological restoration.

biologists themselves, suggest it deserves to be a separate, inclusive family. Accordingly, ecological restoration would be a subset genus within this family. There are ecological restorationists, too, who argue for the centrality and superordinate position of restoration as a practice with large cultural ambitions. Such arrogation compels the arrangement of environmental practices in a single family. Thus, separate practices no matter how defined can be perceived as separate genera, and, as necessary, subgeneric designations can be created. The debates, endless as all taxonomic discussions inevitably are, will take place at the generic level. Is restoration a large taxon that incorporates all allied practices such as reclamation, revegetation, and mitigation? Or is ecological restoration best kept pure in scope, allowing these other allied practices their own genera? The basic structure of the genus ecological restoration suggests a specific practice to which one attaches a historically motivated goal. This implies that something lost is to be regained through directed activity, or, reiterating one of the broad dictionary definitions cited earlier, means “to bring back (a . . . thing [ecosystem]) to a previous, original, or normal condition.” Ecological restoration and environmental restoration are sometimes considered synonyms, and the terms are occasionally interchanged in the literature.5 There are arguments in favor of each, although I am not aware of a published debate on the subject. Eco-

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logical restoration is preferable to my mind because it emphasizes that the work is systemic and rooted in a thoroughgoing understanding of ecological processes and patterns. Besides, ecological restoration has become the term of record, as in the name of the Society for Ecological Restoration. Does restoration ecology deserve its own separate genus? Recall from chapter 2 that restoration ecology is a branch of applied ecology. Ecological restoration is the ensemble of practices that combine to create what restoration is in the broadest sense: a worldwide movement of people assisting the recovery of ecological (and also cultural) integrity. Restoration ecology is subordinate to ecological restoration. William Jordan insists that ecological restoration is a movement and a mode of living as much as it is a scientific pursuit. It is this heterogeneity that makes the SER’s conferences so stimulating; activists, scientists, government officials, philosophers, consultants, and community volunteers all turn up. Ecological restoration is not professionalized, although many professionals lay claim to it.6 So far I have proposed a genus for ecological restoration that incorporates at least the scientific practice and theory of restoration ecology. What else is to be found within it, and what should be excluded? This invokes the boundary-setting problem touched on in chapter 2. Ecological restoration occupies a middle zone in which conventional values and beliefs about environmental management are challenged. Should other “re-” words and activities—reclamation, remediation, rehabilitation, revegetation, and so on—be subsumed under ecological restoration, or are they sufficiently well established for each to warrant its own genus within a broader taxon? A tighter definition of restoration is required to make such discrimination possible, a task we will turn to later in this chapter. First let’s examine the other terms. Reclamation is closely allied with restoration. To reclaim something means to rescue it from an undesirable state. Generally reclamation aims at converting land damaged through resource extraction or poor management to productive use. Much depends on how one interprets “productive use.” Reclamation came into the environmental lexicon in the late 1800s to describe the process of making land fit for cultivation. The Bureau of Reclamation in the United States began operation in 1902 to

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create arable land primarily in regions with a limited water supply. Installing monumental and lesser dams, canals, and diversions, the Bureau turns marginal land—at least from the perspective of agriculture—into productive acreage. The term acquired an expanded meaning in the mid-twentieth century to refer, in some cases, to what could be called restoration: the conversion of damaged land into a semblance of its former condition. Gaping holes left behind by open-pit-mining operations were prime candidates for reclamation. Goals ranged widely, from engineering accomplishments such as bank stabilization, to the creation of timber and agricultural lands, to the provision of recreational opportunities. In some cases, attempts focused on wildlife and vegetation enhancement. Witness the slope reclamation project at the Cardmal River Coal’s (CRC) mine outside Jasper National Park. This project has been wildly successful in creating forage for Rocky Mountain sheep, although the ecological merits of such a scheme are debatable from other perspectives. Closely linked with reclamation is the idea of remediation, or the process of remedying ecological insults. This is important work that shades into restoration. However, typically the lack of focus on historical conditions and recovery of ecological integrity makes the differences between restoration and remediation easy to spot. Rehabilitation is almost synonymous with restoration. To rehabilitate means to build again or bring back to a previous condition, or as E. B. Allen, J. S. Brown, and M. F. Allen propose, it involves creating “an alternative ecosystem following a disturbance, different from the original and having utilitarian rather than conservation values.”7 In ordinary usage, rehabilitation is a more flexible term. It can mean restoration according to strict ecological goals, or the establishment of an acceptable ecological state where prudential and aesthetic conditions prevail. There is perhaps less historical rectitude with rehabilitation than with restoration. Revegetation is a common term with many connotations. Basically it signifies the establishment of vegetative cover in an area denuded or rendered incapable of regenerating naturally. This process involves planting and seeding, and there is no particular attachment to the use of native species. Natural revegetation refers to the practice of allowing

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ecological processes to establish a vegetative cover without human intervention. This may or may not involve the growth of native species; usually, with disturbed ground, weedy introduced species are the main pioneers. There are many overlapping, restoration-related practices in this large family, some of which are only beginning to find familiar use. Reinhabitation is the term preferred by Stephanie Mills, author of In Service of the Wild, because it urges people to find meaningful, respectful lives in ecosystems and not always ones that recreate the exact historical conditions of a place. Dwelling, literally and figuratively, she argues, is crucial to the long-term integrity of ecosystems. The idea of recovery is used in the SER definition to describe the process of bringing something back. Regeneration is a promising term: the process it describes is more active, implying a return to an earlier condition at the same time as generating something new. Back to taxonomy: Should the practices just described, and others like them, be subsumed under ecological restoration? The key criterion appears to be ecological integrity. If a practice promises to increase the ecological integrity of an area that has been compromised, and this notion of integrity is informed by historical considerations, it belongs within the genus. If it does not meet these requirements, as is common with reclamation projects that focus on gaining productive capacity without any real concern for either ecological integrity or historical fidelity, it needs a separate genus, perhaps within the same family. Hence, a practice like rehabilitation probably belongs to ecological restoration, but practices such as reclamation, remediation, and revegetation do not. Hybridization is always at work, as with revegetation projects that use natural plantings and end up resembling restoration projects, and so on. Flexibility in this taxonomic system is necessary, especially because ecological restoration is still trying to develop a clear sense of itself. The Duck Test A taxonomic approach suggests that ecological restoration should be viewed as a genus within a large family of environmental practices. Within this genus are found a host of related practices bound together

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by commitments to historical fidelity and ecological integrity. What kind of definition can be crafted from this background? Let’s go back in time to 1994, when the Society for Ecological Restoration was taking shape, when politics and policies were in flux, and when the search for an official definition of restoration had foundered again. The debate swirling around definitions illustrates just how difficult it can be to arrive at a consensus on the description of a practice. It was the sixth annual SER conference in East Lansing, Michigan. The weather in central Michigan in August can be oppressive, a kind of insufferable heat and humidity. A stalwart group of thirty or so participants was sitting inside at a symposium with the audience-shrinking title “Definitions, Definitions, Definitions!” Such an event would typically be avoided like the plague in favor of conference sessions that involved at least slides or, better yet, field trips. But this was 1994, only six years after the formation of SER. Behind the scenes the board of directors was facing financial challenges, leadership disputes, and the problem that no less than three official definitions of restoration had been adopted in just six years. This unlikely session proved a catalyst for definitional and political change, in part because former and future SER leaders decided unexpectedly to converge.8 The session was intended to raise philosophical issues about how restoration is defined. Instead, we found ourselves in the midst of a simmering political debate. There was pressure on us to find some resolution to the definition issue. Dean Apostol, long-time member of SER, suggested we depart from the agenda and use the “duck test” to help achieve consensus. We took a much-needed break, during which Apostol formulated a series of five brief case studies. These were called “ducks” after the traditional adage that if something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it must be a duck. Hence, if we could agree on whether a particular case was a restoration project, and why, this would help in identifying core elements. The strategy held promise. Or so we thought. Apostol led with the most robust duck: the Curtis Prairie. As we have seen, U.S. restorationists look on the prairie restorations of the 1930s at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum as the starting point of contemporary restoration; they regard the Curtis Prairie, named after the ven-

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erable Wisconsin-based botanist John Curtis, as the gold standard. It was here that many of the early experiments, including seed collecting, and treatment, cultivation, and prescribed fire, were conducted by Ted Sperry, John Curtis, and others.9 At our symposium, debate erupted immediately over this purportedly robust restoration. Are we evaluating a product or a process, and how long did it take before the Curtis Prairie was recognized as an effective restoration? Some expressed the view that the goal of restoration is to remove human intervention so that natural processes could take hold. The Curtis Prairie is an example of a project that requires regular management to maintain desired characteristics: to avoid scrubby succession and weedy invasion, to ensure species diversity and richness. Surprised and somewhat exasperated, Apostol brought forth his second duck. This one involved the introduction of prescribed fire to a formerly wild, forested landscape in order to push it back within a natural range of variation. In the early twentieth century, the introduction of fire suppression resulted over a period of decades in dramatic changes in the landscape—a common phenomenon in many regions of North America, including Jasper National Park (see chapter 1). With a change in practices through deliberate and carefully managed fire, would this approach count as restoration? An immediate question arose: Is it designated a restoration project by virtue of the practices involved, or is restoration implicit in the results obtained? Must we wait until a pattern of burning is established before calling the project a restoration? Does the larger, landscape scale make a difference, or is this kind of restoration functionally similar to prescribed fire on a small prairie remnant? How do we respectfully incorporate Aboriginal fire-management practices back into the landscape after decades of suppression? Mike Oxford, later a board member for the Society, drew sharp criticism for his use of the word enhanced, which it turned out meant something different in England than in the United States. Enhancement has bad connotations for many North American restorationists because it implies, as Andy Clewell put it, “ecosystems on steroids.” What Oxford had in mind was a way of emphasizing that we might be after more than merely restoring the status quo. The conversation was exposed as being decidedly North American. Can a definition of restoration be universal?

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The third duck involved the same wild forest patterns, but this time the forests were converted to farmland. The farm was retired following a few dozen years of use. It fit well with some remnant tallgrass prairies in the region, an ecosystem under considerable threat. The retired farmland will support such a prairie restoration even though records indicate it had been under forest cover prior to cultivation. Is this a duck? Sharp debate began immediately, mostly around the contention that in order to restore something it must have been there, right there, at some time in the past. Two defensive strategies were offered. First, if we go back far enough in time, when climatic conditions and regional ecological processes and structures were quite different, justification could be found for a wide range of possible alternatives. Second, what goals are appropriate to such a restoration? Nik Lopoukhine argued that a reasonable decision could be made on the basis of enhancing biodiversity; tallgrass prairies are threatened ecosystems and must be given every opportunity to flourish. Laura Jackson thought a compromise possible: “More realistically they would turn it into a savannah—choose an intermediate [alternative]—one that represents what the boundaries look like in that area, so it’s ‘duckish.’ It is an issue of scale: at the site level it’s probably creation, but within a landscape it could be restoration if it’s consistent with some sort of historic or prehistoric array of vegetation.” This particular duck raised some fundamental issues about what restoration is achieving or is supposed to achieve. The group was divided over the matter of human agency. Is a really good restoration one that we complete and then just drop out of, eradicating our presence as much as possible? Or is the highest calling for restorationists direct and continuing involvement, becoming part of the system or a member of the biotic community? Jennifer Cypher proposed that each restoration has within it three interconnected dimensions: intent, process, and product. Clarity about intentions—goals, in other words—must be achieved prior to the start of any restoration, which involves a wide array of potential ecological and cultural considerations. A reasonable process is necessary both to ensure appropriate involvement in restoration and to ensure that a project remain within normative boundaries

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of restoration (i.e., reasonable boundaries are placed around how much management is involved in securing the restoration over a longer term). Finally, the most commonly perceived and, in many ways, the traditional core of restoration is product: what actually results from restorative effort. Cypher’s point was simply that all three dimensions must be considered. The fourth duck involved some sort of vegetation mosaic altered through grazing, cutting, and agriculture. It is brought back closer to an earlier configuration but this time within a new economic system in which attention is given to small-scale harvesting of acorns, grain, mushrooms, flowers and trees, honey, and so on. Restoration in this case means reinventing a set of ecological relationships as well as a new economy. Apostol figured this would be an especially contentious duck, but almost everyone around the table agreed that with careful design, such a project could in fact be considered a model of innovative restoration. Restoration would become a way of deepening cultural relationships with the land instead of expanding institutional maintenance programs. The fifth and final duck was based on what was actually going on in Washington and Oregon, an important case for Apostol: “We start off with the same wild forest mosaic, altered through patch clear-cutting, through road building, etc. Quite a bit of original forest remains, roughly 15 to 30 percent. We’re having problems in the landscape, so we’re choosing to invest in restoration: ten to twenty thousand acres. We choose to put logs back in the stream to improve the salmon habitat, choose to take out 50 percent of the roads to reduce erosion, choose to thin plantations to improve structural diversity. . . . Is this a duck?” Opinion varied widely. Some of those still hanging on in the lateafternoon conversation suggested it would be intelligent action, but not restoration. Another approach was to say that restoration extends over a continuum and that a project like the one described would have high “duck content.” Perhaps rehabilitation would be a more appropriate term for such work. This term implies that clearly defined damaging practices are being altered to achieve specific ecological goals. As a process it may well be restorative, but the end product is not a

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restoration in the sense that the amount of effort described is insufficient to generate anything close to a restored system. Throughout that steamy afternoon in Michigan, the issue of vegetative succession arose time and time again, and at the very end Jim Harris, from England, asked how the group would react to a deliberate intervention in a grassland that had been managed pastorally for almost 1,000 years but is now threatened with successional processes. What course of action would North American restorationists counsel? Leaving it to contemporary processes would mean the end of the grassland. Intervention, either through reestablishment of previous human practices or through the development of management regimes that would mimic the former succession-arresting activities, would be required in perpetuity to ensure the vitality of such a remnant area. The answer may be found in a cultural explanation: in England, where human activity has been more pronounced for a longer time10 and such activities are regarded as crucial to national identity, restorationists would likely opt for an interventionist strategy. There is greater likelihood in North America that restorationists would opt for a hands-off approach, although such comparisons are difficult to make with any precision. It seems that the qualities of a landscape and the cultural dispositions of restorationists influence what happens on the ground. However restoration is defined, if anything like international agreement is important, it must incorporate such variation in approach. There is a remarkable amount of conceptual drift in the way restoration is understood: everything from land banking to revegetation to exotic-species control can be crammed into what appears an oversized genus. At the same time, there is an eerie silence on the internal contradictions implied by such wide use.11 Restoration means different things to different people, a circumstance that makes it difficult to describe not only what restoration is, but also more importantly, what it should be. At a very general level restoration is easy to recognize, which is why the most general metaphor-based definitions work at least passably well, but when the limits are pushed and specification is necessary, our clearest thoughts are fogged by complication. The discussions in Michigan were intended to clear the fog. When they did not, we were surprised and humbled.

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A Legacy of Definitions Dennis Martinez, founder and director of the Indigenous Peoples’ Restoration Network, and I were asked in November 1995 by the board of directors of SER to cochair the Science and Policy Working Group. It would be an overstatement to say that the board members were in the middle of the “definitions wars,” but those stalwarts had gone through official Society definitions at the rate of almost one every two years. Fatigue was evident. Another definition, one that was supposed to be foolproof, had just proved unworkable. For almost a year, Martinez and I polled the board and membership of the Society on a variety of options for an acceptable definition. We debated drafts at the Rutgers conference in 1996, and finally, in October 1996, the board voted approval of the new, official definition (more on this later). The original definition, adopted in 1990, was reasonably long lived and also the most controversial: “Ecological restoration is the process of intentionally altering a site to establish a defined, indigenous, historic ecosystem. The goal of this process is to emulate the structure, function, diversity and dynamics of the specified ecosystem.”12 This definition, and similar ones proposed in its wake, indicates lack of agreement on the most basic issues of what restoration is, and what restorationists are attempting to accomplish. For example, some argue that the standards of an earlier era should not be taken too literally, that a fixation on accuracy in this regard brushes over the issue of why one slice of time is preferable to another. Others suggest that the standards of earlier periods are simply impractical in regions where ecological evidence of past conditions is mostly erased. The use of the word indigenous tends to mask the extensive and long-running engagements that First Nations peoples have had with most of the ecosystems Euro-Americans tend to regard as having once been pristine. European restorationists puzzle over what indigenous means in their context: who or what counts as indigenous in a landscape transformed by peoples who trace their practices back more than a millennium? Other SER definitions followed. All of them, to a greater or lesser extent, reflected a balance of scientific principles and social awareness. Of course, the Society for Ecological Restoration holds no monopoly on

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definitions of restoration. One of the most widely cited definitions issued from a report of the U.S. National Research Council (NRC): Restoration is defined as the return of an ecosystem to a close approximation of its condition prior to disturbance. In restoration, ecological damage to the resource is repaired. Both the structure and the functions of the ecosystem are recreated. Merely recreating the form without the functions, or the functions in an artificial configuration bearing little resemblance to a natural resource, does not constitute restoration. The goal is to emulate a natural, functioning, selfregulating system that is integrated with the ecological landscape in which it occurs. Often, natural resource restoration requires one of the following processes: reconstruction of antecedent physical hydrologic and morphologic conditions; chemical cleanup or adjustment of the environment; and biological manipulation, including revegetation and the reintroduction of absent or currently nonviable native species.13

This definition is noteworthy for its detail and attention to the balance of functional repair and structural accuracy. However, it provides no indication of a wider cultural context for restoration practice. Bradshaw and Chadwick’s earlier definition is similar: “Restoration is used as a blanket term to describe all those activities which seek to upgrade damaged land or to re-create land that has been destroyed and to bring it back into beneficial use, in a form in which the biological potential is restored.”14 Definitions that fit this general theme of technical proficiency abound in the literature. Some restoration scientists, notably John Cairns, a long-time champion of restoration and chair of the NRC committee that produced the 1992 definition, and Daniel Janzen, an ecologist renowned for his restoration work in the dry land tropical forests of Costa Rica, blend scientific and social consideration. Cairns proposes “ecosocietal restoration, which is the process of reexamining human society’s relationship with natural systems so that repair and destruction can be balanced and, perhaps, restoration practices ultimately exceed destructive practices.”15 Janzen’s proposal for ecological and biocultural restoration in tropical ecosystems perpetuates a separation between the human and the natural, but it acknowledges a more significant symbiosis than mere economic sustainability of agroecosystems.16 Martinez pushes the integration of the human and the natural one step further in his description of

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the Sinkyone Intertribal Park project in Northern California. The region had been inhabited for millenniums by Native peoples who developed along with the ecosystems. The challenge in restoring this region is ensuring ecological health and sustainable economic activities (e.g., lowimpact logging), and renewing cultural practices. If successful, the project will result in a reinhabitation of the landscape, including cultural and economic practices that run counter to the intuitions of many restorationists. The Sinkyone project offers a model for restoration on a larger scale, one that internalizes cultural, political, economic, aesthetic, historical, and ethical practices once thought of as external to and at odds with the main work of ecological restoration.17 There are those who, having read this account of definitions, must still wonder whether the debate over an appropriate definition of restoration has important consequences for what counts as restoration practice. One clear function of definitions is demarcating what is included and what is excluded. A definition too narrow risks marginalizing restoration as too expensive and exacting within broader ecological management practices. Too broad, and the practice of restoration becomes confused with a host of potentially irrelevant initiatives. Thus, the challenge is to find an acceptable definition that manifests both ecological realities and an awareness of culturally contingent meanings. This is what Martinez and I gleaned from our conversations with restorationists when we developed an official SER definition in 1996. We wanted to ensure sufficient scope to acknowledge an expanded context, yet still provide standards that would make it possible to distinguish something that is restoration from something that is not. In the end, we could not fit the definition into a single sentence. Here is what we came up with: Ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery and management of ecological integrity. Ecological integrity includes a critical range of variability in biodiversity, ecological processes and structures, regional and historical context, and sustainable cultural practices.18

This definition, while clunky, has proved reasonably durable because it embraces a wide variety of practices while specifying core elements. It was sufficiently broad to incorporate a suite of restoration initiatives

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from around the world, from the restoration of cultural landscapes to agroecological restoration, while remaining faithful to the call to history that remains central to any restorative activity. It faltered in the end on the idea of ecological integrity, which seemed an unnecessary abstraction. In 2002, Keith Winterhalder, a retired professor of ecology at Laurentian University in Canada and a major force in the monumental restoration of the nickel mine–scarred landscape around Sudbury, Ontario, led a group of international restorationists through a review of SER definitions and policies.19 We reworked the definition again, producing a fine and reflective description of restoration: “Ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed.”20 A rich accompanying text fills in some of the gaps, and indicates the importance of diverse practices. This new definition is just right, in my view: it is sufficiently open to allow many varieties of restoration to flourish, yet gives a serious nod to historical conditions and assisted recovery. Let’s take a look at some of the core concepts bound up with these definitions (1996 and 2002). Process and Product We can view restoration either as product or as process. A focus on product implies an interest in what results from the act of restoration, a recovered salt marsh for example. In one sense this is exactly what should be valued. A restoration project is effective if it achieves specific objectives and results in a functioning, intact ecosystem.21 This is only part of the picture, however. If we take a simple view of ecological time, an ecosystem stretches along a continuum from a defined, relevant past to the present, and then extends beyond our immediate reach into the future. At any given instant, that ecosystem exists as a unique ensemble of structures and patterns. Viewing it as a continuous function comprising each and every instant, the act of restoration is an intervention that may be of remarkably brief duration (e.g., fencing a site to remove a particular disturbance), or an activity in perpetuity, depending on the amount of management required. Whatever the exact conditions, restoration is always a process of transition, a continuous coming

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into being of an ecosystem. To think of restoration as a product alone is to miss the significance of all the conditions and activities along the way. Another way of approaching this is to understand that restoration is never finished in a strict sense. We can decide to call a restoration project complete when certain objectives have been met, a particular time line is achieved, or natural processes seem to be functioning well without further human intervention. But these are arbitrary decisions. A process-oriented view of restoration is natural for ecologists, who are used to thinking of ecosystems as dynamic entities. The matter is muddied when it comes time to evaluate restoration projects. What are we grading: the process, the product, or both? A reliance on performance standards tends to focus attention on restoration-asproduct. Is the hydrological regime reinstated? Is the full complement of plant communities thriving? Are weedy invasive species under control? There are several problems in thinking too much about product and not enough about process. First, there is a tendency to overlook the significance of the process itself. For instance, did the project empower local community members? What was learned scientifically from the project? Were new practitioners trained? Such considerations have tended to hover at the margins of traditional evaluation techniques. Second, a focus on product obscures the potential long-term management of the project. Some projects will require restorative interventions forever, a consequence of coevolving with people. Hence, some restorations are never complete. Third, our patience is sorely tried in a consumer society where final products of any kind matter more than the background conditions of production necessary to bring them about. If it were otherwise, we would be much more concerned about sources of production, unfair labor practices, and environmental devastation of the “majority world” countries. The product, or commodity, whether in the form of a Twinkies or a salt marsh, is what makes most sense to us in the early twenty-first century. The commodification of ecosystems is likely to take place, and become codified or institutionalized, at least in advanced industrial societies with the advent of mitigation practices, ecological theme parks, and corporate restorations (more on this in chapter 5). This mindset will lead to a focus on efficiency of production of restored ecosystems,

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because the conditions necessary to bring them about will not be particularly important to us. Assisted Recovery Restorationists are merely agents in the process of recovery. It would be arrogant to imagine that we are capable of dictating the outcome of ecological processes; at best, we participate in these processes. We remove dams, install stream structures, clean up excess nutrient inflows, remove weedy species, introduce extirpated organisms, and so on. Recovery refers to the biogeochemical processes that allow an ecosystem to return to conditions that prevailed prior to disturbance. Recovery is something that can happen without direct human agency. A grassland that is used as a horse pasture will recover once the horses are removed. Of course, much depends on the level of herbivory and the extent of establishment of exotic species. Without the return of other ecological processes—for example, the frequent low-intensity fires that are a characteristic process in many grassland ecosystems—successional processes will slowly convert the grassland to scrubland and forest. All of this can occur without human intervention. Restoration, then, is fundamentally about assisted recovery, and this works in two primary ways. First, restorationists work to accelerate natural processes, creating conditions in an instant that might take years, decades, or centuries to occur without intervention. Second, recovery processes are directed toward specific ends determined by the restorationist. These ends, or goals, are based on a host of factors, principally ecological but also economic, social, cultural, political, and moral. An important theoretical question is where the lower line is drawn between restoration and recovery: What is the minimal amount of intervention required? Suppose a forest were removed to make way for a housing development, except that the development never proceeded and the land was given over to unassisted succession. After thirty years, a shrub successional cover had replaced the early pioneer herbaceous layer. After 100 years the land had begun to resemble what had been present before the clearing activities. Presumably, left long enough (200 years or more, depending on the location and type of ecosystem), the land would

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recover to resemble the approximate functions and structures of a former era. Under certain conditions, such recovery would bring the ecosystem back to its purported original condition, although in many other cases, successional paths would not necessarily lead back quickly or at all to what might have been there as a result of thousands of years of slow succession and minimal disturbance.22 Cases such as this are everywhere: abandoned lots and farms, changing land uses, decommissioning of facilities. One of the most dramatic and well-documented changes in landtenure and land-use patterns occurred in the Northeastern United States, producing what Bill McKibben, a popular American environmental writer, terms an “explosion of green”: Less than two centuries later [following intensive logging and agriculture], despite great increases in the state’s population, 90 percent of New Hampshire is covered by forest. Vermont was 35 percent woods in 1850 and is 80 percent today, and even Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have seen woodlands rebound to the point where they cover nearly three fifths of southern New England. This process, which began as farmers abandoned the cold and rocky pastures of the East for the fertile fields of the Midwest, has not yet run its course. . . . By the 1960s and 1970s, the pattern of forest, fields, and pastures was similar to that prior to 1800, its appearance much like it must have been prior to the American Revolution.23

This autogenic reforestation—that is, restoration that takes place without direct human intervention—was unintentional, and represents not much more than secondary succession in reasonably resilient forested ecosystems. No one sat down to design targets for forest cover or enacted legislation. It happened as a result of the specific ecological conditions (rich soils, temperate climate), economic transitions, the mobility of agriculturists, and the spread of rural nonfarm estates. It is also very much dependent on the ecological conditions of Eastern North American forests, which have allowed for such a recovery. The view looks different, for example, in the Midwest, where exotic plants able to thrive on degraded soils have carpeted abandoned prairies. Not all is well in the Eastern, forested Arcadia, and much of McKibben’s article describes the current assault on the recovered forests. Industrial logging has picked up at a breathtaking pace, resulting in large-scale fragmentation of the Eastern states. Despite deliberate reforestation efforts, not much thought is being given to the overall pattern

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of land use or ecological considerations on a landscape scale. McKibben describes the work of citizens and members of the Wildlands project who are mapping both ecological features and the forces of fragmentation to show opportunities for restoration. Their goal is to return the land to conditions resembling wilderness, defined here as the conditions that existed prior to intensive industrial use of the land. There is one problem that McKibben does not pursue: habitat and species diversity. The fact that unassisted reforestation has taken place over the past century does not guarantee the return of the same or similar species and habitat types. We should certainly celebrate the unassisted recovery of the Eastern forests, but we should not necessarily assume that this constitutes an act of restoration. More should be attributed to the work of restorationists that McKibben describes as “the new defenders,” people who are consciously trying to return the land to earlier, healthier conditions. Recovery is a better term than restoration to describe what has happened in the Eastern forests of North America. Recovery assumes that autonomous processes produce an integral ecosystem. Recovery does not assume that the recovered land is necessarily restored in the sense of historical fidelity. In some limited cases, the term unassisted restoration is appropriate when the autonomous recovery processes have produced something indistinguishable from what had been present prior to the disturbance. At the point where recovery approaches restoration, sharp distinctions are nearly impossible. This is why the safest convention, terminologically, is to assume that restoration must involve human intention or agency. In cases where ecological processes have worked unassisted, recovery is an appropriate blanket term. Several years ago in a lecture in which I presented some concerns about the growing technological character of ecological restoration, a group of students from Germany took me to task over the very idea of restoration. They argued that restoration is simply another arrogation of nature, and that our accelerated technological culture is dissatisfied with waiting the length of time—in many cases more than a single lifetime—for autogenic restoration. I agree in some respects: we are impatient and sometimes undertake restoration projects as much because they satisfy our own interests as they do ecological interests (see chapter 5). However,

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the presupposition of the German students that natural recovery processes will return an ecosystem to predisturbance norms is questionable. It may hold true in limited circumstances, but ecosystems choked by exotic species, contaminated by persistent toxins, or blocked successionally have difficulty returning to earlier norms on their own. Intervention is necessary if the goal is to reach back to ecosystems that have become rare because of human actions. For example, the spirelike white pines (Pinus strobus) were logged extensively on the Bruce Peninsula (Ontario, Canada) in the nineteenth century, first to supply ship masts to the British Navy and later by merchant seafarers and farmers eager for cleared land, and they have never recovered. The ecological conditions for regeneration are no longer present, and other species have taken over. Where white pines once defined the peninsula, few are found today. Only restoration efforts—careful replanting and forest management— will bring them back. I am wary of medical analogies for restoration, but one way of looking at this is as parallel to the relationship between health-care provider and patient. In a case of severe illness, where life is critically threatened, medical intervention allows the body’s recovery processes a chance to work. Without the intervention the person would die. In less severe cases, the natural recovery processes are able to work more effectively and autonomously with minimal intervention. In some cases, for instance with a mild virus, the body’s own recovery processes are sufficient to regain health without external intervention, although patterns are changed to accommodate the recovery processes (i.e., increased sleep, change in diet). Restorationists, like health-care providers, must respect the capacity of recovery processes and work sensitively with them to restore integrity. To believe that ecological recovery processes on their own will always work is like believing that human health can be guaranteed without intervention. This is naive. In assisting recovery, restorationists cannot avoid leaving their mark on an ecosystem. Successful restoration depends on setting clear goals that can be tracked and evaluated. These goals are typically ecological, but underlying motivations and explicit interests almost guarantee that a restoration project will reflect some of the values of the restorationist. There are two ways of looking at this, one that maintains that the job

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of restoration should be to suppress the imprint of the restorationist as much as possible, and the other being that the role of the restorationist should be acknowledged and even celebrated. Much depends on basic views about the relationship between people and ecosystems. If one regards human agency as separate from and incompatible with ecological integrity, restoration must be about minimizing personal involvement in the restorative process. I prefer to see restoration as a way of bringing people into a more engaged relationship with nature, the kind that is possible when hands dig in dirt, transplant trees, pull weeds, and water newly seeded slopes. Management The idea that restored ecosystems require follow-up management—in some cases ongoing management to meet specific objectives—is difficult for many to accept. Management was a controversial component of the 1996 SER definition that was removed in 2002. Removing the word does not remove the problem: many restoration projects require ongoing intervention for long-term success. According to conventional beliefs, restoration is about assisted recovery only, meaning that the task of the restorationist is to intervene as little as possible and for as short a duration as feasible. Once the immediate work of creating the conditions necessary for recovery are completed, the restorationist steps aside and allows ecological processes to assume the lead. Unfortunately, in many cases, this model fails in reality. Restoration is frequently about the protection of relict sites, rare flora and fauna, and ecosystems at risk. In such cases, it is often necessary to arrest successional processes in order to maintain desired objectives (e.g., protection of a rare species). Consider the work of Sperry and others at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum beginning in the 1930s. The bold experiments with grassland restoration depended crucially on regular prescribed fires to prevent succession to shrubland. The relative rarity of grasslands made restoration of these ecosystems a priority and ongoing management of the ecosystems essential for long-term protection. Such decisions are analogous to learning that eating animals depends on killing them. Perhaps this

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analogy is too stark, but there are certainly cases where restoration requires excruciating moral choices. Take the decision by managers in Banff National Park to restore bull trout to Moraine Lake. Few lakes are better known in Canada. For years, an image of the lake graced the back of Canada’s $10 bill. Fed by glaciers and close to a highway, it has both breathtaking views and accessibility to recommend it. What few know is the extent to which aquatic ecosystems in Banff have been altered by the introduction of exotic fish species, notably brook trout and splake (a hybridized trout) for enhanced angling. Moraine Lake’s complement of vertebrate and invertebrate species is utterly different now than it was a few decades ago, and the bull trout, native to the lake, lost out to more competitive, fisher-friendly species. Restoring bull trout to the lake means more than simply reintroducing these fish. They would be unable to compete against more aggressive, exotic trout. The restoration plan proposed by park officials involved sustained net fishing to remove as many of the exotic trout as possible, and then poisoning the remaining individuals to make way for the bull-trout reintroduction. One can imagine the uproar: Animal rights group decry the plan as cruel. Local environmentalists divide over the issue, confused as to whether their values should support killing in the interest of restoration. Anglers wonder why one challenging game fish needs to be replaced by a less interesting one, even if it is native. Craig Ritchie, editor of Real Fishing magazine, commented, “You’re removing trout and putting in trout. You end up with the same thing—trout in a lake.”24 This is not true. Yes, one species of trout replaces another, but the entire aquatic ecosystem in Moraine Lake changes in response to the characteristics of predator species. Restoration can, and often does, involve painful management decisions. Some will claim that such tragic choices in the restoration of ecosystems and follow-up management are wrong in the same way that killing animals for food is wrong. This is certainly one of the prime reasons why we ought to be concerned about the propriety of restoration. Whether one refuses to eat animals, there is little question that animal rights movements have sensitized people to the need for showing respect to animals and minimizing harm to them. Similarly, those who have qualms about

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decisive, harmful actions, whether killing off exotic fish in a lake, eliminating a population of ungulates whose sheer numbers contribute to overgrazing, or conducting intensive prescribed fires, urge caution in the restoration community. No matter how much we might want to absent ourselves from continued involvement in the life of an ecosystem, there are occasions where doing so would reflect the greatest disregard for ecological integrity. We learn from our actions only if we are attentive to their consequences, and in the case of restoration, long-term monitoring of a site is vital. Once the immediate task of restoration is complete—that is, once the explicit goals have been met according to a predetermined schedule—a long-term suite of monitoring protocols ought to be introduced to ascertain the extent to which the original goals are maintained. I prefer to think of management in restoration as a negotiated process between restorationists and ecological processes. If one presumes management to imply control, this will result in restorations that fail because of overdetermination and artificiality. At the other end of the spectrum, those who hold that ecological processes are endlessly adaptable and do not require management are simply avoiding a hard lesson: some human intrusions are irrecoverable without further human artifice, so that human agency is sometimes a good thing. Between these two extremes is a participatory—some might call it coevolutionary—process wherein restorationists are working in conjunction with ecological processes with skill, intelligence, and appropriate modesty. In choosing to include the idea of management in the 1996 SER definition, we took the risk of offending the sensibilities of those who believe that restoration is simply about giving nature a little nudge. Restoration is, for better or worse, more complicated, and acknowledging ongoing human responsibility is vital in building an ethical notion of restoration. Historical Range of Variability Paradoxically, restoration is an awkward term for what we do under the banner of ecological restoration. One of the dictionary definitions examined earlier referred to bringing something back “to a previous, original, or normal condition.” Such a meaning works well for paintings, old

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buildings, or the Sistine Chapel, because the ultimate goal is present under layers of grime or soil. The object may be damaged, the exact conditions of its creation unknown, but seldom is the goal in question. The matter is more complicated for ecological restorationists. The subjects of ecological restoration are ecosystems, and these are in constant motion. Depending on how abstract one wishes to get, an ecosystem is changing in accordance with scripted predictability in terms of processes such as vegetation succession and also in response to stochastic processes such as wind, flooding, fire, human activity, species invasions, and a host of complicated interactions that so far have defied understanding. These processes, at least in their manifold interactions, are likely to remain mysteries. Developing systems have no true point of origin or specific moment of creation. Thus, restoring an ecosystem involves an arbitrary choice of historical conditions, to the extent that history is of interest in the restoration process. Trickier still is the fact that stochastic processes make the precise trajectory of an ecosystem unpredictable. Even if we could erase the past disturbances that give rise to a restoration project, there is no assurance that we would know how the undisturbed ecosystem would play out over time. The difficulty in determining appropriate reference conditions, whether a fixed historical point in time or a suite of specific ecological conditions, is one of the central challenges in ecological restoration. Two concepts have become useful in our efforts to deal with these issues. Historical range of variability refers to a reasonable long-term boundary on change; we can determine this and use it to situate specific restoration objectives. Closely related is the idea of reference conditions, which are historical inferences drawn from records or remnant ecosystems. These concepts are the focus of chapter 4. Sustainable Cultural Practices Arguably the most radical aspect of the 1996 SER definition was the embedding of the phrase “sustainable cultural practices” in the definition of ecological integrity. Implicit in the Western technological and scientific worldview, now dominant and spreading quickly, is a rift between

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nature and culture. Whether this emerged from Judeo-Christian religious teachings as some have argued, or from an innate capacity for communicative consciousness as Murray Bookchin has argued, the facts point to a sharp separation between humanity, which incorporates all the intelligence, activities, and products of people, and nature, which is often defined negatively as everything else.25 This divide runs through almost everything we do and represent. Our institutions reflect it in the ways we wall ourselves off from natural processes, or compartmentalize nature through indoor plants, nature programming on television, and other simulations and references. The separation between nature and culture is so much a part of how we see the world that the greatest challenge is an imaginative one, to conjure the world without such a duality—or alternatively, to fundamentally change the relationship between people and nature. The boundary between nature and culture, wild and domestic, has been increasingly challenged. Adherents of deep ecology, social ecology, and ecofeminism, not to mention anthropologists who assail such rigid dualisms, have opened the way for a broader social questioning of what nature means. The conceptual positions have become complicated and difficult to resolve: Is it best to acknowledge, as anthropocentrists do, that all value making extends from us by definition and our obligation therefore is to act as enlightened stewards? Or do we adopt an ecocentric position, wherein value extends across all existence? Ecological restoration is difficult to fit into any conventional category. A special communion forms when people literally dig into the earth to reverse a tide of degradation, atone for past actions, seek a new way of relating to things other than human, or enjoy the pleasure of good company and good work. Such intervention flies in the face of deep ecology, for instance, because it could be seen as arrogant. Traditional preservationists are unnerved by the possibility that restoration does sometimes justify development. Industrialists blink at the high cost of restoration and fear increasing demands for reparation. There are ecocentric and anthropocentric restorationists, but no one position at this point is more compelling. One can be an enlightened anthropocentrist, meaning that restoration is about making the most of distinctly human capacities. Restoration can also be biocentric in the sense of erasing the

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boundaries between culture and nature by adopting, as much as possible, value systems that privilege nonhumans. Ecological restoration has perhaps stirred more debate among environmental philosophers than any other single issue. People of all political persuasions support restoration. They do so because of widespread agreement on the salutary products of these efforts. The process of restoration, however, tends to change minds about the role of people in ecosystems. It is not sufficient to think of restoration as simply a scientific or technical practice. Restoration has inherent democratic potential that requires nourishment from local participatory practice (chapter 6).26 For good restoration to flourish— good in the sense of ecological and cultural integrity—any definition must be expanded to incorporate sustainable cultural practices. Everyone who has been involved in a restoration project can tell a story of cultural integration, whether it be the group of university and high school students building and placing revetments along a stream in Pullman, Washington, on a Saturday morning, or the recovery of lost knowledge of the land that comes from restoring the Mattole River watershed in Northern California.27 The stories that began as rivulets now flow as a wide river. Dennis Martinez asks; “What do we want to restore? We want to restore life. We want to restore the living and sacred relationship between the people and the earth. We want to restore our spirits as we restore the land. We want to restore our culture, our songs, our myths and stories, and the Indian names for creeks and springs. We want to restore ourselves.”28 There are concerns, to be sure, about adding the concept of sustainable cultural practice to the core of ecological restoration. How do we distinguish between cultural practices that honor participation, modesty, and humility and those that aim to emblazon human pride, greed, and arrogance on nature? How do we ensure that a fixation on human values does not swamp the wisdom of ecologists? There are no easy answers. The surest way is through examining the lessons that flow from practice. This is what Freeman House, in his book Totem Salmon, tries to do with respect to the restoration of the Mattole River watershed, and it is what the more personal account by Stephanie Mills of her life on the northern peninsula of Michigan, In Service of the Wild, offers. We

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can glean a few general lessons, although these cannot be converted to formulas. Participation is crucial in restoration, if only to ensure the long-term survival of a project. Humility is necessary to ward off the tendency to believe that restoration is merely a technical challenge and follows prescribed rules. Reflection ensures that we think before we act, and also that what we know and live by stands up to constant inquiry. I borrow Tony Bradshaw’s idea that restoration is an “acid test” for ecology, although my use of this idea is more general. To enhance our knowledge of ecology is to understand the mutual dependency of ecological and cultural integrity, and this is the acid test of ecological restoration. Ecological Integrity The concept of ecological integrity anchored SER’s 1996 definition of restoration and has become a central concept in many contemporary conservation policies. It was jettisoned, however, in the 2002 definition because it constituted an abstraction that in itself required definition. This is a valid complaint, but I remain drawn to the intuitive and metaphorical appeal of ecological integrity. At the very root of integrity is the notion of wholeness, which in the context of conservation and restoration suggests that the goal ought to be the creation of whole, intact systems. James Kay, a systems theorist at the University of Waterloo, proposes that integrity is an all-encompassing term for the various features—resiliency, elasticity, stress response, and so on—that allow an ecosystem to adjust to environmental change: “Integrity should be seen as an umbrella concept that integrates these many different characteristics of an ecosystem, which, when taken together, describe an ecosystem’s ability to maintain its organization.”29 Ecological integrity is closely related to biological integrity, defined by the U.S. ecologists Paul Angermeier and James Karr as “native species populations in their historic variety and numbers naturally interacting in naturally structured biotic communities.”30 There have been two main approaches to defining restoration, both amplifying the idea of ecological integrity. The first emphasizes interpretive descriptions of what restoration should be. The writings of

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William Jordan III, Stephanie Mills, and Freeman House provide typical lyrical accounts of this nature. The second approach consists of analytic descriptions, mostly in the form of models that describe practice and build theory. The French restoration ecologist James Aronson and his colleagues have proposed measurable indices of ecological and environmental factors (including human activities) in the form of vital ecosystem attributes and vital landscape attributes.31 These attributes can be used to assess the degree of degradation of ecosystems, providing a way of measuring the degree to which restoration projects reach their objectives on an ecosystem and landscape scale. The development of a clear list of relevant indicators is a crucial way of advancing restoration science, and when combined with interpretive accounts, this system promises to be a useful tool.32 Nonetheless, these are relatively early attempts at providing transferable, general ecological principles for restoration. R. J. Hobbs and D. A. Norton lament: “What is clear is that restoration ecology has largely progressed on an ad hoc, site- and situation-specific basis, with little development of general theory or principles that would allow the transfer of methodologies from one situation to another.”33 It will take time to develop such a framework, and no framework is likely to be universally valid for all types of ecosystems, locales, and circumstances. What we might best hope for are a series of ecotype- or region-specific frameworks that provide effective advice for on-the-ground restorationists. What of the notion of ecological health, which is clearly a close contender with ecological integrity for the most pleasing target for whole ecosystems? In the 1990s the idea of ecosystem health caught on as a way of defining appropriate goals for ecological management. In some respects, ecosystem health is a more intuitive metaphor, for it focuses attention on notions of human health. On a purely metaphorical level, health carries much weight. It connotes a condition for ecosystems (and humans) that we understand to be positive. However, as a deterministic concept it fails. Definitions of human health are notoriously difficult to articulate; they often end up producing a cluster of evaluative terms that provide guidance but little quantitative specificity. Likewise, there is so much variation in ecosystems that criteria for ascertaining health are either too broad to be practically useful, or too specific to capture a full

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range of meaning. Not only do ecosystems change, but so also do our notions of what counts as healthy. Where, for example, will our views be positioned decades from now about weedy and exotic species? Will we be so overwhelmed by invasions on native flora and fauna that we will declare all-out war on such species, increasing the stringency of this one measure of ecosystem health? Or will we concede defeat to weeds and other flora and fauna, adopting a sophisticated control strategy that largely accepts them? The point is that our criteria for ecosystem health will change over time, and any rigid attempt to define them is doomed to failure. Angermeier and Karr make the distinction between integrity and health this way: “Integrity implies an unimpaired condition or the quality or state of being complete or undivided; it implies correspondence with some original condition. . . . Health, on the other hand, implies a flourishing condition, well-being, vitality, or prosperity.”34 An ecosystem may be healthy without necessarily having what Angermeier and Karr would think of as “original” integrity—that is, the features of the predisturbance state. One could weigh in on either side of the debate as regards ecological restoration, but integrity incorporates the idea of recovering previous conditions. If we are to arbitrate between two compelling metaphorical descriptions of ecological restoration, I choose integrity over health. The Evolution of Words and Worlds This tour through definitions of ecological restoration highlights the difficulty of defining this and similar terms. Ecological restoration is a process as much as a product, aimed at assisting the recovery of whole ecosystems. Restorationists work in concert with ecological processes. Definitions change to reflect changing circumstances and beliefs: evolution, after all, acts on words as well as worlds. But my intuition is that no matter how the definition changes, two principles will remain central to restoration: ecological integrity and historical fidelity. If ecological restorationists want to identify the core concepts of their field, surely these two ideas, above all, must be cited. (In chapters 6 and 7, however, I explore two additional core concepts: focal practice and design).

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Once the core concepts of a practice have been identified, it becomes possible to establish concrete standards and goals. What is the perfect restoration project, the gold standard, the one against which all others are measured? This is a misleading question. It suggests a productoriented view of restoration, which is only one part of describing a project. Martinez shouted out a comment from the floor at the philosophy session at SER’s 2000 conference in Liverpool: “Has anyone ever seen a completed restoration project? Would someone please show me?” He is good at asking devilishly obvious questions. Certainly specific goals can be achieved and monitoring requirements met, but in the life of that ecosystem, in the lives of all the organisms who make their home in that place, humans included, the restoration is seamless. A simple test, which I term the fidelity test, helps make this point.35 Imagine an intact but isolated, temperate mixed-forest ecosystem contiguous to one that has been disturbed significantly through logging, other intrusive human activities, invasions of weedy species, and so on. Suffice it to say that most regard the first forest as integral and the second as needing restoration. A talented interdisciplinary team of scientists, naturalists, and volunteers spends many hours studying the intact woodland as a reference site. They develop a set of specific objectives for restoration for the other woodland site, involving weed removal, restricted herbicide use, physical alteration of certain site and structural features, planting, and selective harvesting. The plan is implemented completely and a rigorous follow-up maintenance and management program is put in place to ensure adherence to objectives. Time passes, say 200 years. A crack team of future restoration scientists, armed with the best analytic equipment, experience, and knowledge, is dispatched to the two sites. Despite their extensive preparations, they are not given any information about the history of the two ecosystems. An exhaustive investigation is conducted into forest structure, soil conditions, nutrient cycling, species richness, spatial characteristics, and other characteristics that shape an ecosystem. The team holds a meeting and then delivers a verdict. If more than a simple majority of members picks either the wrong woodland as the restored one or cannot decide which is which, the restoration is considered a perfect success.

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Or is it? This test stretches the limits of plausibility—age structure alone might be a dead giveaway. A practical problem plagues the test, too. Should the comparison be based on the reference ecosystem at the time of disturbance or in the future when the test is completed? These ecosystems are in a continual process of change. If the disturbance time is chosen, how is it possible to gather sufficient data to properly inform the scientists of the future? Moreover, is there any reason restoration ought to be tested purely by fidelity to a reference ecosystem? Shouldn’t the goals established by the restorationists, which will include specific ecological objectives but perhaps also cultural ones, be the primary basis for measurement? Ultimately, the perfectibility of restoration depends either on duplication, which is uninspiring and unattainable, or on a culturally contingent view of nature. What counts as good restoration is shaped by a combination of two aspects of ecological integrity and historical fidelity: a measurable component based on a priori criteria; and an evaluative component that conditions what is worth considering in the first place. Both of these measures, however, are ultimately linked to changing value systems. It is inevitable that what we regard as important to measure will shift over time. Consider ecological integrity and historical fidelity as resting on two connected, sliding scales. At one end are projects, fictitious and unattainable, that have remarkable integrity (according to predetermined measures) and exact fidelity to historical conditions. At the other extreme are projects wherein integrity is stretched to the limit of plausibility, and historical fidelity is merely a faint trace (figure 3.2). Somewhere along the two lines—no doubt a shifting location to reflect the evolutionary processes described above—is the divide that separates restoration projects from those that do not meet minimal criteria. All projects to the right of the dividing line are restoration projects, some of which meet the twin criteria of ecological integrity and historical fidelity more closely than others. Notice how I say more closely, not better. So many factors can influence what determines a good restoration project, and these vary from region to region and project to project. A successful restoration project in a complicated agroecosystem, such as the riverine meadows in the Slovak Republic (see chapter 2), will depend on different measures of success than the Kissimmee River restoration in

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Ecological integrity

Historical fidelity Minimum (no integrity and fidelity)

Maximum (greatest integrity and fidelity) Minimal condition for restoration

Figure 3.2 A restoration project is defined by its location along two scales, ecological integrity and historical fidelity. The dashed line shows the minimal conditon required for identification of a legitimate restoration project; beyond this line a project would be described as something else—for example, as a reclamation project.

Florida. Both are good projects and would stack up well under slightly different criteria. Integrity is a familiar term, but fidelity is a novel word in an ecological context. To be faithful to something means to be loyal and trustworthy, and also to be true and accurate. The second meaning applies well to the challenge of ecological restoration. Historical fidelity means loyalty to predisturbance conditions, which may or may not involve exact reproduction—remember that there are social, economic, cultural, political, aesthetic, and moral goals from the present to factor in as well. What I like about the idea of fidelity is that it encourages us to be true to whatever goals we have set for ourselves and for ecosystems, which may involve backing off from the standard of perfect historical fidelity. The absence or unreliability of historical data, lack of availability of appropriate personnel and seed/plant stock, and shortfalls of cash, in addition to other factors, limit what is attainable for any particular site. Once aware of such limitations, we do the best we can by trying to be true to our judgments. Our judgments are never fully given over to ecological realities; they are set within a complicated matrix of changing

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values. We act as proxies for ecosystems, doing what we think is best given a wide array of possible approaches. There is no way of escaping such human contrivance. The term fidelity was key to an earlier attempt to describe good restoration. In my 1997 Conservation Biology article, I argue that fidelity comprises three subsidiary principles: structural/compositional replication, functional success, and durability.36 Structural/compositional replication most closely manifests the goal of fidelity. A restored ecosystem must strongly resemble the structure and composition of an appropriate reference ecosystem. Functional success is inextricably tied to compositional and structural replication; neither is possible over time without the other. The ecosystem must align ecologically with the system it is designed to reproduce. Biogeochemical processes must operate normally according to the expectations of the specific ecosystem (e.g., flushing rates, ion exchanges, decomposition). Functional success usually depends on management. Durability is a key criterion for evaluating and determining the success of a restoration. For a restoration to be successful— that is, to achieve the overall goal of fidelity—it must hold up over a significant period of time, significant being defined relative to the type of ecosystem. Resilience is considered an important criterion of a successful restoration project. Many would subsume this quality under durability, but I would suggest that an ecosystem can be resilient and still not be durable. For example, external site pressures such as wholesale invasion by weedy species may overpower even the most resilient ecosystem without management. The need to strike a balance between longevity and expediency when setting performance criteria often creates difficulties for regulatory institutions beyond what they are typically equipped to handle. My earlier model of ecological fidelity still works, but it is not as powerful or clear as a combined model of ecological integrity and historical fidelity. We still face the challenge of effectively incorporating cultural values and practices in a model of ecological restoration. It remains to be seen whether this can be done well with only the two core principles of ecological integrity and historical fidelity. These issues are taken up again in chapter 6.

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Perhaps it is a little late to ask this rather obvious if vexing question: Is restoration the term and concept we want? I have found it awkward when explaining ecological restoration to those new to the practice to occasionally have to concede that restoration is a misleading and ultimately confusing term. Most people gravitate to definitions that fit art or architectural restoration—that is, a return to a prior or original state. We know that such a static notion does not fit the intentions of ecological restorationists. Moreover, unless one is willing to adopt a very strict definition—a tack that the Society for Ecological Restoration has avoided—the conventional notions of restoration do not fit ongoing practice well. Given the choice, I would not promote the term restoration in describing the broad array of projects underway. There are better terms: reparation, which looks backward, or regeneration, which looks forward. This opens two options. One is to accept restoration as an umbrella term for a wide variety of practices, not an infinitely wide set but broader than that encompassed by the austere, historically precise notion of restoration. The other approach is to carve out a narrow niche for restoration and develop a more inclusive term for the wider array. Theoretically, I favor the latter alternative, but the former is more realistic, given the already-ubiquitous use of restoration. As a pragmatist at heart, I will work at both levels, advancing this presently untenable theoretical position with the hope that it may flourish in the future, and simultaneously promoting the cause of ecological restoration as presently defined. Again, we ought to be concerned about the finer points of definition and terminology because they will ultimately affect how restoration is practiced. Back in the 1980s when the field was beginning to coalesce, William Jordan and others recognized the problem of terminology. He and John Aber favored the more flexible (although no less confusing) term synthetic ecology to convey the constructive purpose of restoration as a new experimental paradigm for ecology. Vestiges of this approach appear in the subtitle of one of the earliest publications on the concept of restoration, Restoration Ecology: A Synthetic Approach to Ecological Research.37 Jordan, Gilpin, and Aber were resisting the conventional notion of restoration, that unswerving dedication to the past as if

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ecosystems were obscure paintings and all that was necessary was to remove years of accumulated grime. A balance is required between a historicism that acknowledges the guiding role history plays in recovering ecosystems, and a pragmatism that allows a measure of autonomy for practitioners to work in the present. The best way forward—that is, the latter path—is to ensure that ecological restoration is defined in a way that simultaneously honors ecological integrity and historical fidelity, excludes practices that undermine these core ideals, and enlarges the prospect of people living respectfully in and around restored places.

4 Historicity and Reference in Ecological Restoration

Of course, nature, unlike a tapestry, also continues to evolve through time: even without human-imposed changes, nature does not remain static. —Peter White and Joan Walker, “Approximating Nature’s Variation” Find refuge in change. —Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge

I focus on history in this chapter because it seems the more precarious of the two apparent underpinnings of restoration, the other being ecological integrity. We know that ecosystems are in constant motion; so too does restoration as a practice change over time. This dynamism creates problems for restorationists: Does restoration depend on historical authenticity, and should it? The demands created by history cause some practitioners and observers to draw away from restoration, believing that historical fidelity is unreasonable or too expensive to emulate. Some people may begin to wonder whether the past really needs to exert pressure on the present and future. It we allow a role for history, how will our understanding of authenticity change over time? To what point in history does one anchor one’s plans? Is such precision necessary? The vexing problem of fixing historical conditions, or not, for restoration is well known and lies at the heart of restoration theory and practice. It is less common to acknowledge that our beliefs about restoration change, too. My point is a simple one: restoration can shift in the future in many ways. It can become more attuned to cultural practices, operate on multiple scales simultaneously, move away gradually from the straightjacket implied by rigid historical structures, or be undertaken by private rather than public interests. But it must not abandon history entirely. If it does, we will be giving in too much to the capricious nature of contemporary judgment.

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In a conversation with two ardent and accomplished graduate students studying restoration ecology, I asked whether history mattered to them. They were unequivocal in asserting that the past is an impediment to executing effective projects. For them, creating a functional stream where only a polluted one existed previously was of paramount importance, not the niceties of historical fidelity. Their response rested on their belief in the importance of restoring ecological integrity, though they admitted that in a world of more complete information, history would count in their plans and actions. I thought perhaps that they would see their work as contradicting restoration, but no such dilemma appeared; for them their work was ecological restoration. This may be an isolated example, but I suspect it is not. Most restorationists assume history matters. However, the central place of history in ecological restoration needs to be understood, criticized, and defended, not assumed. This chapter, therefore, is about history, or more properly historicity—that which pertains to historical fidelity.1 There are three reasons for taking historicity seriously: nostalgia and the knowledge this brings of a better past; the capacity to create continuous stories that inform our understanding of a place, or what I call narrative continuity; and depth of time (each of these three concepts will be clarified later). On a more practical level, I also explore the idea of reference ecosystems—historical or contemporary ecosystems that can guide the work of restorationists—a troublesome if crucial concept in restoration in which history is a central figure. The idea of a reference ecosystem is not new, but it has yet to be thoroughly articulated by restoration ecologists.2 I extend the meaning of reference ecosystems to incorporate human as well as ecological presence, or rather to see human presence as an aspect of ecological presence (this view is elaborated in chapter 6). Let’s return to Jasper National Park for a glimpse of how historical information helps (or confounds) restoration. Photographing the Past Jeanine Rhemtulla uncovered a collection of photographs in July 1996 that would change the course of her life and also the way we understand the history of Jasper National Park. Eighty-one years earlier, in the late

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spring of 1915, Morrison Parsons Bridgland, a Dominion Land Surveyor in the employ of the Canadian federal government, and his crew of six men arrived in the upper Athabasca Valley after an arduous rail journey from Ottawa, the nation’s capital 2,000 miles to the east. Bridgland was an accomplished mountain climber and earlier an acolyte of A. O. Wheeler, a senior surveyor and cofounder of the Alpine Club of Canada. The task in front of Bridgland was to climb as many promontories, mostly mountain peaks, as possible, and take careful photographs and measurements that could later be used to chart the first topographic maps of Jasper. Canadians were international leaders at the time in the use of photographic techniques for surveying and map production. Conventional survey techniques using transits and short lines of sight were tedious and slow in the rugged terrain of the Rocky Mountains. Edouard DeVille was appointed Surveyor General of the Dominion Land Survey in 1885, and with his appointment came innovative surveying techniques that included the use of phototopographic surveying. By combining photographs, precise angular and locational observations, and arduous geometry to plot the lines of topographic relief, much more land could be surveyed in less time, leading to the widespread use of photographic techniques in the first decade of the twentieth century. The efficiency was so great that costs were reduced in some cases by an order of magnitude. The result was a wholesale change in techniques for surveying mountainous and hilly regions in western Canada, and such a transformation makes a nearly perfect historical study of technologically induced obsolescence.3 Bridgland honed his techniques, and later wrote a handbook of photographic surveying.4 During the summer and autumn of 1915, supervising two crews, a total of ninety-two survey stations were established (several of which were at different points on the same mountain and a few at ground level). From each point they took at least four, and as many as sixteen, photographs and conventional compass and theodolite (an optical survey instrument for measuring horizontal and vertical angles) measurements. A number of the ascents were challenging, especially with mountaineering techniques of the time, and many were first ascents. These were done without the aid of the roads, manicured trails, route or trail descriptions, helicopters, and lightweight outdoor and

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camping gear that we take for granted today. The crews carried bulky wooden box cameras, glass-plate negatives, photographic chemicals, and a portable darkroom. Bridgland worked while the weather was good, which was not very often in the summer of 1915, and his days began at or before dawn and lasted sometimes until late evening. By the time snow and frigid weather forced him back to Calgary in late October, his expedition had recorded 735 black-and-white photographs on glass-plate negatives (figure 4.1). Tragedy struck on July 29, 1915, when the other photographer, A. E. Hyatt, drowned in Beauvert Lake, necessitating a sad duty for Bridgland that involved interviews with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, travel to British Columbia to ensure proper committal and burial of the deceased, recruiting a new photographer, and then the process of training the new man and completing the survey.5 This was an exceptional season even for Bridgland, who over his

Figure 4.1 Example of cartographic techniques applied to one of the photographs (the Ramparts in the Tonquin Valley, Jasper National Park). From M. P. Bridgland’s Photographic Surveying.

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lifetime is credited with many first ascents of mountains in the Jasper and Banff regions of the Canadian Rockies and at least a dozen other surveys.6 The maps were produced after thousands of hours of painstaking work back at the office, and published in 1917 (figure 4.2). The Dominion Land Survey was established in 1875 to oversee the mapping of the vast and fragile union that was Canada. Political and social cohesion was difficult to achieve over such a large land area in a time before simultaneous communications. A cross-continental railway was blasted over Rogers Pass in 1885 and through what are now Banff and Yoho National Parks, immediately to the south of Jasper, but this

Figure 4.2 Portion of one of six topographic map sheets of north-central Jasper National Park produced from Bridgland’s 1915 photographic survey. The Athabasca River figures prominently, and the site of what is now the Palisades Centre is located at the bottom-left corner of the map.

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was just a thick thread in the weaving together of a nation. The Survey was motivated by nationalism on the one hand, and by a growing commitment to scientific description of the territorial lands and waters on the other.7 Mapping helped assert control over a region by removing some of its mystery and clearing the way for development, and Bridgland’s maps were keys in opening economic opportunities and easing further exploration of Jasper and beyond. In 1915, the Jasper Forest Reserve—the forerunner to Jasper National Park—was eight years old. Two competing railway companies, the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific, had barely finished pushing their way up the Athabasca Valley and over Yellowhead Pass into British Columbia. A small rail town, Fitzhugh (later Jasper), became the administrative and rail center for the region. Based on the success of the grand railway hotels along the southern rail route, early visitors and promoters of Jasper conjured a patrician tourism trade, which was realized to a limited extent with the construction of Jasper Park Lodge. The Lodge continues this grand, although by contemporary standards in a national park, somewhat incongruous tradition. Wealthy tourists, mountaineers, adventurers, and migrants made their way through Jasper, but Jasper resisted the popularity that beset its neighbor to the south, Banff. To this day, although development pressures are intense by any standards, Jasper remains in the shadow of Banff (see chapter 1). By a twist of history, two sets of photographs, bound together in small folios, made it to Jasper National Park. Jeanine Rhemtulla, an ecologist, had just begun her graduate studies in 1996. With time and opportunity on her side, she decided to spend the summer in Jasper looking for a promising research project. That was the first summer of the Culture, Ecology and Restoration project, an interdisciplinary research initiative aimed at providing options for long-range restoration of the montane ecosystems of the upper Athabasca Valley.8 The Palisades Research Centre was filled with spirited discussion about restoration theory, park options, and environmental values. I challenged team members to come up with a way of answering the question, “What are our goals for restoration?” The question brought the inevitable historical regression: Should the ecosystems be returned to the conditions just before the establishment of the park? Before the fur-trade period (1811–1855)? Or

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further back, when climate conditions were similar to those we are now experiencing? Rhemtulla believed that one way of answering these questions was to have some solid data about previous ecological conditions, a matter made difficult by a scarcity of reliable historical data. Her research interests tended toward an understanding of vegetation dynamics as a whole, and not any one specific process (e.g., fire). Historical aerial photographs were helpful, although the earliest set dated back only to 1949. Even a cursory observation revealed considerable change over the forty-two-year interval. Forests appeared more dense, human activity had increased, and the river had changed course in places. It would be a straightforward, if painstaking, task to interpret vegetation types from the two sets of air photos, digitize them for use with a computer mapping system, and compare their spatial characteristics. The problem was that the time difference was only forty-two years, a single heartbeat in long-term vegetation change. When this became clear, Rhemtulla was browsing through files at the park office and park warden Rod Wallace pointed her to the Bridgland photographs. She made photocopies of a few, and emerged in the daylight to a view of the mountains that barely resembled the images in her hands (figure 4.3). Where patchy forests were evident in 1915, dense, close-canopied lodgepole pine forests had replaced these. The degree of change was remarkable. Her hunch was that if Bridgland could compute the geometry necessary to produce accurate maps from these photographs, it must be possible to shoot repeat photographs of the same locations, and generate maps of vegetation now and as compared to the way it was eighty-one years ago. This would yield two heartbeats of ecological duration, or almost eighty years. It turned out not to be nearly so simple, but in that moment was born the Bridgland Repeat Photography project. The art and science of repeat photography—comparing contemporary photographs with historical images taken at exactly the same location— has developed over the last three decades as a modestly popular method for examining change in human activities, vegetation, rock formations, glaciers, water courses, and a host of other landscape features. The classic study of landscape change was Hastings and Turner’s The Changing Mile, which focused on grazing and climactic change in Arizona. Around the world dozens of scientific studies since have used repeat

138 Chapter 4 Figure 4.3 View from Powerhouse Cliff, just north of the town of Jasper, looking across the Athabasca River to Hawk Mountain. This was one of the first Bridgland photographic stations that Jeanine Rhemtulla encountered. The left photo, from 1915, is by M. P. Bridgland and the repeat image (right) is from exactly the same location in 1998 (J. Rhemtulla and E. Higgs).

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photographic techniques, including exemplary studies of vegetation change in the central Great Basin, vegetation and land-use patterns in Colorado, and ecological changes in the front ranges of the Rockies in Colorado. Two studies are analogs for our work in Jasper. Mary Meagher and Douglas Houston have assembled in some case triplets (turn of the twentieth century, early 1970s, and 1990s) of photographs from Yellowstone that show substantial change to this American icon. Many of the issues they note in Yellowstone are familiar to those working in Jasper. Robert Webb and colleagues investigated many reaches of the Colorado River by comparing their views, literally, with the Stanton expedition photographs of 1890 (Stanton recorded with photographs the potential railroad routing). Webb reports on a wide variety of ecological changes (e.g., herbivory, longevity of desert plants, fluvial structures). His study is interdisciplinary, and he employs quantitative analytic techniques in some cases.9 This latter point marks a sharp distinction between earlier and more recent studies. Photographs really do speak volumes, and when a pair of repeat images is presented side by side, especially when the changes are as dramatic as they are with our work in Jasper, the mind’s eye is marked indelibly. For qualitative impact, not much exceeds paired photographs. However, the challenge is to push beyond impressions such as “the forests appear much denser in the more recent photograph,” to an accurate assessment of exactly what has changed and by how much. The Bridgland collection is different from most other repeat photographic collections, because the comprehensive and systematic nature of survey photography allows quantitative analysis. With image-sampling procedures, as Rhemtulla has demonstrated with her research on vegetation change, it is possible to make a comparison of the relative extent of different vegetation types, and thus to show with some precision how the vegetation and other ecological and cultural features have changed.10 The Bridgland Repeat Photography project has grown well beyond Rhemtulla’s initial efforts.11 In the summer of 1998, walking in many cases the same trails that Bridgland and his crew had trekked in 1915, we began the complete rephotography of his original survey, all 735 photographs. We completed the work on September 11, 1999, by climbing Pyramid Mountain, a peak that in appearance is true to its name and dominates the skyline west of the town of Jasper. We did most of our

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work on foot, like Bridgland, although we did occasionally avail ourselves of helicopter support. Trail access was generally better than in Bridgland’s day, and many of the routes are known. Our equipment was lighter, although we lugged around a cranky, heavy 4 ¥ 5 Linhof largeformat camera and an unwieldy tripod. Luckily we were spared the romance of glass-plate negatives. Despite these advantages, we still packed a healthy payload and braced ourselves against volatile, sometimes severe mountain weather and all the quirks and dangers of wilderness travel. Bridgland, surprisingly, had a couple of advantages. He arrived in Jasper twenty-five years after one of the largest fire events on record: back-to-back dry years in 1889 and 1890 that burned more than half the forests of the upper Athabasca Valley and had similar effects throughout Alberta and elsewhere in the mountain west. Walking through brulé, or burned forest, was in many cases easier than the bushwhacking that greeted us in the 1990s after over a hundred years of very little fire (a combination of fire suppression and depressed fire ignition). Also, Bridgland had the aid of a well-trained survey party, significant logistical support, and horses. It is doubtful that he cooked many of his own meals! We chanted these qualifications as reassurances to ourselves along particularly difficult scrambles or during awful weather. Nevertheless, we were incredulous sometimes, awed at others, by what the Bridgland survey accomplished in a single season. We felt sometimes like doughy teenagers urged along by a fit and trim elderly uncle. What we have achieved, and will continue to develop, is a detailed view of the north-central portion of Jasper National Park as it appeared in 1915. This was just as the two railways up the Athabasca Valley and through the Yellowhead Pass were completed, four years following the expulsion of the Métis families to make room for a new idea of the land, and eight years following the establishment of the park. It was also twenty-five years following the most extensive fires on record, roughly a century following the first ascents of the Athabasca Valley by the fur traders, and ten millenniums following the retreat of the last glaciation and the earliest-known wanderings of people in the valley, a span of time punctuated by complicated, mostly unknown, changes in people, plants, animals, and climate. The Bridgland photography, not to mention our repeats nearly a century later, is a small nick on this arrow of time. By

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filling the roughly eighty-year gap with aerial photos and models of ecological change, we can document the processes of landscape change. The photographs are a powerful testament to change, for in one quick glance they reveal dramatic visual changes—rockslides, forest regeneration, roads and trails. As one would expect with any interpretive technique, there are significant limits on what can be gleaned from the photographs. Underlying processes such as nutrient cycling and soil chemistry, and fine-grained vegetation shifts, are not detectable with photographs. There are places we visited, in the alpine regions mostly, where the change is so subtle that only careful observation reveals the increments. This is a landscape in motion, as all landscapes are, and the movement amplifies the intricacy. This vigorous quality should not be surprising. We know that ecosystems change, that people’s activities combined with ecological processes create continuously changing patterns. The paradigm in ecology has shifted in the last twenty years from one in which equilibrium defined the end point of ecological change to one in which ecosystems are disequilibrium systems with complicated multiple trajectories and multiple steady states.12 If we presume that everything is in flux, which would be a radical way of interpreting some of the new theorizing in ecology, then history may matter very little to restorationists, and in fact restoration may not be literally necessary or warranted. A major concept of restoration, historical fidelity, would fall away in favor of exclusive concern with ecological integrity (see chapter 3). Thus, restoration might involve the removal of immediate and indirect human stressors, making possible multiple ecological trajectories (including those that may not be apparent in the historical record), attentiveness to contemporary regional ecological conditions, and a focus on naturalistic instead of natural patterns and processes. These questions about history percolated as Rhemtulla and I retraced Bridgland’s steps. It was humbling to realize that so much work is required to understand the past qualities of a place. After all, was 1915 actually a special year? Not really. It did mark a point roughly midway through the use of phototopographic surveying, a feverish era in the relatively new Dominion of Canada. The images from 1915 do provide a portrait of a landscape closer perhaps to one extreme of vegetation

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patterning, one that was patchy and open. It would be wrong to suggest that either the 1915 or repeat photographs show the valley as it is or should be. There is reason to believe that both sets of snapshots occur within a longer-term range of variability, although it does seem that the close-canopied conditions that prevail today are unusual in the recent (. Covington, W. 1999. “Flagstaff Searching for its Forests’ Future,” High Country News. March 1, 1999, 8. Cox, R. 1831. Adventures on the Columbia River, Including the Narrative of a Residence of Six Years on the Western Side of the Rocky Mountains, among Various Tribes of Indians Hitherto Unknown: Together with a Journey across the American Continent. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. Cronon, W. 1983. Changes on the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang. Cronon, W. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton. Cronon, W. 1995. The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. In W. Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, 69–90. New York: Norton. Cronon, W., ed. 1995. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: Norton. Crosby, A. W. 1986. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe: 900–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crumley, C., ed. 1994. Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Cypher, J. 1995. The Real and the Fake: Imagineering Nature and Wilderness at Disney’s Wilderness Lodge. Unpublished master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology. University of Alberta. Cypher, J., and E. S. Higgs. 1997. Colonizing the Imagination: Disney’s Wilderness Lodge. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 8(4): 107–130. Cypher, J., and E. S. Higgs. 1997. Packaged Tours: Themed Experience and Nature Presentation in Parks and Museums. Museums Review 23: 28–32.

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Index

Aber, John, 80, 129 Aboriginal peoples Cree, 23 G’itxsan, 200 Iroquois, 23 land management practices, 169–170 Lekwungen (Songhees), 226–236, 254, 262–263 Sinkyone, 109, 237 Snake Indians, 23 Snuneymuxw (Nanaimo) First Nation, 230 Stoney, 23 Abrod nature reserve (Slovak Republic), 70 Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies (Oberlin College, Ohio), 272, 279 Adams family, 266 Adbusters, 280 Angermeier, Paul, 122, 124 Apostol, Dean, 102–103, 105 Archbold Biological Station (Lake Placid, Florida), 61, 164 Aronson, James, 123 Assisted recovery, 112–116 Athabasca River and Valley, 16, 22, 24, 29, 45, 136, 149, 152, 167, 170–173, 181–182, 187, 266, 287 Auroville (India), 247 Autogenic restoration, 112–115

Banff National Park, 9, 17, 27–28, 117, 136 Banff-Bow Valley Study, 17, 27 Bayley, Suzanne, 17 Beckwith, Brenda, 231–233 Berger, John, 80 Berry, Wendell, 94, 210 Biophilia, 145 Black River (Ohio), 6 Bodaly, David, 230 Bookchin, Murray, 120, 184 Borgmann, Albert, 180, 185, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 200, 202, 203, 241, 243, 245–246, 257, 258, 259, 281–282 Botkin, Daniel, 40 Boundary definition of ecological restoration, 76, 77 Bradford, Wes, 17 Bradshaw, Tony, 80 Bridgland, Morrison Parsons, 133–135, 140 Bridgland Repeat Photography project, 132–144, 151, 162–163, 177 Bried, Gordon, 26 Brower, David, 2, 217, 218, 219–220 Bruce County (Ontario, Canada), 3 Bryce, Cheryl, 228, 233, 235–236, 262, 263 Buchanan, Richard, 274, 277–278, 281

336

Index

Burns Bog (Delta, British Columbia), 6 Cairns, John, Jr., 80, 108, 237 Calvert, Kathy, 16 Cape Florida Project, 61, 214 Carmanagh Valley (Vancouver Island), 150 Celebration City, 52–54, 60 Certification, 209, 211–214 Chalifoux, Suzette, 23 Chomsky, Noam, 258 Clewell, Andy, 103 Cohen, Abner, 252–253 Colonization of the imagination, 51–52, 203, 241 Commodification, 188–195, 214, 248 of nature, 203–206 of practice, 206–214 of restoration, 208, 219, 222 Communitas, 252 Comparative perspectives on ecological restoration, 87, 88–89 Conservation, 12 Conservation biology, 97 Correlational coexistence, 246 Covington, Wallace, 142 Cox, Ross, 24, 266 Critics of restoration, 2, 11–12, 217–220 Cronon, William, 56, 57 Crumley, Carole, 164 Cultural dimensions of restoration, 8, 72, 76, 86, 88–89, 106, 109, 119–122, 126, 222, 226–263 Culture, Ecology, and Restoration project, 20, 24, 136 Curtis, John, 5, 82, 103 Curtis Prairie (University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum), 13, 78–79, 102–103, 116, 247, 250 Cypher, Jennifer, 45–59, 104, 187, 203

Dahm, Clifford, 67 DAPHNE Foundation (Slovak Republic), 69 Definitions (of ecological restoration), 38, 41, 77, 81, 94–130 Bradshaw and Chadwick, 108, 122 Cairns, 108 dictionary (Oxford English), 96 Janzen, 108 SER 1990, 107 SER 1996, 109, 118, 122 SER 2002, 110 U.S. National Research Council, 108 Design, 4, 5, 13, 14, 95, 270–285 focal design, 282 of human experience, 283–284 human versus ecologically centered, 279–280, 281, 284 risks of, 285 and technological culture, 280–281 wild design, 5, 14, 95, 271, 277–285 Designer ecosystems, 60 Device paradigm, 185–186, 191–193, 206, 222, 223, 241, 243, 248–249, 257–259, 260, 263 availability, 189 and economic reform, 258–259 and manufactured consent, 258–259 Deville, Edward, 133 Dewey, John, 278–279 Discovery Island (British Columbia), 226–236, 254, 262–263 Disney Corporation, 10, 12, 21, 45–54, 60, 187, 195, 203–205, 216, 223, 249. See also Wilderness Lodge Dominion Land Survey, 133, 135–136 Dorney, Robert, 5, 7, 73, 74, 152 Dust Bowl, 78 Ecocultural restoration, 236, 238, 239–240, 243 Ecological health, 115, 123–124

Index Ecological integrity, 4, 10, 95, 101, 110, 122–124, 126, 141, 203, 205, 206, 220, 226 Ecological Monitoring and Assessment Network (Canada), 159 Ecological restoration versus environmental restoration, 93 versus restoration ecology, 81, 93 Egan, David, 164 Ehrenfeld, Joan, 81 Eisner, Michael, 53 Eliot, Robert, 218, 219–220 Environmental restoration versus ecological restoration, 93, 98–99 Experimental Lakes Area (Ontario, Canada), 159–161 Fassett, Norman, 78 Feenberg, Andrew, 280 Fidelity (ecological), 127–128 Finlay family, 266 Fire, anthropogenic, 24, 39–40, 42, 55, 61, 103, 116, 118, 172, 182, 239 Fisher, R., 207 Fitzhugh, 136 Fleming, Sandford, 25 Focal design, 282 Focal practices and things, 4, 95, 185–186, 190–191, 194–195, 241–245, 248–249, 251, 254–259, 263, 275, 281–284 Focal restoration, 4, 12, 181, 223, 225–259 Foreground and background, 192–193 Franklin, Ursula, 189–190 Freak landscapes, 35–40, 55 Friend, Tad, 205 Frost, Robert, 3 Gaia hypothesis, 240 Gann, George, 61

337

Georgian Bay (Ontario, Canada), 3 Gilpin, Michael, 80 Gourley, Edith, 171 Graber, David, 29 Greene, Henry, 5, 82 Guziova, Zuzana, 69 Hall, Marcus, 83–84, 85–87, 89, 142, 146 Haraway, Donna, 201 Harris, Jim, 106 Hartz Mountain (Secaucus, New Jersey), 7 Harvard Forest (Massachusetts), 159, 160 Haworth, Larry, 185, 276 Hayles, Katherine, 201 Henry House, 167 Herman, Edward, 258 Hiassen, Carl, 62 Historical continuity, 147, 154, 156 Historical fidelity, 4, 10, 95, 101, 124, 126–128, 131–177, 206, 220, 226 Historical range of variability, 119 Historicity, 10–11, 132, 147, 156 History of restoration, 77–92 Hobbs, Richard, 87, 94, 123 Holland, Alan, 153, 154 Holland, K. M., 249 House, Freeman, 121, 123, 209, 247 Howell, Evelyn, 164 Hubbard Brook (New Hampshire), 159, 160 Hudson’s Bay Company, 23 Hyatt, A. E., 134 Icefield Interpretive Center, 51 Indigenous Peoples’ Restoration Network, 107, 236 Ingold, Tim, 148–149, 158 Institute for Regional Conservation, 61 Intentionality, 4, 14, 104, 271–277 and design, 273–274, 279, 285

338

Index

Jackson, Laura, 104 Janzen, Daniel, 108, 237 Jasper Forest Reserve, 136 Jasper National Park, 7, 9, 10, 16–46, 54, 57, 132–142, 151, 170–173, 181, 197, 201, 238–239, 266–270, 282, 287 and agriculture, subsistence, 36, 170 and bears, 16–18, 35 and beaver, 171–172 and elk populations, 33–35 and fire, 33, 172 and fish stocking, 31, 36 herbivory, 172 and hunting, 31, 33, 269 Jasper Park Lodge, 43, 136 Jasper townsite, 35, 266 and logging, 33 management of, 28–29, 40–41, 54–55 and mining, 35 and predator control, 31 pressures on, 27–31 and trapping, 36, 140, 144, 170 wildlife restoration, 172 Joachim family, 266 Jordan III, William, 79, 80, 84, 99, 123, 129, 186, 209, 215, 237, 248, 250, 251, 253, 254 Karr, James, 122, 124 Katz, Eric, 218–220 Kay, James, 122 Keystone concepts (of ecological restoration), 4, 14. See also Ecological integrity; Focal practices and things; Historical fidelity; Wild design Kirby, Jack, 253 Kissimmee River (Florida Everglades), 10, 11, 63, 64–68, 87, 126, 207 Knowledge, forms of, 196–201, 262 constructivism, 201 cultural contingency, 201 cultural memory, 262 ecological history, 262

paradigmatic, 200 scientific, 196–199 subjective, 199 testimonial, 200 traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom, 200–201 Lake Forest Preserve (Illinois), 249 Lake Huron, 3, 153 Lambert, Marilyn, 231 Landscape, understanding of, 22 and history, 22 Landscape evolution, 259–263, 270 Latour, Bruno, 220 Lease, Gary, 42 Leopold, Aldo, 5, 78, 82, 247 Lewis, Henry, 24 Light, Andrew, 210–213, 218, 255, 256 Liminality, 251–252 Long Term Ecological Research program (U.S.), 159 Lopez, Barry, 149 Lopoukhine, Nik, 68, 104 MacLaren, Ian, 20, 55 Management, ongoing need for, 116–118 Marsh, George Perkins, 88 Martinez, Dennis, 107, 108, 109, 121, 125, 236–238 Marx, Leo, 216 Mattole watershed (California), 247 McDonough, William, 279–280 McHarg, Ian, 13, 90, 271 McKibben, Bill, 113 McMahon, Jim, 60 Meekison, Lisa, 250 Mengotti, Franscesco, 88 Métis peoples, 23, 25, 36, 140, 144, 172, 266 Michalenko, Greg, 75 Mills, Stephanie, 42, 56, 83, 101, 121, 123, 209, 237, 247 Mitigation, 97, 207, 209, 220 no net loss policies, 209, 220

Index Moberly, Edward, 24 Moberly, Walter, 23, 266 Morava River wet meadows (Slovak Republic), 10, 64, 68–73, 87, 126, 239 Morris, Joan, 230 Mowing, 70, 71, 72 Murcia, Carolina, 87 Murphy, Peter, 24 Myerhoff, Barbara, 252–253 Nabhan, Gary, 248, 260 Naturalistic explanation, 148–149 Naveh, Zev, 87 Niering, Bill, 79 Noble, David, 13 North Branch Prairie (Chicago), 13, 90, 213, 239 Norton, D. A., 94, 123 Nostalgia, 143, 145, 156 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 13–14, 83, 90, 275–276 O’Neil, John, 146, 153, 154 Orion Society, 61 Orr, David, 56, 272 Oxford, Mike, 103 Palisade Centre, 16–18, 22, 27, 136, 167, 171, 181, 265 Participation (community involvement and volunteerism), 4, 121, 122, 209–214, 226, 242, 255–259, 260 community focal practice, 258 democratic capacity, inherent, 211, 255–256 Penn, Briony, 157 Perceptions of nature. See also Colonization of the imagination constructivism, 44–45 and Disney, 45–46, 49–52, 203–205 essentialism, 45 hyperreality, 195, 203, 204, 215 respect, 239–240 restorationism, 216, 217

339

and technology, 45, 55–56 and wilderness, 10, 20–21, 25, 41–43, 46, 54, 143–144, 181–182, 196, 215 Perry, Jonathan, 207 Phototopographic surveying, 133–134 Pit cooking, 227, 228, 232, 233–234, 244–245 Place, 148–154 culturalistic representation, 149, 158 and dwelling, 149 and historicity, 156 and landscape, 148–149 and space, 148–149 Portman, Dale, 16 Process and product, 103–104, 110–111, 125, 193 Prospect Park (Brooklyn), 6, 13, 275–277 Railways Canadian National, 22, 25 Canadian Northern, 25, 136 Grand Trunk Pacific, 25, 26, 136 Rarity, 155 Reclamation, 95, 97, 99–100 Recovery, 101, 112, 114 Reference conditions, 11, 95, 119, 136–137, 158–177 approximation, 167 baseline, 162–163 benchmark, 163 and climate change, 174–175 historical ecology, 164 and human activity, 169–170 and incompleteness, 175 reference information (sources and problems with), 158–159, 162–163, 166–168, 173–177 research questions, 169 uncertainty, 175 variability (natural, historical, spatial), 163–165 and whole-ecosystem studies, 161–162

340

Index

Regeneration, 101, 129 Rehabilitation, 95, 99, 100, 105 Reinhabitation, 101 Remediation, 99, 100 Reparation, 12 Repeat photography projects Hastings and Turner (Arizona), 137 Higgs and Rhemtulla (Jasper National Park), 132–144 Meagher, Mary and Houston, Douglas, (Yellowstone), 139 Webb, Robert, et al. (Colorado River), 139 Repeat photography techniques, 137–141 Restauration, 97 Restoration and Management Notes, 79, 83 Restoration as conversation, 285–287 Restoration Ecology, 79, 80 Restorationism, 216 Restoration projects in agroecosystems, 9 Archbold Biological Station (Lake Placid, Florida), 61, 164 Auroville (India), 247 Black River (Ohio), 6 Burns Bog (Delta, British Columbia), 6 Cape Florida Project, 61, 214 Curtis Prairie (University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum), 13, 78–79, 102–103, 116, 247, 250 Discovery Island (British Columbia), 226–236, 254, 262–263 Hartz Mountain (Secaucus, New Jersey), 7 Kissimmee River (Florida Everglades), 10, 11, 63, 64–68, 87, 126, 207 Lake Forest Preserve (Illinois), 249 Mattole watershed (California), 247 Morava River (Slovak Republic), 10, 64, 68–73, 87, 126, 239

North Branch Prairie (Chicago), 13, 90, 213, 239 Prospect Park (Brooklyn), 6, 13, 275–277 Robert Starbird Dorney Ecology Garden (University of Waterloo), 10, 64, 73–77, 90, 152, 248 Sinkyone Intertribal Park (California), 109, 237–238 Swan Creek (Victoria), 148 Woodhorn Colliery Museum (England), 157 Revegetation, 99, 100–101 Reverse adaptation, 193 Rhemtulla, Jeanine, 17, 33, 132, 136–142, 177 Ritual, 226, 249–255 and focal practice, 251, 254–255 and performance, 251 versus rite, 251 Roberts, Edith, 83 Robert Starbird Dorney Ecology Garden (University of Waterloo), 10, 64, 73–77, 90, 152, 248 Rocky Mountains, 4 Rymer, Russ, 52, 54 Saul, John Ralston, 194 Schama, Simon, 22 Schindler, David, 159–161 Seffer, Jan, 71 Sinkyone Intertribal Park (California), 109, 237–238 Snyder, Gary, 58 Society for Ecological Restoration (SER), 1, 2, 7, 8, 10, 45, 59, 61, 68, 78, 79, 82, 90, 96, 99, 102, 107, 129, 187, 208, 217, 236 Soulé, Michael, 42, 196 Sperry, Theodore, 5, 78, 82, 103, 116 Stanova, Viera, 71 Stevens, William, 90 Stoltmann, Randy, 150 Straka, Peter, 69 Strong, David, 57, 188–189, 246

Index Sustainable cultural practices, 119–122 Swan Creek (Victoria), 148 Swift, Lewis, 16, 23, 25, 26, 266 Synthetic ecology, 129 Taxonomy (of ecological restoration), 97–101 Taylor, Charles, 184 Technological restoration, 3, 12, 186, 225–226, 241, 242–243 Technology, 182–195 and enrichment, 188–189 and focal practice, 185–186, 190–191, 194–195 and focal things, 190–191 and liberation, 188–189 Thompson, David, 23 Time depth, 154–155, 156 Tonquin Valley (Jasper National Park), 151, 154 Toth, Lou, 66 Traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom, 200–201 Tree of Life native plant nursery, 199 Turner, Edith, 250 Turner, Frederick, 215, 250 Turner, Nancy, 227, 231, 233, 236 Turner, Victor, 250, 251–252 Typologies of restoration, 81–85 University of Waterloo, 5 University of Wisconsin Arboretum, 5, 78, 82–83 Ury, W., 207 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 64–65 Van Gennep, Arnold, 252 Variability (historical and natural range of), 163–165 Vaux, Calvert, 275–276 Walker, Joan, 158, 163, 165, 169, 173 Wallace, Rod, 137 Westervelt, Kelly, 61, 214

341

Westfall, Barbara, 250 Wheeler, A. O., 133 White, Cliff, 36 White, Peter, 158, 163, 165, 169, 173 White, Richard, 41 Wilby, Arnold C., 16, 26 Wild design, 5, 14, 95, 271, 277–285 Wilderness Lodge (Orlando, Florida), 10, 12, 21, 45–52, 54, 60, 156, 187, 195, 204, 223, 249. See also Disney Corporation Wildlands Project, 20, 114 Wildness, 58 Willeke, Gene, 253 Wilson, Alexander, 45, 186, 208 Wilson, E. O., 145 Winner, Langdon, 185, 193 Winterhalder, Keith, 110 Wong, Anne, 276 Woodhorn Colliery Museum (England), 157 Yellowhead highway, 22–23, 25, 181, 266, 269 Yellowstone to Yukon project, 2, 20, 269