Restoration - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 3

restoration is technically a great success: the fact that the vase had been broken will
be noticeable only to the professionally trained eye. But as it turns out, James has
only deepened the rift between him and Sarah. Not uncharacteristically, he failed to
consult with her, in this case about the proper treatment of the broken vase; for a vari-
ety of reasons, she would have much preferred to preserve the vase in its brokenness.
A technically successful restoration can, therefore, also be a socially unsuccessful
restoration. A project meant to restore an object and shore up a relationship achieved
the former at the price of doing further damage to the latter.
Given this brief reminder of the enormous family of activities of which restoration
is but one member; of the fact that nonetheless most of what are called “restoration”
projects involve a variety of such family members—restoration, preservation, recon-
struction, and so on; and of the reality that good repairers in one domain are not nec-
essarily thereby good repairers in another, it should be no surprise that proposals for
the restoration of the marshlands of southern Iraq, for example, involve much more
than restoration and much more than the marshlands. Indeed, “restoration” may not
even be the best term to use in conjunction with such a project—not so much because
damage has been so great as to render impossible full restoration (though that seems
to be true) as because marshlands are by their very nature changeable in ways that
works of art and buildings are not; we expect a well-restored painting to look just
like it did before the damage, but we don't expect a restored river to cut through the
riverbed just the way it did before being diverted or drained.
More to the present point, some proposals may explicitly or implicitly call for
improvement rather than mere restoration: not just improvement of the current dam-
aged condition, but also improvement upon the earlier, more desirable condition.
That is, to the extent to which any proposal calls for making the marshlands not
only better than they are now but also in some respects better than they've ever
been, it may well be an improvement project more than a restoration project. Does
that matter? Well, in some contexts the difference between restoration and improve-
ment certainly does matter: art restorers, for example, are not supposed to take it
upon themselves to improve upon a damaged work of art, to try to make it better
than it ever was. A professional conservator isn't supposed to even think to herself,
“Hmmm, that Van Gogh would look a lot better if I make the sky a bit lighter.” In the
context of the Iraqi marshlands and other wetlands with a history of human habita-
tion, the difference between restoration and improvement certainly becomes signifi-
cant to the extent that the question is not only about the land but also about a way of
human life intimately tied to that land. Do those who were torn from their way of
life when the marshes and marshlife were so severely damaged wish that the land
and their way of life be put back together the way they were, say, two decades ago?
How much is what they desire not a restoration of, but an improvement upon, those
days, in terms of both the condition of the marshes and the conditions of their lives?
They obviously didn't get to decide in the 1990s what was to become of the land
or their lives; will they get to decide now, or in any event be partners in such deci-
sions? Decisions about whether or not to restore (and, if to restore, how to restore),
decisions about whether or not to improve (and if to improve, how to do so), and
decisions about how to measure the success of the restoration or improvement are
inherently political; they reflect the result of struggles over who has the power and