Restoration - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 4

authority to make crucial determinations of where precious resources will go and to
evaluate how well they have been used. Though perhaps this is especially clear in
the case of something so obviously politically charged as the restoration of the Iraqi
marshlands, it is no less true in the case of the restoration of major works of art (e.g.,
David and The Last Supper ) and in the mundane case of James and Sarah (James,
you recall, simply preempted Sarah's role in the decision to restore).
So we can ask of any proposal for the restoration of the Iraqi marshlands or
the other landscapes under discussion the same questions we need to ask of any
repair or restoration project: (1) what is the nature of the project—is it restoration?
Reconstruction? Preservation? Improvement? Or some combination of these? To
whom and to what does it matter which approach is taken? And (2) what are among
the proposed objects of repair, restoration, rehabilitation, improvement, or the like?
Artifacts? Natural habitats? Relations among people? Cultural identity? Human dig-
nity? One measure of the depth of the political charge to any reparative undertaking
is the extent of the material and symbolic consequences of the project, the variety
of domains in which repair of some sort is being attempted. Part of what appears to
be at stake in the restoration, reconstruction, improvement, and so on of the marsh-
lands, as we've already seen, is the repair not only of the land but also of a way of
life. But even more: when asked by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) why
the United States and its allies should provide economic and logistical support for
efforts to restore the marshlands, Gordon West of the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) referred not only to the restoration of ecological conditions
but also to the need to remedy the injustices done to the marshdwellers and more
generally under Saddam Hussein (U.S. House of Representatives 2004). Moreover,
as Professor Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm pointed out to Ms. Ros-Lehtinen and her
congressional colleagues, among the serious rents in the social fabric of Iraqi society
under Saddam was the deterioration of the educational system, “not only physically
with the aging infrastructure, but also morally, with academic isolation taking its toll
on the capacity of the country to provide solutions in the area of knowledge” (U.S.
House of Representatives 2004). Ms. Ros-Lehtinen herself indicated that she under-
stands the return of life to the marshes and its human and nonhuman inhabitants to
be part of an effort to “erase the scars of a dictator” (U.S. House of Representatives
2004). (Whether any particular restorative project involves imposition of the will of
one country upon another in the name of healing such scars is another but not irrel-
evant matter.) If you agree to one layer of repair, do you thereby agree to all?
To come around, in conclusion, to the broad theme of the “Background” section
of this topic, what might be dubbed “restoration writ large” ( sensu France 2004):
1. I have suggested that we think of the restoration of the Iraqi marshlands and
other landscapes as further instances of the ubiquity and variety of repair
projects undertaken by the very familiar creature we call Homo sapiens ,
that wily language-using social and political animal who also might aptly
be called Homo reparans . Repairing is a crucial skill for beings like our-
selves, who are limited by the resources at our disposal, who are subject to
the ever-present possibility of error and decay, who are capable of terrify-
ing acts of destruction, who seek continuity with the past, and who face