Restoration - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 5

the necessity of patching up relationships with their neighbors. But Homo
sapiens is not now the repairing animal, now the social animal, now the
political animal, and so on. The repairing animal is at one and the same
time the social animal, the political animal, and the like, and that is why the
restoration of the Iraqi marshlands and other landscapes, were they to be
undertaken, can never be simply a matter of the right science, engineering,
and technology.
2. But if thinking about repair and restoration writ large helps to situate and
illuminate some of the reasons why wetlands restoration is such a complex
reparative project, it is also true that the complexity to which we must attend
in the case of the restoration of the marshlands drives home a particularly
vivid lesson for students of repair and those who reflect on “restoration writ
large.” And that is that visible damage to the natural and artifactual world
(if we assume this overly tidy distinction) around us is hardly ever simply
that. We are embodied beings. It's not just that we are dependent for life on
the land and water and air around us. We come to be and to know ourselves,
we come to know and to create community with others, in part through our
intimate relation to the physical world we inhabit and the material objects
we create. We don't just live on or live near other living and nonliving
things; our lives are in them, and they are in our lives. That is why it is not
simply a coincidence that our spirits may be broken when the land on which
we live or the objects we have created are shattered against our will.
This general point about the necessity of our intimacy with the physical and mate-
rial world cannot, of course, be cited in defense of every instance of such intimate
relation between us and that world. For one thing, to recognize such deep connec-
tion is not yet to say anything about the means by which any particular person or
community comes to be in such intimate relation to a particular patch of the earth or
their lives so intertwined with particular structures and objects. There are just and
unjust ways of coming to occupy, live off, and live with land, water, buildings, and
other objects. Moreover, this kind of intimacy, however achieved, hardly rules out
selfish manipulation, exploitation, and defilement. Indeed, some of the most vicious
forms of exploitation are possible only in conditions of intimacy. This surely is clear
to us in the case of relations between human beings. Under what conditions such
questionable forms of intimacy exist between humans and other living beings, other
living systems, is one of the defining questions in ecological restoration, as discussed
in chapter 2.
REFERENCES
D'Emilio, F. 2003. Amid criticism, “David” to get a cleaning. Boston Globe , September 16.
Fitch, J. M. 1990. Historic preservation: Curatorial management of the built world .
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
France, R. 2004. Mesopotamian marshes and modern development: Practical approaches for sus-
taining restored ecological and cultural landscapes. www.gsd.harvard.edu/mesomarshes.
Spelman, E. V. 2002. Repair: The impulse to restore in a fragile world . Boston: Beacon Press.