Restoration, Ecological Citizenry, and Ziggurat Building in Iraq - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 7

2 Restoration,Ecological

Citizenry,andZiggurat
BuildinginIraq *

CONTENTS
Introduction.............................................................................................................. 21
The Importance of Ecological Restoration .............................................................. 22
Moral Issues Intrinsic to Restoration ....................................................................... 23
Restoration and Relationships.................................................................................. 24
Conclusions.............................................................................................................. 25
Acknowledgment ..................................................................................................... 26
References................................................................................................................ 26

INTRODUCTION
Ecological restoration may be perhaps the most intellectually stimulating and ethi-
cally troubling of all forms of environmental action. Restoration design ( sensu
France 2007a), as opposed to restoration ecology (the assembly of the broken bits
and pieces of damaged ecosystems), is a comprehensive and integrative way in which
to look upon both the world and our role within it. Restoration design can be defined
as the activity through which “reparation-minded individuals directly and creatively
find ways in which to engage nature by establishing deeper physical and intellectual
relationships with their world during the process of re-imagining, reconfiguring, and
'restoring' the ecological spaces in which they live and their consciousness in terms
of how they live” (France 2007a). The restoration of the Iraqi marshlands has the
potential to become one of the most important cases in the next few years of how
this full potential of restoration can be realized, a way of not simply restoring the
damage we have done to the physical environment, but also restoring the relationship
that people have had to that special environment. The full potential of restoration,
then, as Andrew Light (2004) sees it, is not simply the technical restoration of the
environment but also the restoration of the cultural relationship with nature.
Almost immediately after the American tanks rolled northward past the remnants
of the marshes on their way toward Baghdad, locals began to dismantle the dams and

* Adapted by Robert L. France from Light, A., 2004. Conceptual and moral issues in ecologi-
cal restoration. Paper presented at the Mesopotamian Marshes and Modern Development:
Practical Approaches for Sustaining Restored Ecological and Cultural Landscapes confer-
ence, Cambridge, MA, October.

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