Restoration, Ecological Citizenry, and Ziggurat Building in Iraq - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 8

channels that had for years strangled the region of water in their attempt to restore
the wetlands. And soon after the initial toppling of the Ba'athist regime in Baghdad
(and before the counterinsurgency), hundreds of native Iraqis were mobilized by the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help clear away debris from the canals around the
city as a first attempt to restore the water infrastructure. Today, restoration efforts are
being planned for the Iraqi marshlands by American, Italian, Canadian, and Japanese
government agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs; France 2011) in
association with the Iraqi government (see the foreword). The ultimate success of
the restoration efforts there will almost certainly be dependent upon the mobiliza-
tion of the local community through the physical act of repairing the ecosystem
(Light 2004). It is through participating in the healing of nature that the participants'
relationships to that nature are, in turn, healed as well (France 2007a). This chapter
explores some of the conceptual and moral issues underlying restoration.
THE IMPORTANCE OF ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION
With every practice referred to as “restoration,” there is always the question whether
it is really just that or is some other form of reparation (see chapter 1). Generally
speaking, “ecological restoration” is defined as the human practice of restoring natu-
ral ecosystems, particularly those damaged by anthropogenic causes (but also occa-
sionally those damaged by natural catastrophes as well). The science of restoration as
it evolved in North America in the early 1970s dealt with human-damaged systems
(Higgs 2003). Some of the first large-scale real-world experiments were conducted
on tall-grass prairies in the Midwest and derived from the early work of pioneering
conservation biologist Aldo Leopold at the University of Wisconsin.
Two of the indicators of the growing importance of restoration in our contempo-
rary world involve ecology and economy. Ecology is normally given as the justifica-
tion for restoration in terms of delivering ecosystem services. The defining issues
addressed by ecological restorationists in this regard were habitat reconstruction,
pollution mitigation, biodiversity sustenance, and exotic species limitation (Light
2004). Restoration has also become a big business (Cunningham 2002; and see chap-
ter 3), and the federal government now spends more on this than almost any other
type of environmental endeavor (e.g., the Clinton administration's multibillion-dollar
appropriation budget for restoring the Florida Everglades).
Higgs (2003) defined three types of criteria for judging the worth of a good res-
toration project. Effective criteria are based on ecological reasons such as histori-
cal fidelity with respect to structural composition and replication, and functional
success in terms of whether the replicated system can exist and be durable through
time. Efficient criteria are the economic considerations for completion of a restora-
tion project in terms of cost-effectiveness in relation to time and person-hours to
complete the task. Expanded criteria represent the most interesting and challenging
horizon issue in restoration (Light 2004).
The science of restoration is evolving at a very rapid pace with many controlled
tests examining the veracity of restoration in a wide variety of physical landscapes.
The expanded criteria are harder to assess as they deal with the historical, cultural,
social, political, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of restoration. In a situation like