Restoring Babylon - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 20

tainable renewal strategy that—while it might not please everyone—will produce
the most revitalization in the shortest period for the least investment.
Integration actually has its own restorative effect. Cities often spend vast sums
on redevelopment and restoration projects, without getting the level of revitaliza-
tion they desire. This is due to “silo thinking,” which produces a series of isolated,
disconnected projects: historic, brownfields, watershed, and so on. With its natural
efficiencies and synergies, integrated revitalization programs tend to yield a restora-
tion effect far greater than the sum of their component projects.
The reverse also is true: restoration has an integrative value. Restoration is
uniquely nonpartisan, and thus integrative, because everyone loves bringing things
back to life. At least the Poles had the advantage of rebuilding their country in the
absence of war. Rebuilding in the midst of armed conflict is a chancy proposition
at best, but if anything can bring people together, restoration can (see chapter 2).
For example, restoration brought Muslims and Christians back together in Mostar,
Bosnia, where together they rebuilt the five-hundred-year-old Stari Most, an iconic
Muslim bridge destroyed by the Christians during their war with each other (which
had ended just a scant year or two earlier). And in 2004, Israelis and Palestinians
together completed a ten-year project to restore the Alexander River, which they
share. This once highly polluted, nearly dead little river has now been dramatically
returned to health and beauty (see chapter 2).
For millennia, our heroes and people of wealth have gained prominence by discov-
ering, conquering, and exploiting “new lands.” English explorer James Cook, Spain's
conquering general Francisco Pizarro, and U.S. oil magnate John D. Rockefeller
each in their time gained public acclaim for their contributions toward the exploi-
tation of newly found resources. The fact that other people were already living in
the “new lands” was of little consequence, especially if they were “wasting” their
resources (in other words, using them sustainably).
Companies based on sprawl and resource extraction are now regarded as villains,
and the heroes of the twenty-first century are those undoing the damage of our ear-
lier heroes. In some cases the future of entire organizations hinges on their ability to
switch from new development to restorative development, and much of their restora-
tion work will be undoing what they themselves did earlier. The U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers is wrestling with that transition, as for example in their restoration of the
Everglades. The Jewish National Fund spent most of the twentieth century draining
marshes and straightening rivers (see chapter 6). They too are now undoing some of
their own projects. In fact, they put up $12 million for the Alexander River restora-
tion mentioned above.
Half a millennium ago, Spanish conquistadores destroyed the city of Tenochtitlan
(now called Mexico City), in part because it was “too civilized.” When the first
Spaniards encountered the city, one wrote in his diary that they wondered if they had
reached heaven. Their stinking, overcrowded, disease-ridden European cities were
shamed by the sparkling white Aztec city, with its limestone structures, its hanging
gardens of flowers on most buildings (reminiscent of Babylon?), and aqueducts, not
to mention a restorative sewage treatment system at nearby Xochimilco—sort of
a miniature version of Mesopotamia's marshes (see chapter 11)—that was state of
the art (even by today's standards). Chinampas, an agricultural technique similar to