Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 10
Toward a Political Ecology of
Ecosystem Restoration
JOHN C. BLISS AND A. PAIGE FISCHER
Ever since humans emerged on the grassy plains of Africa,
Homo sapiens
has demon-
strated a special affinity for mixed, open-canopy woodland and savanna landscapes.
With their abundance and diversity of game and edible plants, fuel for cooking and
warmth, protection from weather and wide-open views of predators, these landscapes
provided everything hunter-gatherers needed. It has been hypothesized that humans
prefer canopied, open-floored landscapes for these biological reasons (Appleton 1975;
Bourassa 1991). Woodland and savanna landscape structures also appear to embody
widely shared cultural values for coherence and exploration—the well-spaced trees
appear orderly and the open floor can be accessed, while distant areas of trees remain
undiscovered (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989). Over the millennia that humans coevolved
with these systems, the landscape imprinted on us, compelling us to seek stands of
widely spaced trees over prairie grasses in which to live. In turn, we imprinted our will
on the landscape through pervasive, deliberate, and sophisticated management to ful-
fill human needs. A growing body of evidence points to the formative interactions be-
tween humans and these landscapes (Penn and Mysterud 2007). In this chapter we
explore these interactions, using the Oregon white oak ecosystem as a case study, to
provide some considerations for ecosystem restoration. Specifically, we discuss the
cultural values, social practices, and tenure arrangements that influence how humans
have altered landscapes in the past. We explore the dynamic, interdependent rela-
tionship between human communities and landscapes, and draw attention to power
relations relevant to restoration. We close with a checklist of questions to guide practi-
tioners in integrating social and ecological considerations.
An illustration from Oregon
Oregon's Willamette Valley is bordered by isolated remnants of the oak savanna and
woodlands that once dominated the entire basin from the lower slopes of the Coast
Range on the west to the Cascade Mountains on the east. These ecosystems, appeal-
ing to the human eye and rich in biodiversity, are among the state's most endangered,
covering only a few percent of the area they occupied at the time of Euro-American
