Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and enduring cultural and aesthetic ties to the altered landscape have developed. In
the British Isles, for example, landscapes have been devoid of trees for so many gener-
ations that reestablishing forest cover is popularly viewed as destroying the landscape
patrimony (Carroll et al. 2009, but see chap. 19, this volume).
Fourth, all questions of land use, including restoration, involve issues of tenure;
the formal and informal system of rules and practices that govern rights to access, use,
and disposal of land and land resources (see chap. 11, this volume). When Euro-
American settlers took up residence in the Willamette Valley, they imposed an en-
tirely different tenure system on the land from that of the Kalapuyans that limited
communal rights and defended individual rights. This shift in tenure may have cir-
cumscribed the use of fire from management of a common resource on a landscape
scale to clearing discrete parcels for private farmsteads, and the compulsion to protect
these farmsteads from fire probably made settlers much more conservative about its
use. Since settlement, those individual rights have been continuously renegotiated as
social norms for land use have evolved—from homesteads, to timber and agricultural
crops, to amenities—and each renegotiation has affected oak differently. The domi-
nance of private land in the Willamette Valley that once constrained oak systems now
may benefit them. Tenure rights share the dynamism we observe in human values and
ecological conditions.
Fifth, relationships between humans and landscapes are dynamic. They evolve to-
gether in response to changing biophysical and social conditions. At the same time
that restoration ecologists select ranges of ecological trajectories to guide their work,
social trends should also be considered. Given current developments in technology,
cultural values, and social structures, how might society interact with ecosystems in
the future? What kinds of products and services will be desired? Where will people
want to live, work, and recreate? What kinds of benefits will they need from ecosys-
tems to sustain the health and livability of their communities? While both ecologists
and social scientists recognize the folly of pursuing some vision of a static “restored”
state, they need a shared vision of the desired range of target conditions or trajectories.
The dearth of accurate, unbiased, reliable data on historical conditions hampers de-
velopment of such a vision. As we will examine in the following section, our under-
standing of past ecological conditions has sometimes been built upon incomplete,
ahistorical, selective, and misleading data. In this sense, the very premise of restora-
tion to some historical or natural condition is problematic. Constructive management
of socioecological change might be a more realistic goal for restoration.
A Political Ecology of Restoration
Having established ecological restoration as a values-based human endeavor, let us
now consider a useful lens through which to examine its ecological and social di-
mensions. Political ecology provides a framework for critically examining ecological
restoration within its contemporary social, political, and economic context (Blaikie
and Brookfield 1987; Peet and Watts 1996; Robbins 2004). Nygren and Rikoon
