Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ognized because they do not fit neatly into our scientific myth of “objectivity” or be-
cause our preservationist myth of “wilderness” holds that they are to be neither seen
nor heard is nothing short of absurd and certainly counterproductive to work that
needs to be done to protect and restore the environment and humankind's role as
steward of it.
Humans: Apart from Nature or Part of Nature?
As in most endeavors, we stand on the shoulders of those who preceded us. We inherit
from them ideas, skills, practices, and theories that inform our present situation and,
to the extent that they remain relevant, help us plan for the future. The practice of
ecological restoration is not without these traditions. In terms of practical application,
it owes much to the practices of agriculture, horticulture, gardening, landscape archi-
tecture, forestry, and other applied fields. From a more scientific perspective, ideas
from ecology and the other physical sciences serve as an obvious and important foun-
dation (Palmer, Falk, and Zeder 2006). The humanities and social sciences have, un-
til recently, played a lesser role in ecological restoration, despite their importance to
the overall success of restoration projects, and, in the case of sociology, a long rela-
tionship with ecology under the banners of human ecology (Adams 1935; Hollings-
head 1940; Gross 2003) and, more recently, environmental sociology (Dunlap 1980a;
Dunlap and Catton 1994; Gross 2003).
In this section, we provide an overview of some of the people, institutions, and
events that have changed the Western worldview to include the idea that humans are
an integral part of the biophysical world—a concept that is essential for the discus-
sions that take place between the covers of this topic.
Whereas indigenous cultures and other non-Western religions and schools of
thought typically do not make a distinction between humans and nature (or culture
and nature), this dualism is pervasive in Western thought (Glacken 1967; White
1967). Modern science, which has at its foundation this subject-object/us-other
metaphysical position, brought this dualism forward when it externalized nature as an
object of knowledge (Haila 2000).
Working within this context of modern science, early ecologists in North America
and Europe (e.g., Josias Braun-Blanquet, Henry Cowles, Frederic Clements, Victor
Shelford, Arthur Tansley) strove to understand plants or animals and how those spe-
cies associated with one another (communities, assemblages), how various plant com-
munities interacted with one another across the land (plant succession), and how ani-
mals interacted with the land (habitat, food webs). Despite their use of terms
associated with human-related social units, these ecologists had little interest in the
role humans played in the ecological settings they studied, preferring to imagine their
study sites as “natural.”
One of the first to allude to the problem created by separating humans from nature
was the animal ecologist Charles C. Adams, who, in 1913, wrote: “With a grounding
in the general principles of organic response to the total environment, the distur-
bances due to man are a problem in the adjustment of the highest type of animal, as a
