Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
increasing engagement with sociology, anthropology, and conflict management. In
the mid-1990s, James Kennedy and then U.S. Forest Service chief Jack Ward Thomas
stressed the need to prepare young natural resource specialists to deal with people as
well as natural areas (Kennedy and Thomas 1995). They argued that natural resource
management should be viewed as “social value management” or, alternatively, “social
conflict management” (Kennedy and Thomas 1995, 317) and that managers be ex-
plicitly trained to understand and deal with complex social-political-economic envi-
ronments. The U.S. Forest Service and some other federal agencies (e.g., the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) now have integrated social science and
human dimensions work into their overall planning.
Finally, although ecosystem ecology as a unified discipline did not last, the
human-oriented concept of the Odums continued as many systems ecologists turned
their attention to applied and hybrid practices and disciplines, including conservation
biology/ecology, ecosystem health and management, sustainability theory, and eco-
logical economics (de Laplante 2005, 404-5), and, in situations where landscape- or
watershed-level projects were undertaken, ecological restoration.
While this overview is admittedly brief and incomplete, we hope it has provided
the reader with a sense of the foundations of the movement in ecology and the hu-
manities away from the nature-culture divide. Moreover, we hope that it begins to
demonstrate that the importance of the social sciences and humanities is now recog-
nized in conservation efforts worldwide and has become an integral part of those ef-
forts. The following section focuses more specifically on the pioneering efforts within
the realm of ecological restoration to move beyond the human-nature dualism and
embrace the reciprocal role humans have with nature.
Humanities-Oriented Work in Ecological Restoration
William (Bill) Jordan was, arguably, the first person to write consistently about inter-
play of humans and nature within the context of ecological restoration. Yes, there are
the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley, and others (all of
whom Jordan drew upon), but during his tenure (1981-2001) as editor of the journal
Restoration & Management Notes
(later
Ecological Restoration
), Jordan routinely ex-
amined ideas such as restoration as performance, restoration as a means of connecting
humans to nature, restoration and education, and restoration and community. More-
over, he enjoined authors to do the same, thereby producing a journal that covered
not only the scientific and managerial aspects of restoration but the philosophical,
artistic, and psychological as well. In his 2003 topic
The Sunflower Forest: Ecological
Restoration and the New Communion with Nature
, Jordan summarized and updated
many of the arguments he had made during those two decades:
Restoration is important . . . because it is a way of returning classic ecosystems
to the landscape, allowing us to go on the offensive in the struggle to ensure
their long-term survival....Butitisalso important for exactly the reasons that
four generations of environmentalists have been skeptical about it: because it is
