Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
sense of place, ecological health, balance, and healing. The restoration plan includes
restoration of ecosystem structure and function as well as subsistence income and en-
hancement of spiritual and cultural values (Wolf 2004).
The ability of indigenous peoples to exercise their stewardship roles with the land
is central to the principle of reciprocal restoration, and also inextricably linked to legal
title to the land. However, land title is a serious problem for many aboriginal peoples,
like the White Earth Ojibwe, the Klamath, and countless others. Such is the case for
the Onondaga Nation of upstate New York. Their homelands include the sacred site
of Onondaga Lake where the Iroquois Confederacy was founded and now, unfortu-
nately, thirteen Superfund sites. The Onondaga Nation has filed a historic land rights
action to regain aboriginal title, not with the intent to seize property, but to regain the
ability to exercise their responsibilities for the watershed and to restore both land and
people. Their “Vision for a Clean Onondaga Lake” articulates the synergy between
restoring a landscape and cultural restoration (Onondaga Nation 2010).
Restoration of Traditional Land Management for Biodiversity
Especially in the Americas and Australia, the notion of the presettlement state is prob-
lematic because it is frequently tied to the “myth of the pristine” (Denevan 1992),
which supposes that the landscape encountered at the time of European settlement
was in a “state of nature” and free from human disturbance. In the Americas, this per-
spective ignores at least twelve thousand years of human history of land management
and an even longer period in Australia (chap. 4, this volume). There is now abundant
evidence that the pre-European settlement landscape was the product of indigenous
natural resource management, such as prescribed fire (Kimmerer and Lake 2001).
Therefore, it may not be possible to restore the presettlement landscape without also
restoring the traditional land management practices.
Traditional resource management methods share several goals with contemporary
restoration efforts, including manipulating the patterns and processes of ecological
succession to produce the desired species composition and structure. Indigenous
management practices were effective in creating and maintaining species assem-
blages that produced a sustained yield of food and subsistence materials for humans,
while also generating shifting mosaics of high productivity and biodiversity. The
ethnographic literature is rich with descriptions of highly site-specific land care prac-
tices designed to produce a given vegetation composition (Mann 2005; Berkes 2008).
These may be of significant value to restoration ecologists.
Kat Anderson (1996, 2001, 2006) provides an excellent review of the wide array of
indigenous land management practices in California that ensured a sustainable har-
vest of culturally significant plant materials. Such practices mirror the definition of
ecological restoration offered by Allen and Hoekstra (1992) as “gardening with wild
species in a natural mosaic.”
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to review the myriad ecosystem management
practices employed by indigenous peoples. However, if, as Robinson and Handel
(2000) suggest, ecological restoration is essentially facilitated succession, then it is
