Environmental Engineering Reference
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at every point an encounter with shame. Restoration is shameful because it in-
volves killing and a measure of hegemony over the land; because the restora-
tion effort is never fully successful and never complete;
because it dramatizes
not only our troubling dependence on the natural landscape, but—equally trou-
bling—its dependence on us
; and because it dramatizes the restorationist's com-
plicity, not only in the destructive acts he attempts to reverse, but, more funda-
mentally, in the shameful process of creation itself, in which he presumes to
participate. (
Sunflower Forest
, 50, emphasis added)
While Jordan was making his points in the pages of
Restoration & Management
Notes/Ecological Restoration
and elsewhere, other writers were producing topics
about ecological restoration and its connection to humanity and the environment for
a general audience or at least that part of the public interested in environmental af-
fairs. The first was John Berger, whose 1985 topic
Restoring the Earth: How Americans
Are Working to Repair Our Damaged Environment
provided a journalistic survey of
people taking on the job of ecological restoration—and their responses to it. Other
topics of a similar stripe followed, including William K. Stevens's 1995 account of
ecological restoration activities in the Chicago area,
Miracle under the Oaks: The Re-
vival of Nature in America
, and Stephanie Mills's topic, also published in 1995,
In Ser-
vice of the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting Damaged Land
, which included ac-
counts of her personal experience with restoring land as well as restoration narratives
from across America and in India. River restorationist/writer Freeman House's
Tot em
Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species
(2000) told the story of ecological restora-
tion along the Mattole River in northern California, emphasizing the integral and
mutually beneficial connection between the human community and salmon recov-
ery. Another topic that suggested similar human benefits from restoration was
Ecopsy-
chology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind
(1995), edited by Theodore Roszak
and his colleagues. More recently, Peter Friederici (2006) has revisited the interaction
between people and restored landscapes in his topic
Nature's Restoration: People and
Places on the Front Lines of Conservation
.
Social Sciences
While there were earlier works that tied the social sciences to natural resource man-
agement issues (e.g., in journals such as
Society and Natural Resources, Environmen-
tal Management, Human Ecology
), the breakthrough in terms of examining the social
science perspective of ecological restoration came in 2000 with the publication of
Restoring Nature: Perspectives from the Social Sciences and the Humanities
, which was
edited by Paul Gobster and Bruce Hull. Like Stevens's topic, they focused on ecologi-
cal restoration efforts in the Chicago area, but with an emphasis on the public and po-
litical controversy that had been under way in Chicago since 1996 about restoration
activities. The product of a well-attended conference in 1998, the topic examined not
only the controversy and people's reaction to it, but the much larger issue of the social
creation of nature or how people construct nature as part of their larger worldview.
