Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
renewing the human-place connection, and enabling people to reclaim their respon-
sibility for sustaining the land that sustains them. Higgs (2005) notes that “restoration
is successful only to the extent that the life of the human community is changed to re-
flect the health of the restored ecosystem.” Traditional ecological knowledge is vital to
support this new direction in restoration ecology, as a model for restoration of rela-
tionship grounded in the worldview of humans participating in the well-being of land.
Reciprocal restoration also offers the opportunity for an immigrant culture to start
becoming “indigenous to place” by healing relationships with land and history. This
does not mean appropriating the culture of indigenous people, but generating an au-
thentic new relationship. It means throwing off the mindset of the immigrant, includ-
ing the frontier mindset of “take what you can get and move on.” It means becoming
involved with the “language” and dynamics of the place you live—learning its land-
forms, weather patterns, animals, plants, waterways, and seasons. Being indigenous to
place means to live as if we'll be here for the long haul, as if our children's future mat-
tered. It means taking care of the land as if our lives, both spiritual and material, de-
pended on it. It involves entering into a covenant of reciprocity with the land, which
includes restoration. That's what it means to become indigenous to place (see chap-
ters 19, 22, 23, this volume). This can be done in a variety of ways (e.g., eco-cultural
restoration, the restoration of traditional practices and cultural landscapes, ecological
art) as the three case studies in chapters 19, 20, and 21 illustrate.
Conclusion
• It is not the land that is broken, but our relationship with it. Thus, the work of
ecological restoration must be to restore human-land relationship.
• Traditional ecological knowledge can contribute to both the philosophy and
the practice of ecological restoration by expanding our vision of what restora-
tion can entail to include eco-cultural and reciprocal restoration.
• Traditional resource management practices provide insight into tools for resto-
ration through manipulation of disturbance regimes.
• Indigenous concepts of right relationship include respect, reciprocity, responsi-
bility, and relatedness.
• Relationship can include active participation in the well-being of land.
References
Abrams, D. 1996.
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human
World
. New York: Pantheon Books.
Alcoze, T., and M. Hurteau. 2001. “Implementing the Archaeo-environmental Reconstruc-
tion Technique: Rediscovering the Historic Ground Layer of Three Plant Communities in
the Greater Grand Canyon Region.” In
The Historical Ecology Handbook: A Restora-
tionist's Guide to Reference Ecosystems
, edited by D. Egan and E. A. Howell, 413-24. Wash-
ington DC: Island Press.
Allen, W. H. 1988. “Biocultural Restoration of a Tropical Forest.”
BioScience
38 (3): 156-61.
