Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Gobster and Hull end their important contribution by asking and answering probing
questions such as, Why restore nature? Which natures are possible and acceptable?
Which natures can be maintained and sustained? Which restoration project is more
important than other pressing environmental and social problems, and deserves allo-
cation of scarce resources? They conclude that seeking answers to these questions
from the biological sciences is not enough. Instead, they argue, “Contributions from
the humanities and social sciences are needed to help decide restoration goals, to jus-
tify them in a competitive social context, and ultimately to plan, implement, and
maintain desired states of nature” (Hull and Robertson 2000, 299).
That same year, two other topics appeared that brought the idea of collaboration to
the wider natural resource and conservation audience. Both topics—
Across the Great
Divide: Explorations in Collaborative Conservation and the American West
(Brick,
Snow, and Van de Wetering 2000) and
Making Collaboration Work: Lessons from In-
novation in Natural Resource Management
(Woddolleck and Yaffee 2000)—stressed
the need to move from confrontation to a collaborative approach in order to solve
public policy stalemates. We capture a similar argument in our section on collabora-
tion, but with an emphasis on its role in ecological restoration efforts.
In 2003, Matthias Gross, a German sociologist and cofounder of the journal
Na-
ture + Culture
, presented us with
Inventing Nature: Ecological Restoration by Public
Experiments
, a treatise about ecological restoration and the creation of nature, the
split between the layperson and the expert, the opportunity that ecological restoration
presents in repairing that divide through “real world” projects, as well as a review of
the history of sociology/human ecology. He has followed the topic with various arti-
cles; one in particular, “Beyond expertise: Ecological science and the making of so-
cially robust restoration strategies” (Gross 2006), suggests, as we do, two forms of han-
dling knowledge—one the conventional form of controlled, expert knowledge, the
other a transdisciplinary knowledge that is evaluated in terms of its general social rele-
vance. Gross calls this second type Mode 2 and describes it as follows: “Learning in
this mode of knowledge production is immediate and is part of the discovery process,
as is the case in many restoration projects” (Gross 2006). He goes on to suggest that
Mode 2 is not meant to supplant the traditional form (Mode 1), but to complement it
and expand its peer review process to the interested general public.
Eco-cultural Restoration: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and
Cultural Landscapes
As ecological restoration matured and gained popularity during the 1990s, it ex-
panded its reach outside the typical mainstream environmental community, espe-
cially and purposely to indigenous peoples because they have a strong interest in
restoring the ecology of the areas they inhabit as a means of increasing their resource
base and rejuvenating their cultures. In 1995, at the Society for Ecological Restora-
tion (SER) Conference in Seattle, Washington, Dennis Martinez led the effort to or-
ganize the Indigenous Peoples Restoration Network as a working group within SER
(Stevens 1996). The sessions he organized for that conference were a template for
