Why People Matter in Ecological Restoration

DAVE EGAN, EVAN E. HJERPE, AND JESSE ABRAMS

Ecological restoration is a practice of hope; hope because restorationists envision a better future as a result of their efforts. Ecological restoration is a practice of faith; faith because restorationists work in a world of uncertainty. Finally, ecological restoration is a practice of love; love because restorationists care about, and give their lives to, efforts that protect and enhance the lives of humans and other-than-human beings alike. Ecological restoration is a human practice, and because it is, people matter.

In this book we endorse the idea that humans are an integral part of nature and that they play a key role in determining, either consciously or otherwise, the condition of the environment in which they live. We also support the idea that the practice of ecological restoration is one of the more positive ways that humans can interact with the rest of the natural world. Moreover, we seek to show why recognizing and understanding the human dimensions of ecological restoration are critical to the success and longevity of all ecological restoration efforts, especially those undertaken at large scales, on public lands, and/or within urban/suburban settings. These are situations where restoration activities move beyond the vision and control of an individual landowner or small group of like-minded people; these activities are community-based efforts that involve the ideas and concerns of many people.

A fundamental assumption underlying the concept of ecological restoration is that humans are responsible for degrading the natural environment and, therefore, humans have a responsibility to repair it. At the heart of ecological restoration is a vision of a better relationship between humans and the rest of the world. Unfortunately, there is no unified vision of who we are as people, how the world around us operates, and what this better relationship should look like. We believe, however, that ecological restoration provides a forum within which we can study the dialogue between humans and nature, and between various human stakeholders. In this book, we do so by studying the human aspects of collaboration and community-based ecological restoration, restoration economics, volunteerism, environmental education, eco-cultural practices, and politics, governance, and planning.

One of the first things we observe when studying ecological restoration is that, because humans are intimately involved, the practice is inherently (1) value laden, (2) context driven, (3) prone to be immersed in disagreement and compromise, and (4) experiential.

Numerous studies have shown that determining restoration goals and best practices are value-laden activities because they involve human perceptions, beliefs, emotions, knowledge, and, ultimately, behaviors (Gobster and Hull 2000; Bright, Barro, and Burtz 2002; Morford and James 2002; Shindler, Wilton, and Wright 2002). This is problematic when one practices ecological restoration from a strictly scientific perspective, because ecological science alone fails to capture the full extent of the issues we are trying to solve or that must be bridged in order to reach a science-based solution. As historian and ecologist Robert McIntosh points out, "The conflict between the image of science as objective and value-free and that of ecology as intrinsically value-laden and a guide to ethics for humans, animals, and even trees is difficult to reconcile. Segregation of strictly scientific concerns from matters of public policy is not easy, as atomic scientists had found" (McIntosh 1986, 308). Furthermore, ecological restoration activities take place in cultural, political, and economic contexts that produce different "strains" and definitions of ecological restoration. This is especially true as one looks at projects across various regions and at international scales. In addition, these contexts are dynamic and can change with the addition or removal of even one influential person from an oversight group, management team, legislative body, or field crew. Influxes of funding, passage of key legislation or mandates, perceived crisis conditions, and increased public awareness and support can also play key roles in advancing restoration activities. Likewise, bad press, poor relationships with clients and stakeholders, and other negative associations tend to doom the best plans and override the findings of sound scientific research.

As we have seen in numerous situations (e.g., Cook County Forest Preserves, the Everglades, San Francisco nature parks, southwestern ponderosa pine forests), these two factors—value ladenness and context—can and do produce situations where disagreements have halted or canceled restoration efforts. Moreover, these two aspects of the human condition often compromise the historical authenticity (Egan 2006) or historical fidelity (Higgs 2003) of ecological restoration projects and move them closer to some other kind of conservation effort (i.e., reclamation, revegetation).

To move forward under conditions characterized by uncertainty, disagreement, and complexity, our experience tells us that, instead of seeking greater control we must use pertinent strategies, such as the democratic process, inclusiveness, and respecting local values and knowledge. We must also recognize competing land-use views, differing visions of human–nature relationships, and opposing values related to job creation and financing. Working through these strategies can help develop solutions amenable to both nature and humans.

Finally, human involvement in restoration practices is experiential in both the physical and the psychological sense, making it open for educational possibilities, artistic interpretations, and spiritual and physical renewal. These efforts can, likewise, aid in resolving situations blinded by mistrust and ignorance. Ultimately, people are innately part of restoration projects as experts, learned amateurs, or volunteers, or as the general public affected by the results of restoration projects. To leave them unrecognized because they do not fit neatly into our scientific myth of "objectivity" or because our preservationist myth of "wilderness" holds that they are to be neither seen nor heard is nothing short of absurd and certainly counterproductive to work that needs to be done to protect and restore the environment and humankind's role as steward of it.

Humans: Apart from Nature or Part of Nature?

As in most endeavors, we stand on the shoulders of those who preceded us. We inherit from them ideas, skills, practices, and theories that inform our present situation and, to the extent that they remain relevant, help us plan for the future. The practice of ecological restoration is not without these traditions. In terms of practical application, it owes much to the practices of agriculture, horticulture, gardening, landscape architecture, forestry, and other applied fields. From a more scientific perspective, ideas from ecology and the other physical sciences serve as an obvious and important foundation (Palmer, Falk, and Zeder 2006). The humanities and social sciences have, until recently, played a lesser role in ecological restoration, despite their importance to the overall success of restoration projects, and, in the case of sociology, a long relationship with ecology under the banners of human ecology (Adams 1935; Hollingshead 1940; Gross 2003) and, more recently, environmental sociology (Dunlap 1980a; Dunlap and Catton 1994; Gross 2003).

In this section, we provide an overview of some of the people, institutions, and events that have changed the Western worldview to include the idea that humans are an integral part of the biophysical world—a concept that is essential for the discussions that take place between the covers of this book.

Whereas indigenous cultures and other non-Western religions and schools of thought typically do not make a distinction between humans and nature (or culture and nature), this dualism is pervasive in Western thought (Glacken 1967; White 1967). Modern science, which has at its foundation this subject–object/us–other metaphysical position, brought this dualism forward when it externalized nature as an object of knowledge (Haila 2000).

Working within this context of modern science, early ecologists in North America and Europe (e.g., Josias Braun-Blanquet, Henry Cowles, Frederic Clements, Victor Shelford, Arthur Tansley) strove to understand plants or animals and how those species associated with one another (communities, assemblages), how various plant communities interacted with one another across the land (plant succession), and how animals interacted with the land (habitat, food webs). Despite their use of terms associated with human-related social units, these ecologists had little interest in the role humans played in the ecological settings they studied, preferring to imagine their study sites as "natural."

One of the first to allude to the problem created by separating humans from nature was the animal ecologist Charles C. Adams, who, in 1913, wrote: "With a grounding in the general principles of organic response to the total environment, the disturbances due to man are a problem in the adjustment of the highest type of animal, as a member of an animal association, to its complete environment." However, this quote is more typical of the belief that humans and human action should be ruled by the laws of nature—a popular idea during the 1910s and 1920s, and even today—than of desire to end the human–nature dualism.

The English ecologist Arthur Tansley, in a 1935 paper that not only challenged the Clementsian model of plant succession and Clements's concept of the complex organism but offered a new ecological paradigm—the ecosystem—as an alternative (Tansley 1935), provided an extremely important step in dissolving the human–nature dualism concept within ecology. Tansley not only argued for including human-caused vegetation types into the study of ecology ("We cannot confine ourselves to the so-called "natural" entities and ignore the processes and expressions of vegetation now so abundantly provided us by the activities of man" [p. 304]), he also placed humans within the natural world as an "exceptionally powerful biotic factor":

It is obvious that modern civilized man upsets the "natural" ecosystems or "biotic communities" on a very large scale. But it would be difficult, not to say impossible, to draw a natural line between the activities of the human tribes which presumably fitted into and formed parts of "biotic communities" and the destructive activities of the modern world. Is man part of "nature" or not? Can his existence be harmonized with the conception of the "complex organism"? Regarded as an exceptionally powerful biotic factor which increasingly upsets the equilibrium of preexisting ecosystems and eventually destroys them, at the same time forming new ones of very different nature, human activity finds its proper place in ecology. (303)

Responding to Tansley's critique, Clements and Shelford, in their 1939 treatise BioEcology, did recognize humans as the "outstanding dominant of a new order," but they deemed it premature to include the study of human ecology in any detail in their book.

Nevertheless, human ecologists (e.g., Robert E. Parks, etc.) proceeded on, using the concepts of ecology to study humans, although most plant/animal ecologists paid relatively little heed to their activities. Still, there were some connections. Indeed, the Ecological Society of America held a symposium on human ecology in 1940 (McIntosh 1986, 307). The idea of interdisciplinary work between plant/animal ecologists and human ecologists continued to hang on by the barest of threads during and after World War II, and through the early 1960s. The Ecological Society of America, for example, made attempts during the mid-1950s to elevate the discussion of human ecology and, in 1955, the National Science Foundation/Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research coproduced "Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth," a conference that brought together ecologists, anthropologists, geographers, and other thinkers to discuss the past, present, and future relation between humans and nature (Thomas Jr. 1956). However, these and other smaller efforts produced little lasting effect.

So little, in fact, that by 1967 the ecologist and philosopher Paul Shepard was asking: "Whatever happened to human ecology?" (Shepard 1967). McIntosh, reflecting on the situation, concluded: "Geography, sociology, and other disciplines concerned with humans, their cultures, and their relations to the environment sometimes adopted the name but rarely the substance of ecology.... The several efforts to bring together ecologists and social scientists failed to integrate them or to produce really significant moves toward interdisciplinary approaches" (McIntosh 1986, 308).

But the postwar era did produce, often for military purposes, a strong interest in the study of systems and the quantification of energy flows and functions within them. In ecology, this effort was led by Eugene Odum and his brother, Howard, as they took Tansley's concept of ecosystem and Raymond Lindeman's landmark work (Lindeman 1942), and put their own stamp on holistic-type studies under the banner of ecosystem ecology or systems ecology. As important as their ecological studies and the systems studies of others (e.g., Liken and Bormann at the Hubbard Experimental Forest), was Eugene Odum's insistence on interdisciplinary studies that placed humans within the ecosystem. He indicated this viewpoint in the following:

Until recently mankind has more or less taken for granted the gas-exchange, water purification, nutrient-cycling, and other productive functions of self-maintaining ecosystems, chiefly because neither his number nor his environmental manipulations have been great enough to affect regional and global balances. Now, however, it is painfully evident that such balances are being affected, often detrimentally. The "one problem, one solution approach" is no longer adequate and must be replaced by some form of ecosystem analysis that considers man as part of, not apart from, the environment. (Odum 1969, 266–67)

Reflecting back on the emergence and growth of ecosystem ecology, Eugene Odum wrote: "[D]uring the environmental awareness decade, 1968 to 1981, a school of ecosystem ecology emerged that considers ecology to be not just a subdivision of biology, but a new discipline that integrates biological, physical, and social science aspects of man-in-nature interdependence" (E. P. Odum 1986, cited in McIntosh 1986, 202). In the minds of many ecologists, Odum's perspective was a radical departure from traditional ecological science (de Laplante 2005), even if the reality of Odum's work did little to push the actual study of humans within ecosystems.

On the international stage, UNESCO initiated the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Program in 1971. The program was viewed as an upgrade from the International Biological Program (IBP), which Eugene Odum chaired in the United States, in that it was less academically oriented and more pragmatic. It also placed a greater emphasis on developing countries and their ecosystems (e.g., tropical forests received a very high priority) than did the IBP. Ecosystem ecologist Frank Golley (1993), in his history of the ecosystem concept, writes: "MAB studied systems in which humans were an integral part, including cities, agricultural systems, and nature reserves (162).... The MAB extended ecosystem studies from natural landscapes to the human-built environment, leading to the revitalization of the subject of human ecology on ecosystem principles" (164). The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (also known as the Stockholm Conference) endorsed the MAB Program. Furthermore, it promoted a new, international focus on the relationship between humans and the environment that has proven, in retrospect, to be the springboard for future international environmental efforts (including an interest in climate change and sustainable development) and has been a solid foundation of European environmental efforts.

This same period saw a revival of interest in human ecology/environmental sociology with several new publications (Kormondy 1974; Sargent II 1974; Dunlap 1980a, 1980b). Like earlier efforts, this interest in ecology and humans was short-lived, disappearing as Dunlap and Catton (1994) suggest in the early 1980s as public interest in environmental issues waned during the Reagan administration. It rebounded in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the global nature of environmental issues and the human role in them became better known and more widely publicized (Dunlap and Catton 1994).

A groundbreaking work appeared in the early 1990s—Humans as Components of Ecosystems: The Ecology of Subtle Effects and Populated Areas (McDonnell and Pickett 1993). This book not only placed humans squarely within the context of the ecosystem, it complemented new efforts within the Chesapeake Bay area by ecologist Steward Pickett and others that ultimately resulted in Baltimore being named and funded as an National Science Foundation Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network site—the first in the United States to incorporate both ecological and social sciences.