“Ecological restoration” has a good ring
to it. So good, in fact, that the two words are used by everyone
from the environmentalists at The Nature Conservancy to the heads
of America’s biggest corporations. While conservation groups look
to restoration as a way to hasten the recovery of native ecosystems
harmed by agriculture or industry, developers tout the construction
of new wetlands as a way to replace existing wetlands, bulldozed to
make way for roads or homes.
But even practitioners of
restoration remain unsure of its limits, and many environmentalists
are skeptical of its ultimate value. Can restored or constructed
wetlands ever size up to “natural” ones lost to development? Do we
know enough about ponderosa pine forests, for example, to rebuild
these systems after they have been degraded by logging and grazing?
Is it arrogant to think we can wreck natural systems and then
engineer them back to health?
In his new book, The
Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with
Nature, William R. Jordan III answers these critiques. Pulling from
over two decades of restoration experience at the University of
Wisconsin, Jordan lays out a powerful vision for a new
environmental ethic, with ecological restoration at its core. While
he admits that restoration hasn’t succeeded on every front, Jordan
believes that the sometimes humbling act of trying to re-create
natural communities helps us understand our active role in shaping
the natural world.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Restoration evolution.
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