What Do We Mean When We Talk About Ecological Restoration?

ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION 224 DECEMBER 2004 281

Ecological Restoration Vol 22 No 4 2004 ISSN 1522-4740 E-ISSN 1543-4079copy2004 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

What do we mean to be doing whenwe talk about plan for and carry

out ecological restorations Restora-tionists usually reply that our goal inrestoration is to return an ecosystem tosome previously existing condition thatno longer is present at that site Wealmost always make the assumption thatthe sitersquos current condition is somehowdegraded or less desirable than the previ-ous condition and needs improvementThe Society for Ecological Restorationrsquosrecent definition of ecological restorationseems to capture the standard for ourwork ldquoEcological restoration is an inten-tional activity that initiates or acceleratesthe recovery of an ecosystem with respectto its health integrity and sustainabilityFrequently the ecosystem that requiresrestoration has been degraded damagedtransformed or entirely destroyed as thedirect or indirect result of human activi-tieshellip Restoration attempts to return anecosystem to its historic trajectoryrdquo (SERPrimer 2002)

Yet that definition and our usual goalin restoration raise several importantquestions not the least of which is Whatdo we mean by health integrity and sus-tainability Furthermore how do wedecide when an ecosystem is so degradedor damaged that it is in need of restora-tion What do we mean by historic tra-jectory (A historian colleague of mine[Mark Spence personal communication]points out that it is logically impossible forany ecosystem not to be on a historic tra-

jectory) What sort of values are we bring-ing to the process when we talk aboutrestoration What are we really doingwhen we restore an ecosystem

These questions have plagued meever since I got into the business of restor-ing ecosystems and managing existingrestorations Some of my questions arisefrom my educational background In grad-uate school I was trained in classical com-munity ecology and like most communityecologists I was taught that it was best tostudy communities and ecosystems thatwere as little disturbed by human activityas possible In fact we purposefullyavoided any ecosystem with obvious dam-age from human activities Yet the moreI looked at the world around me the moreit became apparent that there were veryfew ecosystems that were in fact undis-turbed by humans

I do my restoration work in westernIllinois where the typical restoration is totake agricultural land and restore it to tall-grass prairie What makes a tallgrassprairie more valuable than agriculturalland As a society we would cease to existwithout a large amount of agriculturalland Moreover if I were to simply aban-don an agriculture field in westernIllinois it would not turn into a tallgrassprairie on its own Instead it would even-tually become an oak-hickory woodlotWhy is a tallgrass prairie more valuablethan an oak-hickory woodlot The factthat producing the tallgrass prairierequires considerable human effort has led

What Do We Mean When We Talk AboutEcological Restorationby Stuart K Allison

PERSPECTIVE

Is restoration

really a form of

ecological gardening

some philosophers to label restorations asartificial (Katz 1992) But is the input ofhuman effort really a problem whendeciding whether a restoration is valuableor not In this essay I will concentrate onhow we decide the goal of our restorationefforts what it means when we describerestorations using terms such as ldquonaturalrdquoand ldquoartificialrdquo and discuss the potentialof using the term ldquogardeningrdquo to describeour work

Setting the Goal for a RestorationIn ecological restoration our feeling is thatthe current degraded condition of the siteis less natural than a previously existingstate and that a more natural condition isbetter for the site and usually better for theenvironment as a whole We progresstowards a more natural condition with thenotion that such a condition will ensurebetter ecosystem health integrity and sus-tainability But how do we decide what ismore natural than the current condition

In North America we almost alwaysdecide that the conditions that existedprior to European-American settlementwere more natural than the conditionsthat developed afterwards For examplein western Illinois we typically decide toplant tallgrass prairie that is similar to theprairies that existed there prior toEuropean-American settlement Thus weare setting as our goal the recreation of atallgrass prairie as it would have existedprior to the 1830s We hope to restore thesite in such a way that the tallgrass prairiewill develop along a trajectory of dynamicchanges that would mirror what wouldhave happened to tallgrass prairies ifEuropean-Americans had never arrivedin the area

Our goal of restoring an agriculturalsite to something similar to the tallgrassprairies that existed prior to the 1830simmediately presents us with many practi-cal problems however First what do weknow about the tallgrass prairies thatexisted prior to European-American arrivalThe answer ismdashnot as much as we wouldlike to know We have some species liststhat date back to the 1830s For westernIllinois the best plant list by far was com-

piled by pioneer physician and botanicalenthusiast Dr Samuel Mead (Mead 1846)But Dr Meadrsquos list only provides us with thenames and locations of plants he collected

and notations of whether the plants werecommon or rare We have almost no infor-mation about the relative proportions ofthe plants in the tallgrass prairies he sam-pled or how the different species were asso-ciated with each other To supplement thislimited information we often use existingremnants of the original tallgrass prairies asmodels (Schramm 1992) Remnants areproblematic however because they aresmall isolated pieces of prairie that wereusually preserved because they were inplaces not well suited for agriculture andthus were dissimilar to most of the tallgrassprairie that once surrounded them Theseremnants have almost certainly changedsince the 1830s because they are isolatedand suffered changes in fire regime and aloss of many animal species associated withthem (Curtis and Greene 1949 Leach andGivnish 1996)

The lack of animals associated withthe original prairies is a particularly vexingproblem Almost all tallgrass prairierestorations are too small to support thelarger animal species typical of original

tallgrass prairie Only at the very largestprairie restorations (for example NeilSmith National Wildlife Refuge andMidewin National Tallgrass Prairie) arethere any plans to introduce large herbi-vores such as bison or elk There is noplan to reintroduce the large carnivorestypical of tallgrass prairies Animals likethe grey wolf require such a large homerange that even our largest prairie restora-tions could not support them How naturalis a prairie that lacks its typical animals

A further complication is that thetallgrass prairies that existed in Illinois inthe 1830s were almost certainly main-tained by Native American-set fires(Anderson 1990) Is a prairie that wasmaintained by human use of fire reallynatural And if it is why do we feel that ahuman-maintained prairie is more naturalthan a human-maintained soybean fieldCertainly there are many reasons for thisfeeling not the least of which is the pres-ence in the prairie of a diverse group ofplant species adapted to the local environ-ment compared to an agricultural mono-culture of a non-native domesticatedspecies In addition a soybean fieldrequires a much greater investment ofhuman energy than a tallgrass prairie Butthere is clearly a continuum of humaninvolvement in these ecosystems and itbecomes increasingly difficult to figure outwhere the natural and unnatural ends ofthe continuum become separate from eachother As I mention later this of course isthe difficulty we have if the word ldquogarden-ingrdquo is applied to ecological restorationWhere does gardening as we typicallydefine it begin and end and where doesgardening as restoration begin and end

The problem of a continuum ofhuman activities with varying degrees ofnaturalness is even worse in other parts ofthe world such as Europe much of Asiaand Africa where the presence of humansand their activities are so extensive andlong-standing that it is difficult to evenbegin to understand what the environ-ment would look like without them Howcan we identify natural in the face of somuch human activity occurring over suchlarge areas over hundreds of thousands toeven millions of years

282 ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION 224 DECEMBER 2004

We hope to restore thesite in such a way thatthe tallgrass prairie willdevelop along a trajec-tory of dynamic changesthat would mirror whatwould have happened to tallgrass prairies ifEuropean-Americans had never arrived in the area

The Problem of the NaturalOne solution to this problem of identify-ing natural in the face of human activity isto simply define natural as that whichoccurs without or beyond human activityConservation biologist Malcolm Hunterhas defined natural in the context of man-agement in just this manner ldquoIn summaryusing the word lsquonaturalrsquo to mean lsquowithouthuman influencersquo in the context of con-servation would help to define clearbenchmarks for managing ecosystems bothinside and outside ecological reservesThese benchmarks would not be coloredby arbitrary value judgments that praiseactivities by one group of people as naturaland condemn activities by other people asunnatural If we consider all human activ-ities to be unnatural we can focus on theprimary issue designing managementpractices that will move ecosystems closerto their natural structure and functionrdquo(Hunter 1996) Hunterrsquos definition is verysimilar to that of environmental philoso-pher Eric Katz who claimed that ldquoTheprocesses of the natural world that are freeof human interference are the most nat-uralrdquo (Katz 1992) Hunter in particularworried that identifying something such asthe use of fire by hunter-gatherers as nat-ural and the use of bulldozers by industri-alized peoples as unnatural was illogicaland felt that any human activity must beviewed as occurring outside of nature thuspreserving the natural environment insome kind of pristine state removed fromthe taint of human contact

The definition of natural as ldquowithouthuman influencerdquo causes us both ashumans and practicing restorationistsmany problems however First it rein-forces the nature-human division thatsees us as somehow separate from natureOnce we see ourselves as separate fromthe environment we seem to have themental freedom to think about and treatthe environment in any way we see fitwithout considering the consequencesReinforcing the human-nature divisionalso flies in the face of much modernphilosophical and environmental think-ing Many environmental philosophershave developed the idea that humans are

intimately a part of nature and that welose our true humanness when we separateourselves from naturemdashan idea most ele-gantly stated by Aldo Leopold in hisldquoLand Ethicrdquo (Leopold 1949)

Nonetheless many environmental-ists remain wary of identifying all humanactivities as natural There is a tendencyto label some activities or peoples as morenatural than others largely based onthings like degree of industrialization or

the amount of non-renewable resourcesnecessary to produce a piece of technol-ogy Yet from the point of view of an indi-vidual plant fire and hand axes are formsof technology that are just as devastatingas bulldozers and herbicides

The human-nature division is exac-erbated by confusion about how we definenatural The confusion is best seen byexamining the opposites to different defi-nitions of natural (Vogel 2002) If theopposite of natural is ldquosupernaturalrdquo thenwe see natural as something produced byor existing in a condition that developedby way of physical and biologicalprocesses that typically operate in our uni-versemdashprocesses that can be deduced byfollowing the scientific method and thatwe sometimes refer to as ldquothe laws ofnaturerdquo If the opposite of natural is ldquoarti-ficialrdquo then we see natural as the result ofprocesses that are not human as it ishumans who produce artifacts the artifi-cial If we follow the former definitionthat natural is not supernatural thenhumans are inherently natural We aroseby the biological process of evolution andour creations are the result of the use ofour minds and bodiesmdashalso the productsof evolution Thus the human construc-

tion of something like a building or bull-dozer is as natural as a beaver constructinga dam on a stream

Another problem in defining naturalas ldquowithout human influencerdquo is deter-mining where on earth we could possiblyfind any ldquonaturalrdquo ecosystem today ManyAmericans have grown up with thenotion that national parks such asYellowstone and Yosemite have alwaysexisted as some kind of pristine naturaltemple removed from human activitysince time immemorial We visit thoseparks and look at the environment andthink that what we see today has alwaysexisted in its current state and thathumans had nothing to do with the gene-sis of the parkrsquos environment The truth isbefore the arrival of European-AmericansNative Americans lived in and madeextensive use of the lands that wouldbecome our national parks The parks aswe know them today would not exist intheir current condition without the activ-ities of first Native Americans and laterthe National Park Service (Spence 1999see also ER 21(4)245-246)

It is in fact difficult to find manyplaces on the Earth that have not beeninhabited and modified by humans (Vogel2002) When I first read The End of Nature(McKibben 1989) I like many peoplethought Bill McKibben overstated his casethat human influence had become soextensive that no place on earth couldescape our actions But as we learn moreand more about global climate change theseasonal growth of the ozone hole overAntarctica and the transport of pollu-tants to the deep ocean it has becomeobvious that McKibben was basicallyright The main problem with McKibbenis that he also viewed the environmentthrough the lens of the human-naturedivide and did not completely acknowl-edge the long-term human influence onthe environment On the other handenvironmental philosopher Steven Vogelhas argued that nature as ldquowithout humaninfluencerdquo has not existed since the begin-nings of human evolutionary history Heclaims that we have always lived in inti-mate contact with the environment andthat our actions have always modified theenvironment as surely as the evolutionary


Ultimately I wouldargue all we mean byecological restoration is returning ldquoconditionsrdquo to a former state

pressure of the environment modified usHe states that ldquothe world we inhabit isalways one transformed by human prac-ticesrdquo and thus it is impossible to parse outa nature separate from us (Vogel 2002)

It appears to me that given the cur-rent trajectories of human populationgrowth and ongoing environmentalchange all areas that will remain in acondition that has any resemblance towhat we might call natural will continueto exist in that state only because ofhuman choice Moreover once humanshave chosen to set aside an area as anature preserve or wilderness area thework does not stop At that point ongo-ing human managementmdashwith all itsdecisions and controversiesmdashbecomes anecessity to prevent non-natural influ-ences (such as pollutants poaching andthe activities of domesticated and intro-duced species) from overwhelming theecology of the area (Janzen 1986)

I think it is noteworthy that while theSER Primer mentions cultural processesand the necessity of preserving ldquoculturallandscapesrdquo in many parts of the world itsauthors still reflect the idea of nature with-out human interference when they claimthat an ecosystem is finally restored whenit can ldquocontinue its development withoutfurther assistance or subsidyrdquo The conceptof no further human assistance would seemto preclude the possibility of an ultimatelysuccessful restoration of cultural land-scapes that depend upon human activitiesto maintain them

What Do We Mean by RestorationSo we come back to our initial questionWhat do we mean when we say that wewould like our ecological restorations toresult in a ldquomore naturalrdquo ecosystemGiven that ldquonaturalrdquo is a difficult term todefine that nature defined as ldquowithouthuman interferencerdquo is hard to imagine inour post-industrial world and becauserestorations require continuous humaninvolvement I would argue that we areleft with an unobtainable goal if our desireis to restore a ldquonaturalrdquo ecosystem

It may seem that by making this argu-ment I am supporting Katzrsquos contention

that restorations are simply artifactswhereas natural ecosystems are naturalbecause there is no human intention intheir creation (Katz 1992 2000) InsteadI agree with Vogel who argues thatbecause artifacts are produced by humansand because humans are the product of thenatural process of evolution therefore ldquoallartifacts are naturalrdquo (Vogel 2003)

The Oxford English Dictionary (2003)defines restoration as ldquo1 The action ofrestoring to a former state or position thefact of being restored or reinstated a Ofpersons b Of territory conditions orthingsrdquo Ultimately I would argue all we

mean by ecological restoration is returningldquoconditionsrdquo to a former state If we leaveout value-laden terms like ldquonaturalrdquo orldquopristinerdquo we allow ourselves a much largerrange of possible former states to which wecan restore ecosystems This an importantoption especially in North Americawhere so often the focus on restoration hasbeen to return areas to unobtainable levelsof naturalness or pristine condition Anyrestoration will necessarily be done withthe goal of achieving some state chosen byus and the goal or final state we attempt toachieve is only one of many possible states

In the Midwest for example wechoose prairie largely because it is the eco-system encountered by the first European-American settlers and thus it figures intoour regional mythos of what we are and

where we came from (Calkins 1989) Wealso choose tallgrass prairie because we findit aesthetically pleasing but we have toacknowledge that we have chosen one pos-sible former state from others that existedhere post-human arrival and could reason-ably be supported by our current climateAcknowledging our choice in the matterallows us a broader range of possible restora-tion options and suggests that we need tomore seriously consider other historicalecosystems that existed at any one site

ldquoThe Gardenification of NaturerdquoNoted ecologist and conservationist DanJanzen wrote a paper about ecologicalrestoration in the tropics that he subti-tled ldquoThe Gardenification of Naturerdquo(Janzen 2001) In many ways Janzenrsquosvariation on the word ldquogardenrdquo was a curi-ous choice Restorationists often takepains to differentiate restoration from gar-dening and imply that our work is morenatural and perhaps even more noblethan gardening (Jordan 2000) There areseveral reasons why restorationists makethis distinction chief among them is thatgardening is seen as too controllingmdashtoomuch a process of human domination anddomestication of the landscape ManyNorth American restorationists also viewgardening as an artificial process that pro-duces highly simplified plantings Weoften think of a row of petunias along thesidewalk or a few vegetables in a plot inthe backyard as a garden and forget aboutthe much larger landscape gardens that atleast attempt to recreate some version of amore species-rich and less-controlledlandscape (Moore and others 1988)

The choice of words we use todescribe what we are doing is importantbecause different words imply differentvalues (Hull and Robertson 2000) andthis is not merely ldquoantics with semanticsrdquoas the title of the old Readerrsquos Digest featuremight suggest The words we use oftencolor how we perceive our actions andeven the way in which we go aboutachieving our goals Furthermore Strunkand White (1979) taught us to never use abig word when a small word would do To


There is a sad ironywhen we talk aboutrestoring North Americanecosystems to conditionsmaintained by NativeAmericans without consulting or includingNative Americans in therestoration process

my way of thinking calling our workldquorestorationrdquo was the use of a bigger wordto set our work apart from gardening Sucha division was unnecessary because it onlyserves to drive people away

I think that the word ldquorestorationrdquohas a somewhat mechanical feel to itPeople restore buildings artwork andautomobiles and such restorations areoften fairly complex processes that onlythe very skilled can accomplish In con-trast anyone can plant a seed or pull aweed Herbert Schroeder (2000) notedthat many volunteer groups working onthe restoration of savanna ecosystems inthe Chicago area took pains to tell poten-tial volunteers that no advanced degree ortraining was necessary in order to helpwith the restorations Perhaps a word likegardening or at least using the term whendescribing the process would be moreinviting to potential volunteers

In a similar vein while some practic-ing restorationists have pointed out theart necessary for successful restorations(Schramm 1992) and some have evenclaimed restoration is an art (Turner1987) many have focused on the moretechnical aspects of restoration Technicalinformation is clearly critical for the suc-cess of restoration projects We need toknow the density and mixture of seeds toplant and how to nurture plants after ger-mination but as Eric Higgs (2003) pointsout when we focus on the technical welose the personal connection with theenvironment Aldo Leopold wrote that hehad more faith that the restoration of aproper human connection to the environ-ment would occur when the average farmboy took an interest in tinkering with thepines on the farm than he did if care forthe environment became the soleprovince of the academy and trained pro-fessionals (Leopold 1939)

Finally it seems to me that restora-tion often lacks the cultural dimensionmdashthe dimension that produces meaningFor example the Norwegian geographerKenneth Olwig (1995) criticized arestoration of stream meanders inDenmark claiming that without therestoration of the agricultural system thatmaintained the original stream-meadowecosystem the restoration was not very

meaningful Likewise in Englandnational parks have landscapes that aremaintained as cultural ecosystems wherethe traditional pastoral use of the land isseen as vital to maintaining the land-scape Olwig (1995) argues that withoutcontinued human use of the environ-ment the landscape would cease to existin the form that led to its preservation andthe human meaning for the landscapewould also be lost Restoration must resultin a deep personal and cultural engage-ment with the environment or it will notachieve much beyond a temporary patchfor the landscape The ideal human rela-tionship to the environment should resultin something akin to love as in love forother people (Olwig 1995)

Speaking of cultural landscapes andecosystems there is a sad irony when wetalk about restoring North Americanecosystems to conditions maintained byNative Americans without consulting orincluding Native Americans in therestoration process These culturallyderived ecosystems lack meaning whenthe original purpose for their creation isignored Native Americans burnedprairies for many reasons but it is unlikelythey burned them just for the heck of it Ifwe do not restore the Native Americanuses to these ecosystems then we need todevelop other uses to give the restorationsdeeper meanings (see ER 21(4)245-310)

I think that ldquogardeningrdquo is the perfectword to describe what restorationists aredoing because it emphasizes the personalrelationship between individual humansand the land (Moore and others 1988)Correspondingly as William Jordan (1994)and Andrew Light (2000) have pointedout ecological restoration is not just aboutrestoring a piece of the landscape it is alsoabout restoring the human relationship tothe environment We can choose a sitepick a historical ecosystem state as ourgoal plant native species remove weedsand in some cases even reintroduce extir-pated animals but we will not have accom-plished much if we continue to think ofhumans as separate from the environmentIn many ways the most important endproduct of restoration is not only a healthyecosystem but a healthy relationshipbetween humans and that ecosystem

Today it is probably impossible to havehealthy ecosystems without a healthyhuman-ecosystem relationship

To restore the human connection tothe land we need to move back into theenvironment in a small personal way justlike a gardener on hands and knees plant-ing bulbs in the cool autumn earth Theancient simple act of putting somethingin the ground and ldquohaving faith in a seedrdquo(Thoreau 1993) to germinate and grow isperhaps the defining image of a positiverelationship between humans and theearth In the garden we can actuallyachieve the ldquomiddle ground in which sus-tained use and non-use might attain somekind of balanced sustainable relation-shiprdquo (Cronon 1995)

Of course gardens and gardening area bit contradictory when thinking ofrestoring a balanced and healthy relation-ship to the environment Gardens areoften walled to keep the rest of the envi-ronment out But even in the most tightlycontrolled walled gardens of RenaissanceItaly there was a small spot near the cen-ter (known as a bosco) that was leftunmanaged to incorporate the wild non-human influences within the domesti-cated land (Mitchell 2001) Our goal inrestoration should be to reverse the planand process of those Italian gardens Weneed to remove the walls and make thedomesticated the small central part andas much as possible make the rest of thegarden the uncontrolled ecosystem grow-ing on its own

CodaDo I really think that my call to use theword ldquogardeningrdquo (or variations thereofsuch as ldquoecological gardeningrdquo) when wetalk about ecological restoration willchange the name we have for restorationprojects No the cat is already out of thebag with respect to the term ldquoecologicalrestorationrdquo The journals devoted to thesubject Ecological Restoration andRestoration Ecology already use the wordldquorestorationrdquo as does the main organizationassociated with restoration the Society forEcological Restoration International As aname ecological restoration has a historyand is well understood by restorationists


(Jordan 1995) But it is important that weare explicit about the relationship betweengardening and ecological restoration It isimportant that we recognize that ecologicalrestoration is a very highly evolved form ofgardening perhaps the ultimate form of gar-dening in terms of understanding thehuman relationship to the environmentThus use of the word ldquogardeningrdquo is not anegative or something we need to beashamed of rather it is something we needto be proud of and embrace Because asrestorationists we are really trying to restoreourselves to the garden of the environ-ment to put ourselves back in a positionwhere we see ourselves as just one part ofthe ecological web The more we can do tosimplify and personalize the human-envi-ronment connection the better The hang-up some environmental philosophersexpress about whether restorations are nat-ural or not or even whether the natural stillexists misses the point The connectionbetween humans and the environment isreal and cannot be denied The fact thatthe relationship is not working well cannotbe denied either There are many items onthe plate for restorationists but the mostimportant item must be the restoration ofthat human-environment relationshipWithout that restoration none of our otherefforts will matter

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSFirst I must thank the Sigurd Olson Environ-mental Institute and Northland College Theyprovided the space and freedom that allowedme to write this paper while a visiting scholarat the Institute Steve Sandstrom and PaulaKalmon were especially helpful during my timeat the Institute Mark Spence and FrankMcAndrews read an earlier draft of this paperand provided many valuable comments andsuggestions A grant from the RockefellerBrothers Foundation to Knox College helpedfund my time as a visiting scholar

REFERENCESAnderson RC 1990 The historic role of fire

in the North American Grasslands Pages8-18 in S Wallace and S Collins (eds)Fire in tallgrass prairie ecosystems Nor-man University of Oklahoma Press

Calkins EE 1989 They broke the prairie Cham-paign-Urbana University of Illinois Press

Cronon W 1995 The trouble with wilder-ness or getting back to the wrong naturePages 69-90 in W Cronon (ed) Uncom-

mon ground Toward reinventing natureNew York WW Norton Co New York

Curtis JT and HC Greene 1949 A study ofrelic Wisconsin prairies by the species-pres-ence method Ecology 3083-92

Higgs E 2003 Nature by design CambridgeMA The MIT Press

Hull RB and DP Robertson 2000 The lan-guage of nature matters We need a morepublic ecology Pages 97-118 in PH Gobsterand RB Hull (eds) Restoring naturePerspectives from the social sciences andhumanities Washington DC Island Press

Hunter M 1996 Benchmarks for managingecosystems Are human activities naturalConservation Biology 10695-697

Janzen DH 1986 The eternal externalthreat Pages 286-303 in M Soule (ed)Conservation Biology The science ofscarcity and diversity Sunderland MASinauer Associates Inc

__ 2001 How to grow a wildland The gar-denification of nature Pages 155-160 inMJ Novacek (ed) The biodiversity crisisLosing what counts New York AmericanMuseum of Natural History The NewPress

Jordan III WR 1994 ldquoSunflower ForestrdquoEcological restoration as the basis for a newenvironmental paradigm Pages 17-34 inAD Baldwin Jr J DeLuce and C Pletsch(eds) Beyond preservation Restoring andinventing landscapes St Paul Universityof Minnesota Press

__ 1995 ldquoRestorationrdquo (The Word) Restora-tion and Management Notes 13(2)151-152

__ 2000 Restoration community and wilder-ness Pages 23-26 in PH Gobster and RBHull (eds) Restoring nature Perspectivesfrom the social sciences and humanitiesWashington DC Island Press

Katz E 1992 The big lie Human restorationof nature Research in Philosophy and Tech-nology 12231-241

__ 2000 Another look at restorationTechnology and artificial nature Pages 37-48 in PH Gobster and RB Hull (eds)Restoring nature Perspectives from thesocial sciences and humanities Washing-ton DC Island Press

Leach MK and TJ Givnish 1996 Ecologi-cal determinants of species loss in remnantprairies Science 2731555-1558

Leopold A 1939 The farmer as a conserva-tionist American Forests 45294-316

__ 1949 A sand county almanac and sketcheshere and there New York Oxford Univer-sity Press

Light A 2000 Ecological restoration and thecultivation of nature A pragmatic perspec-tive Pages 49-70 in PH Gobster and RBHull (eds) Restoring nature Perspectivesfrom the social sciences and humanitiesWashington DC Island Press

McKibben B 1989 The end of nature NewYork Anchor Books

Mead SB 1846 Catalogue of plants growingspontaneously in the state of Illinois theprinciple part near Augusta HancockCounty The Prairie Farmer 6535-36 6093 119-122

Mitchell JH 2001 The wildest place on EarthItalian gardens and the invention of wildernessNew York Counterpoint Press

Moore CW WJ Mitchell and W TurnbullJr 1988 The poetics of gardens CambridgeMA MIT Press

Olwig K 1995 Reinventing common natureYosemite and Mt Rushmoremdasha meander-ing tale of a double nature Pages 379-408in W Cronon (ed) Uncommon groundToward reinventing nature New YorkWW Norton Co

Oxford English Dictionary online 2003Oxford Univesity Press httpdictionaryoedcom accessed August 7 2003

Schramm P 1992 Prairie restoration Atwenty-five year prespective on establish-ment and management Pages 169-177 inDD Smith and CA Jacobs (eds) Pro-ceedings of the Twelfth North AmericanPrairie Conference Recapturing a vanish-ing heritage Cedar Falls University ofNorthern Iowa

Schroeder HW 2000 The restoration experi-ence Volunteersrsquo motives values and con-cepts of nature Pages 247-264 in PHGobster and RB Hull (eds) Restoringnature Perspectives from the social sci-ences and humanities Washington DCIsland Press

Spence MD 1999 Dispossessing the wildernessIndian removal and the making of the nationalparks New York Oxford University Press

Society for Ecological Restoration Interna-tional Science and Policy Working Group2002 The SER primer on ecological restora-tion First Edition

Strunk W and EB White 1979 The elementsof style New York MacMillan

Thoreau HD 1993 Faith in a seed The dis-persion of seeds and other late natural historywritings BP Dean ed Washington DCIsland PressShearwater Books

Turner F 1987 The self-effacing art Restor-ation as imitation of nature Pages 47-50 inWR Jordan III ME Gilpin and JD Aber(eds) Restoration Ecology A syntheticapproach to ecological research Cambridgeand New York Cambridge University Press

Vogel S 2002 Environmental philosophyafter the end of nature EnvironmentalEthics 2423-39

__ 2003 The nature of artifacts Environ-mental Ethics 25149-168

Stuart K Allison is a professor in the Department ofBiology Knox College Galesburg Illinois 61401309341-7185 Fax 309341-7718 Sallisonknoxedu


some philosophers to label restorations asartificial (Katz 1992) But is the input ofhuman effort really a problem whendeciding whether a restoration is valuableor not In this essay I will concentrate onhow we decide the goal of our restorationefforts what it means when we describerestorations using terms such as ldquonaturalrdquoand ldquoartificialrdquo and discuss the potentialof using the term ldquogardeningrdquo to describeour work

Setting the Goal for a RestorationIn ecological restoration our feeling is thatthe current degraded condition of the siteis less natural than a previously existingstate and that a more natural condition isbetter for the site and usually better for theenvironment as a whole We progresstowards a more natural condition with thenotion that such a condition will ensurebetter ecosystem health integrity and sus-tainability But how do we decide what ismore natural than the current condition

In North America we almost alwaysdecide that the conditions that existedprior to European-American settlementwere more natural than the conditionsthat developed afterwards For examplein western Illinois we typically decide toplant tallgrass prairie that is similar to theprairies that existed there prior toEuropean-American settlement Thus weare setting as our goal the recreation of atallgrass prairie as it would have existedprior to the 1830s We hope to restore thesite in such a way that the tallgrass prairiewill develop along a trajectory of dynamicchanges that would mirror what wouldhave happened to tallgrass prairies ifEuropean-Americans had never arrivedin the area

Our goal of restoring an agriculturalsite to something similar to the tallgrassprairies that existed prior to the 1830simmediately presents us with many practi-cal problems however First what do weknow about the tallgrass prairies thatexisted prior to European-American arrivalThe answer ismdashnot as much as we wouldlike to know We have some species liststhat date back to the 1830s For westernIllinois the best plant list by far was com-

piled by pioneer physician and botanicalenthusiast Dr Samuel Mead (Mead 1846)But Dr Meadrsquos list only provides us with thenames and locations of plants he collected

and notations of whether the plants werecommon or rare We have almost no infor-mation about the relative proportions ofthe plants in the tallgrass prairies he sam-pled or how the different species were asso-ciated with each other To supplement thislimited information we often use existingremnants of the original tallgrass prairies asmodels (Schramm 1992) Remnants areproblematic however because they aresmall isolated pieces of prairie that wereusually preserved because they were inplaces not well suited for agriculture andthus were dissimilar to most of the tallgrassprairie that once surrounded them Theseremnants have almost certainly changedsince the 1830s because they are isolatedand suffered changes in fire regime and aloss of many animal species associated withthem (Curtis and Greene 1949 Leach andGivnish 1996)

The lack of animals associated withthe original prairies is a particularly vexingproblem Almost all tallgrass prairierestorations are too small to support thelarger animal species typical of original

tallgrass prairie Only at the very largestprairie restorations (for example NeilSmith National Wildlife Refuge andMidewin National Tallgrass Prairie) arethere any plans to introduce large herbi-vores such as bison or elk There is noplan to reintroduce the large carnivorestypical of tallgrass prairies Animals likethe grey wolf require such a large homerange that even our largest prairie restora-tions could not support them How naturalis a prairie that lacks its typical animals

A further complication is that thetallgrass prairies that existed in Illinois inthe 1830s were almost certainly main-tained by Native American-set fires(Anderson 1990) Is a prairie that wasmaintained by human use of fire reallynatural And if it is why do we feel that ahuman-maintained prairie is more naturalthan a human-maintained soybean fieldCertainly there are many reasons for thisfeeling not the least of which is the pres-ence in the prairie of a diverse group ofplant species adapted to the local environ-ment compared to an agricultural mono-culture of a non-native domesticatedspecies In addition a soybean fieldrequires a much greater investment ofhuman energy than a tallgrass prairie Butthere is clearly a continuum of humaninvolvement in these ecosystems and itbecomes increasingly difficult to figure outwhere the natural and unnatural ends ofthe continuum become separate from eachother As I mention later this of course isthe difficulty we have if the word ldquogarden-ingrdquo is applied to ecological restorationWhere does gardening as we typicallydefine it begin and end and where doesgardening as restoration begin and end

The problem of a continuum ofhuman activities with varying degrees ofnaturalness is even worse in other parts ofthe world such as Europe much of Asiaand Africa where the presence of humansand their activities are so extensive andlong-standing that it is difficult to evenbegin to understand what the environ-ment would look like without them Howcan we identify natural in the face of somuch human activity occurring over suchlarge areas over hundreds of thousands toeven millions of years


We hope to restore thesite in such a way thatthe tallgrass prairie willdevelop along a trajec-tory of dynamic changesthat would mirror whatwould have happened to tallgrass prairies ifEuropean-Americans had never arrived in the area




















































































































































































































































































































Documents

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Ecological Restoration?