Nature and Culture

A recent article in Conservation Biology should be a heads up for restorationists who are interested in thinking clearly about the nature of their work, or who care about the ways in which that work is construed by others. The article, written by the University of North Texas environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott and colleagues Larry B. Crowder at Duke University and Karen Mumford at the University of Minnesota, is titled "Current Normative Concepts in Conservation" (Conservation Biology, 13 (1): 22-35, February 1999). In it the authors suggest that various schools of thinking about the environment and conservation can be interpreted in terms of two new schools of conservation philosophy, which they identify as "compositionalism" and "functionalism. " These categories correspond pretty closely to community ecology on the one hand, and ecosystem ecology on the other. Thus "compositionalists" tend to think about landscapes and their conservation mainly in terms of species and populations, while "functionalists" tend to think about it primarily in terms of, well, function. So far, so good. But this is not all. Compositionalists and functionalists not only look at landscapes in different ways, Callicott and his colleagues argue, they also think differently about nature and about the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. Briefly, they argue that functionalists tend to think of humans as a part of nature, while compositionalists tend to think of humans as separate from nature. And--this is the kicker--they place ecological restorationists directly in the compositionalist school, along with others who assume that humans and human culture exist somehow outside of nature. This may come as a surprise to restorationists who have learned to think of their craft not only as a way of achieving intimacy with a "natural" landscape, but also as a way of affirming the naturalness of humans by providing them with a role in the ecology of "natural" ecosystems. Nevertheless, a characterization of this kind, appearing in a leading international journal, demands attention, and perhaps even calls for a bit of self-examination. Is that what restoration is really about--re-creating landscapes that are defined as "natural" because they reflect little or no human influence, and in the process asserting the un-naturalness of our own species? Is that really how restorationists think about their work? And if it isn’t, then why do scholars outside the field get the impression that it is? Is this simply misinterpretation? Or are they, as often happens, seeing us more clearly than we see ourselves? Reflecting on these questions, I have come up with a number of observations. First, Callicott and his colleagues build their argument on two definitions of "restoration," implying that these accurately reflect the way restorationists think about their work. The first is the definition published by the Society for Ecological Restoration in 1997: " . the process of returning, as nearly as possible, a biotic community to a condition of biological integrity. " The second, from a 1994 paper by Paul Angerrneier at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Jim Karr at the University of Washington, asserts that "the goal of ecological restoration is to produce a self-sustaining system as similar as possible to the native biota. " In their paper, Callicott and his colleagues present these two definitions back to back, as though they are interchangeable, or at any rate essentially in agreement. But it seems to me that they are actually quite different, particularly with respect to the definition of goals for restoration projects and the idea of nature they imply. Angermeier and Karr’s definition clearly implies that restoration entails a return to some more "natural" condition, characterized by a "native" biota, and of course this leads to the arguments about what is native (or "natural") and what isn’t-arguments that we have all been involved in and that never seem o come to an end. SER’s definition, on the other hand, doesn’t mention "nature" or "native" species, but only "biological integrity. " It is difficult to understand how this reflects a philosophy that sets culture apart from nature. And it is difficult to understand how this supports the idea that "compositionalists tend either to ignore the presence of Homo sapiens in the Americas or to treat such peoples as wildlife" (page 26). Quite the contrary, it has always seemed to me that, through the rediscovery and reenactment of historic technologies such as burning, North American and Australian restorationists have p ayed a leading role in discovering the integral role of pre-contact peoples in the landscape, even when this has meant, as it sometimes has, disagreeing with those who insist on the environmental innocence or ecological neutrality of people living in traditional cultures. Besides this, it is worth pointing out that Callicott and his colleagues depend heavily on a single paper by two academic scientists to establish their characterization of restoration. Though they quote SER’s definition, they don’t really build on it, and, as I have pointed out, it doesn’t actually support their case. (In fact, it represents an exhaustive, decade-long effort by restoration practitioners to define their work in a way that avoids precisely this kind of misreading of what restoration is and how restorationists think about it.) The problem here, I suspect, is the scholar’s habit of relying on printed sources of information,