ABSTRACT
Restoring for Sustainability in Arizona and Connecticut The Hopi villages in northeastern Arizona are far removed from the West River neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut. It is not at fi rst obvious how much these two communities have in common or how important their commonality is. One is a remote Native American tribe in the American Southwest, and the other a mostly African American, inner city community on the East Coast. Both however are economically marginalized communities that share a vision that may be crucial for global sustainability. Members of each community see ecological restoration as a tool for improving social conditions by restoring the natural links between ecological and human cultural processes. We defi ne ‘renaturing’ as an intentional and refl ective attempt to restore human relationships with natural processes of ecosystems in addition to the more common focus on restoring the biophysical health of ecosystems. This chapter compares case studies from these two communities to illustrate why renaturing is a form of ecological restoration that can contribute to sustainability.
