ABSTRACT
I have been teaching eco-related courses for twenty five years. For much of the time my work has been propelled by a sense of impending crisis, to the point where I now suffer from crisis fatigue. So I have begun to move toward more utopian topics. Bioregionalism and the work of Peter Berg are centrally motivating for me as they offer a vision and action plan for a future in which human culture harmonizes with natural systems. Influenced by Berg’s three-fold mandate to restore and maintain natural systems, meet basic human needs sustainably, and support the work of reinhabitation, I developed a graduate seminar on the literature and theory of ecological restoration. The seminar presents climate change amidst a network of interlinked environmental problems, such as invasive species, loss of biodiversity, habitat degradation, toxic waste, unsustainable cities, and a habit of mind that regards nature as separate from culture. The class engages with the science of restoration ecology while analyzing literary texts that feature people who are restoring damaged ecosystems and renewing human communities. Mitigating and adapting to climate change will require imagination and cultural change. Narratives of ecological restoration offer a creative path of hope that can inspire effective action from the grassroots and provide an antidote to crippling despair. One of the implications that climate change has for teaching is boded in the
word “change” itself. For educators to become actors in arguably the most serious issue of our time requires that we teach new material, straddle fields, and try new approaches. While the prospect of teaching outside our area of expertise-especially at the graduate level-can be intimidating, I have found that my best seminars are the ones where the students and I explore new territory together. An approach that works well is to require “cogitations” and to delegate roles. Cogitations are directed, informal writing due every week on the assigned readings. Roles include providing background information on the primary text; parsing the supplemental articles; and reviewing a book related to the course topic. For the first few classes I orchestrate the flow of these moving parts-cogitations, background, critical articles, book review, and a changing menu of in-class
activities. After about the third week, orchestrating class is performed by students. When I first tried the experiment of having students orchestrate, I was anxious about giving up control. But the approach has worked brilliantly. Turning now to a discussion of texts, I will highlight those works with explicit
ties to climate change. It is helpful to begin the semester by assigning history and theory, providing students the context, vocabulary, and conceptual lenses to become critical readers of the primary texts that follow. William K. Stevens’s Miracle Under the Oaks: The Revival of Nature in America offers an engaging introduction to ecological restoration. A journalist, Stevens explains that in writing an article for The New York Times in late 1990 he learned about “a movement afoot to restore damaged, degraded, and destroyed ecosystems” and that “the restorationists even had their own newly formed society,” the Society for Ecological Restoration (Stevens vii). That article planted the seed for Miracle Under the Oaks, which focuses on a project begun in 1977 in the suburbs north of Chicago to restore an oak savanna known as Vestal Grove. Stevens likens ecological restoration to reassembling Humpty Dumpty and describes the enterprise as a “healing art” in which “restorationists intervene to repair the damage caused by other humans so that the natural evolutionary processes that generate biodiversity can resume” (7-8). Vestal Grove is a success story and symbol of hope, a weedy, garbage-strewn thicket transformed by “green-thumbed” volunteers into a place “‘almost holy,... rich, healthy, and ancient-and young at the same time’” (Stevens, quoting Packard 310). Moreover, doing the work of restoration-clearing brush, identifying plants, collecting seeds, planting, and weeding-helps people reconnect with nature. As one volunteer put it, restoration work “‘has filled a very deep need in me to give myself a sense of place and a better understanding of just how complex the natural world really is. … I’ve restored myself, in a sense, to the natural world’” (Stevens 198). When Stevens visits Vestal Grove, some fifteen years after restoration efforts began, he finds that the savanna has “gloriously, fulsomely, returned from the edge of oblivion, a resurgent enclave of life populated by a number of rare and endangered species” (Stevens 10). But the future of Vestal Grove is uncertain, Stevens writes. If prevailing scien-
tific opinion is correct, there will come a day when Vestal Grove will be buried under a half a mile of ice, “and all the works of humans in and around what is today called Chicago... will be ground to dust” (Stevens 310-11). Or, aware of a “much more immediate possibility,” Stevens prognosticates that “carbon dioxide poured into the air by humans’ burning of fossil fuels created out of the plants of another epoch will warm the atmosphere and create conditions too hot and dry, too quickly, for Vestal Grove’s finely tuned ecology to survive” (311). Nevertheless, lessons learned at Vestal Grove and other restoration sites may prove essential to preserving biodiversity-“the raw material of evolution”—as well as to “reviving damaged and destroyed ecosystems and re-creating others in new and more hospitable places if future climatic change makes it necessary” (Stevens 311). Cogitation instructions for this first book ask students to pose one or two ques-
tions that might serve as touchstones for the rest of the semester. I compile and we discuss the students’ questions, which reflect the class’s diverse interests and in some
cases propel their final paper. For example, Laura Ofstad’s question, “Can ecological restoration be combined with a posthumanist or deep ecologist perspective?” led to a final paper on human rewilding in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Landon Lutrick’s question, “Does the man-imposing-his-will character (restorationist as hero) problematize environmental efforts, or could restoration be a redemptive way to use a familiar recurring character?” culminated in a final paper on “The Man Who Knows: Restoring the Environment and the Myth of the Frontier.” Patrick Russell’s question about ecological restoration in an urban context led to his final paper, “Ecological Restoration & Human Restoration: Reimagining the City” and ultimately led him to pursue graduate studies in Community and Regional Planning. And Sarah Neri’s question, “What narratives can be used to explore the process of restoration on a global scale?” became linked to her interest in climate change, resulting in a final paper that explored climateinduced migration and scattered identities in emerging climate change fiction. The more one learns about ecological restoration the more complicated the
picture becomes. The Society for Ecological Restoration provides this seemingly simple definition: “Ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed” (qtd in Allison 4). However, many of the questions that students raise at the beginning of the semester persist unanswered. For example, what historical condition should be the goal of restoration efforts? Is the goal to restore a place to its condition before humans? before European contact? before large-scale human settlement? or before industrialization? Once we choose a place in time as the target goal, how do we know what that place was like then? Does it do any good to restore an area to a pristine condition if the land around it is filled with invasive species? How does the project of ecological restoration privilege some epistemologies over others? Metaphorically, are restorationists gardeners, doctors, managers, stewards, engineers, or something else? What cultural change is necessary for ecological restoration to succeed over the long term? Within the field of ecological restoration itself, questions multiply and debates
flare. Today it is widely accepted that there is no stable, climax state that has ever existed or could ever occur in a world of unremitting change. Some practitioners envision ecological restoration as returning land to a healthy state within its historical range of variability so that evolution can resume with a minimum of human interference. Others believe that human intervention will always be needed. Some prize biological diversity for its own sake, regardless of its value to humans. Others prioritize restoring ecosystem function and services-“natural capital”—such as flood control, water filtration, soil fertility, nutrient cycling, and decomposition. In this view, returning a degraded area to ecological functionality takes precedence over and may be more feasible than bringing back the complete spectrum of biological diversity that once existed at a particular site. More recently, some scientists argue that large-scale anthropogenic changes, such as climate change, land degradation, and alien invasive species, have created “novel ecosystems,” which have no historic analog. They argue that it will not be possible to return land to a state prior to these massive disturbances, which means that a new suite of goals should
be considered, perhaps accepting and accommodating non-native species. At this point, some people question whether “restoration” is even the correct term for this project of “intervention ecology” that engineers “designer ecosystems.”1
