Posted
below is Liam Heneghan’s
review of William R. Jordan III’s: The Sunflower
Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature.
The
review recently appeared in The Los
Angeles Review of Books—one of the brightest new book discussion and
commentary sites on the web. With reviews, essays, and author interviews, LARB’s site offers numerous ways to
search genres, titles and author names.
LARB
notes that: William R. Jordan III is director of the New Academy for Nature and
Culture and co-director of DePaul University's Institute for Nature and
Culture. He was senior editor of Restoration
Ecology: A Synthetic Approach to Ecological Research (1987) and was
founding editor of the journal Ecological
Restoration and a founding member of the Society for Ecological
Restoration.
The
Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature. University of California Press;
Reprint edition, 2012
Restoration
Ecology and the Shame Thing: William Jordan III’s "The Sunflower
Forest," 10 Years On, review by Liam Heneghan
LARB,
April 12th, 2013
WHEN I
FIRST BROUGHT a group of my undergraduate students to meet William Jordan III
at Cafe Mozart in Evanston, Illinois, he told them that each year we should
ritualistically destroy a small plot of virgin prairie, of which there is
virtually none left in this state, in order to dramatize its importance to us.
I assured them that he did not mean this sacrifice literally; he assured them
that he did.
At that
time, around the turn of the new millennium, William (Bill) Jordan was working
on The Sunflower Forest: Ecological
Restoration and the New Communion with Nature, which came out in 2003
(reissued in paperback 2012). More than any other writer I know, Bill rehearses
his arguments in countless conversations and prepared talks before commuting
them to the written word. I can trace remarks he made at a Christmas gathering
years ago through several iterations until they became the fully formed ideas
that made up his most recent book Making Nature Whole: A History of Ecological
Restoration, written with George M. Lubick (2011). So, when Bill assured us he
was serious about the ritualistic sacrifice of prairie a decade ago, it
anticipated a theme that would emerge sometime later in The Sunflower Forest.
Several
ecological restorationists with whom I have spoken over the years confess
bewilderment with The Sunflower Forest; they read it hoping to get insights
into the “how” of restoration, whereas the book focuses primarily on its
performance, ritual and the creation of meaning. However, The Sunflower Forest
and its companion Making Nature Whole were not written to appeal to the most
immediate pragmatic needs of restoration. They were written to address
questions about our troubling relationship with nature. In providing a new
paradigm for relating to nature, Bill claimed to offer a “friendly critique” of
contemporary environmental thought: of “wilderness” and of Aldo Leopold’s Land
Ethic, for example. The reception to this friendly criticism has been frosty.
It is a
matter of pride among some of my humanist friends to point out that ecological
restoration is vacuous for at least two related reasons. Firstly, nature is
ever changing, and therefore there is no turning back the ecological clock. Secondly,
because nature is in flux, determining a particular moment or time period to
which to return an ecological system is necessarily arbitrary. In the United
States, it has been common to discuss returning a system to “pre-settlement”
times, though, as critics note, this is to underestimate the role of indigenous
peoples in shaping the landscapes in which they lived. Should we not, in the
interest of purity, return systems to early post-Pleistocene times in order to
eliminate all human influence? Such cautioning was perhaps helpful a few
decades ago when ecological restoration was in its infancy and some of its
practitioners exercised a certain laxity in describing what they were up to.
Since
Jordan is primarily concerned with the subjective experience of restoration as
a relationship with nature, examining his definition of ecological restoration
is a promising place to start a discussion of his work. Besides, it was Jordan
who coined the term “ecological restoration.” In doing so, he named a practice
that remarkably was unnamed before. Jordan had been working since 1977 at the
University of Wisconsin’s Arboretum in Madison, where, 40 years earlier under
the influence of famed conservationist Aldo Leopold, attempts were made to
recreate ecological communities on several hundred acres of land near Madison.
At the time, Jordan was in charge of public outreach at the Arboretum and it
occurred to him that these projects, by then relatively neglected and regarded
as irrelevant to conservation efforts, were an interesting way of telling the
Arboretum’s story. He would later describe the Arboretum’s early work in
habitat recreation as the “Kitty Hawk” of restoration. Initially, Jordan and
his arboretum colleague Keith Wendt wanted to call such efforts “synthetic ecology,”
but since this brought to mind chemistry rather than ecology, that term was
later substituted with “restoration ecology.” The term “restoration,” in
general, could then be applied retrospectively to the range of projects being
undertaken globally that sought to return ecological systems to a former state.
Jordan
is not insisting on the historical aspect of restoration because he is a
purist; rather, he argues that it is this negotiation with the past condition
of a site, and our role in altering it to its current state, that gives
restoration its distinctive value. We restore because we are culpable, and not
because we necessarily need more from a system. Despite this, Jordan’s
definitions (there are more than one) are not, at first glance, especially
promising. “Ecological restoration,” he wrote, “is the attempt, sometimes
breathtakingly successful, sometimes less so, to make nature whole.” The way to
accomplish this is to do whatever is possible “to heal the scars and erase the
signs of disturbance.” Restorationists may “rehabilitate soil, recontouring it,
adding nutrients to promote growth of native plants, or in some cases finding
ways of removing nutrients to discourage the growth of fast-growing, weedy
species.” In other words, restoration activities may involve more than just a
direct manipulation of species; restorationists may also alter ecosystems’
processes to achieve their results, recognizing in this that ecological systems
are dynamic. A more accurate definition of restoration will, therefore,
recognize the practice as being more than a simple return to an original
condition. Restoration must include “everything we do to a landscape or an
ecosystem in an ongoing attempt to compensate for novel or ‘outside’ influences
on it in such a way that it can continue to behave or can resume behaving as if
these were not present.”
Restoration
therefore links an ecosystem’s past to a possible future by eliding the present
and using any means available to the restorationist. It represents a deliberate
erasure of the human component from the landscape. Jordan’s insistence on the
restoration of “all” means that rattlesnakes, mosquitoes, and other creatures
inimical to human welfare should be reintroduced to a restored system. Projects
that don’t meet Jordan’s definition would include those that merely renew
“natural capital” — that is, when such projects do not restore elements less
inclined to be helpful to the human enterprise.
Jordan
developed the idea of “ecocentric restoration” — his term for restoration
directed at making nature whole — in tandem with his friendly critique of other
categories of environmental thought. Those categories of thought, roughly
speaking, are ones that regard our relationship with the natural landscapes as
purely colonial, or alternatively in the wilderness tradition, as an encounter
with the sacred. Finally, there are those environmental traditions that regard
humans as simply one ecological entity among others. The first of the
traditions gets expressed in resource exploitation, the second in wilderness
preservation, the third in a kind of distress that we still have not fully
connected with the natural community of which we are but one member among many.
For
some restorationists, if we could merely see ourselves as plain members and
citizens of this natural community, as Aldo Leopold would have us do, then our
problems would be solved. However, in Jordan’s view, there is a limitation to
this line of thinking. Community, at least in the manner used by
environmentalists, is a notion that conjures up good feelings without typically
confronting us with difficulties that accompany real community. Those of us who
have sat down at the family dinner table — hopefully, all of us — will
recognize that, with every slice of apple pie possibly comes a surly uncle’s
remarks on how poorly it has been prepared. Missing from the community concept
is an account of the negative elements of human experiences of community: envy,
selfishness, fear, hatred, shame and so on, the neglect of which, Jordan
claims, leads to “a sentimental, moralizing philosophy that […] insists on the
naturalness of humans […] but that neglects or downplays the radical difficulty
of achieving such a sense of self, and also downplays the role of culture and
cultural institutions in carrying out this work.” As Jordan soberly comments,
the “entirely positive conception of community has very little basis in actual
experience.”
Not
only does environmentalism generally fail to deal effectively with the unseemly
in humans, it fails also to take productive account of the monstrous in nature.
After all, the engine of evolutionary change in the Darwinian-Wallacean account
is not afternoon tea; it is the often violent struggle for existence that stirs
the evolutionary pot. As a consequence, Jordan claims “environmentalism has
offered a story that is thin and sentimental and that fails to deal with our
profoundest doubts about the world and our place in it.”
Since
none of our environmentalisms has, he argues, dealt productively with “the scandal
of creation,” he advocates pursuing a new way forward. Central to his thesis is
the problem of shame.
As the
circle of enthusiasts for Jordan’s work has grown over the past decade (and I
count myself among them), the question of what to do with “the shame thing” has
grown. Considering, once again, the problem of consumption concretizes the
situation somewhat. Food sharing, breaking bread and so on, are the classic
occasions for the creation and nurturing of community. Yet, in order to
subsist, humans must kill and dine. Even the most scrupulous of vegetarians
must be embroiled in the violence of agricultural production. Every nut and
berry ingested is an infant flower unblossomed. Though nature may ultimately
win the battle and have us moldering in the grave, every time we sup we have at
least won that skirmish. At the very least, the contemplation of consumption
makes the notion of community somewhat more challenging. To use Jordan’s terms
for these complications, consumption is an occasion for shame. Shame, of
course, is an old fashioned thing and most of us, I suppose, would elect to be
rid of it. Though it is precisely because we have become shameless in our
approach toward nature that, Jordan claims, contemporary environmentalism is so
attenuated. He argues that none of our various environmentalisms provide the
wherewithal to deal with these problematic aspects of our experience of nature
in psychologically productive ways, and that this limits its value as a way of
coming to terms with our array of “environmental problems.” It is not an
exaggeration to say that contending with shame is one of the core issues of The
Sunflower Forest.
Making
shame central to his work creates, it seems, its own occasion for shame.
Sympathizers have ransacked the thesauri looking for more palatable
substitutes: limitation, humility, existential awareness, embarrassment, grief
and so on. Though Jordan declares himself willing to drop the term, I think, in
fact, that he is not likely to substitute it.
The
treatment of shame in The Sunflower Forest builds upon the work of
anthropologist James S. Hans, and on literary critic Frederick Turner who draws
in turn upon the work on ritual of his parents, anthropologists Victor and
Edith Turner. Jordan repurposes their distinctive treatment of shame to think
about the value of ecological restoration. However, shame is meant here in a
very specific sense. The term generally denotes an emotion deriving from one’s
awareness of being dishonored, ridiculous, or having behaved in an inappropriate
fashion. Guilt seems to be related to shame, and in common usage indicates
responsibility for an action, or having been at fault for a particular failure,
crime, or other event. The emotional register for shame seems higher than that
of guilt, though the latter may, of course, have considerable charge. Guilt can
occasion shame, but one does not typically feel guilty for experiencing shame.
Shame seems the more fundamental emotion.
Jordan
sees guilt as responding to a consciousness of what one does, whereas shame is
a consciousness of what we are. To give a very prosaic example: when, after a
long days’ labor, you become aware of your own displeasing body odor, you
experience shame, in Jordan’s sense: we are sweaty primates upon whom the
perfumed veneer of civilization has but a temporary hold.
Jordan
rightly argues with Turner and Hans that shame is a “universal and inescapable
(though deniable) aspect of human experience.” Given its universality, it
should surprise us little that restoration is an encounter with shame, in the
face of our killing unwanted vegetation and exerting our control over the land.
This is especially shameful when we assure ourselves we are engaging in
restoration precisely in order to give life back to degraded systems, and that
our intention is to relinquish control over the land. Restorationists cannot
simply wave their divine hands, as a god might, and turn back the ecological
clock. Restorationists have to address the very real limitations of their
skills. But it is precisely by experiencing shame that restoration produces
value. As Jordan puts it: “The great value of ecological restoration, I now
believe, is that it provides an ideal, even unique context for negotiating […]
the development of a relationship between ourselves and the classic landscape.”
In this
way, Jordan has radically transformed the terms of the environmental debate.
Other environmental ideologies posit either a fallen nature given to
exploitation by a redeemed and therefore innocent humanity, or posit a pristine
and inviolate nature immeasurably disturbed by an irretrievably wretched
humanity. Since there is a little monstrousness — a certain loss of sentimental
innocence — on both sides of the divide between humans and the rest of nature,
this acknowledgment can generate a newer solidarity with nature. There is,
Jordan says, a “continuity of shame” between humans and the rest of nature.
The
acknowledgment of shame, of our mortification at our human limitations, and of
the troubling brutality of nature, is not an end in itself. To merely stare
across the gulf between us and the rest of nature is to court horror, not
relationship. Relationship and its rewards come from dealing with shame. So,
what is the recipe for developing true community with nature through
restoration?
As we
concluded, say, the last winter holiday season, several of us were probably
relieved that the drama of gifting was over. Rarely is a gift just a simple
offering — certainly not when it is wrapped and placed under a dying tree.
There is more to gifts, as I think we all appreciate, than first meets the eye.
The gift, etymologically, is at the root of community. According to Jordan, the
gift is the “munus” in community. One can make too much of such roots, of
course; after all, “munus” has a range of meanings, duty and service included.
Using Marcel Mauss's essay "The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in
Archaic Societies," Jordan makes the case that gift exchange, viewed in a
serious way, plays a key role in thinking about the laborious task of community
formation. Gifts, earnestly inspected, have some peculiar properties. They are
often public, characteristically unnegotiated, and though obligatory in a
sense, they should not appear to be offered under duress. A gift never leaves the
matter settled, but is merely one exchange in an interminable round. Drawing
from Turner’s book The Culture of Hope, Jordan concludes that “every exchange
of gifts is fraught with uncertainty, which [Turner] expresses in terms of the
shame or sense of unworthiness that is inseparable from an exchange of gifts.”
To
offer a gift is in its own small but surprisingly vexatious way to take a risk;
it creates an occasion for uncertainty that can’t be easily resolved. Will my
gift be big (or modest) enough, appropriate to the occasion, sufficiently
thoughtful? Restoration, then, is a risky gift given in acknowledgment of our
debts to the natural world. It contains the recognition that the damage we
inflict on the natural world is inevitable — it is the lot of humans to
consume, metabolize, egest, and excrete. But “restoration as gift” also
contains the recognition that it is small recompense for the magnitude of the
debt. The bull in the proverbial china shop becomes disconcertingly aware of
the fearful havoc he has caused and makes amends by offering afternoon tea
served in the sundered cup. We are that bull.
Ecological
restoration, meant in Jordan’s full sense, purportedly brings us into community
with the rest of nature in a number of distinctive ways. The practice makes us
aware of the repercussions of our ongoing involvement in sullying natural
systems. It provides a means of direct engagement with nature since, in
contrast to wilderness protection, for instance, it involves beneficent
trammeling (the restorationist is armed with a bow-saw rather than binoculars).
It is also redemptive insofar as it is “the first phase in the cycle of giving
and taking back that is the ecological foundation for any relationship.” To be
sure, the gift is inadequate and “unworthy.” If restoration culture enables us
to figuratively but productively deal with shame and with transcending shame,
then, arguably, we get to so-called higher values, including, Jordan argues,
beauty.
One the
thrills of a walk I took in a Chicago-area prairie shortly after my arrival
there in 1998 was the discovery of Rattlesnake Master, Eryngium yuccifolium, a
rare prairie plant associated with sites of exceptional quality. However,
learning that it had been planted by Steven Packard, the site’s restoration
steward, markedly lessened my pleasure. A restored ecosystem seems a
disappointing thing — a fake, not at all the authentic article. The claim that
restoration creates fakes is, in fact, the grounds for one of the most
influential critiques of restoration by Australian philosopher Robert Elliot in
his book Faking Nature: The Ethics of Environmental Restoration. Jordan,
however, points to alternatives to associating value with authenticity or
autonomy. For instance, he discusses traditions in which value is associated
with relationship, such as the creation myths of “archaic” people (Mircea
Eliade’s term) and anthropologist Roy Rappaport’s analysis of ritual
performance that brings the universe to order. These enable Jordan to argue
that “the restored ecosystem, to the extent that it has been implicated in the
frontier of creation through engagement with humans, is not less but actually
more natural, more real in this sense than its less self-aware ‘original’
counterpart.” Making this assertion may be strategically important — after all,
restoration has been compared with forgery in art — but it doesn’t convince me
on a gut level that a restoration site is more “natural” than a wilderness
location. To say that they both have value seems good enough to me.
Even if
one is not convinced that finding a planted rarity is heart-leaping, the point
about performed or relational being is an important one. This is because it may
convince us that doing things to ecosystems rather that setting them aside, as
is the case in wilderness protection, produces value. Perhaps this should not
be such a novelty considering that the products of human creativity are
regarded as the pinnacle of the human enterprise, but environmentalists
historically have esteemed most what they leave undone, even, oddly enough,
when (as in the creation of a National Park) this forsaking requires monumental
effort.
For the
gift-exchange with nature to have value and to work as the basis for
relationship, the asymmetry and ambiguity of the exchange must be resolved.
Even if we regard an acre of restored prairie as having enhanced value by
virtue of the attention, labor and care that went into its management, it is
poor recompense for the destruction of hundreds of thousands of prairie acres.
Restoration a la Jordan can only work “through the spiritual and psychological
technologies of performance, ritual, and the arts.”
Drawing
on varied literatures on ritual, performance, and liturgy, Jordan depicts the
gift of restored habitat as a “ritual commutation” where a small offering is
substituted for a larger one than might be called for. In the same spirit that
Abraham substitutes a ram for his son Isaac, so a restored prairie fragment is
offered back to Nature as something more than a gesture, but less than a full
discharging of debt. A problem with environmentalism, from the perspective that
Jordan develops here, is that it has been too eager to find literal
compensations for the damage inflicted on nature. Ecological restoration, by
contrast, has, the merit of being achievable and realistic.
What
about outcomes? Although some restorations are very successful, we are still in
the early days of this discipline. Jordan is suggesting that the process itself
has a very distinctive, revolutionary, perhaps therapeutic value beyond the
product. The process can serve as a model for emerging environmentalisms that
seem at variance with those that are older and less friendly to the management
of nature, and that, Jordan argues, may not be able to provide the same internal
as well as external benefits. He once told me that he might have ended up with
similar conclusions from any number of starting points that entail what he
calls “strong engagement with nature.” I took him to be suggesting that there
exist a range of practices — spiritual, artistic, therapeutic and so on — that
all recognize the challenge in establishing how best to orient ourselves
towards nature, yet which are nonetheless psychologically productive. The fact
is that, for all of its claims to radicality, environmentalism is of a piece
with the shame-denying aspects of the broader culture it critiques. Restoration
ecology, by contrast, provides a new paradigm for thinking about humans and
nature.
Despite
Jordan’s insistence to my students more than a decade ago that a prairie
sacrifice would be a useful thing, he has not, as far as I know, strenuously
advocated for this. Rather, on occasions I have seen him replace this exercise
with the burning of a few leaves of prairie grass — a fitting commutation for
an immense sacrifice.
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