Taking a broader view - conference of the Society for Ecological Restoration

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1996 by Stephanie Mills

An expectation of radical change - from the demise of Renaissance-era cultural imperialism to the deconstruction of the Forest Service to the all-but-unstoppable invasion of natural areas and range lands by non-native species - informed the sixth annual conference of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER).

A thousand conference participants were registered, and more were turned away. The meeting, held in Seattle last September, was big enough to accommodate shadow conferences and subcultures: among the multitude were government employees - the good folks charged with the care and feeding of public lands; grad students alert to the possibility of interesting work; "Avant Gardeners" - landscape architects and nurserymen and women advancing the native plants' cause; a good ol' Hog Farmer, Goose, now a riparian restoration artist and contractor; timber company employees; Monsanto Rodeo[R] riders discreetly touting the merits of their herbicide; Hoh, Squaxin, and S'Klallam people; and a contingent of Aussies bringing word of a bush restoration movement.

A symposium, "The Role of Restoration in Ecosystem Management," was convened by self-proclaimed practitioners (on both public and private lands) of EM. In the forests of the Pacific Northwest, Ecosystem Management is "multiple use" in contemporary guise; it feeds that perennial hope of being able to have the cake and eat it, too. The actual ecologists considering EM reached consensus only on the magnitude of our ignorance.

"A lot of science that restoration management is dependent on is still in its infancy," said Michael Williams, a plant ecologist and one of the symposium's organizers. "And we don't have a good handle on how ecosystems are responding." In fact, he said, "Ecosystems are flopping all over the place," making unexpected responses to management moves, and casting serious doubt on even the possibility of ecosystem management.

SER board member Dennis Rogers Martinez, a leader of the Takelma Intertribal Project and a veritable force of nature, organized a powerful native presence at the meeting. Traditional elders and spokesmen from throughout the West (Vine Deloria among them) declared in plain speech that traditional environmental knowledge is comparable to that yielded by western science, if not superior in that it is engendered by spiritual practice. Given a long history of tending their landscapes for food, fuel, fiber, game, and ceremonial medicine, traditionals have vast and intimate knowledge of their bioregions and an ultimate stake in their restoration. Therefore, said Martinez, "scientists have got to be humble enough to take direction in collaborating or entering into native territories."

Future primitives - reinhabitors - see restoration similarly. Several bioregional elders took the SER podium there in Cascadia: Mattole watershed organizer Freeman House, standup comic and Institute for Sustainable Forestry activist David Simpson, Kansan ethnobotanist Kelly Kindsher, and Cascadian Institute founder David McCloskey spoke to plenaries or workshops on the ways in which ecological restoration can inform cultures of place, and vice versa. Several workshops dealt with the possibility of restoring community economies, with reforestation offering good employment, and permaculture and sustainable agriculture a decent subsistence.

Keynote speaker Robert Gilman, publisher of the influential In Context,(*) exhorted the gathered restorationists to "accept the invitation to participate in profound cultural change." The conference arrayed hundreds of constructive responses to ecological crises, from planning sound ecosystem reserves (as outlined by conservation biologist Reed Noss in his remarks to the symposium) to discovering that a little bit of lime could encourage the moonscape around Sudbury, Ontario's Big Nickel smelter to revegetate itself. In this latter instance it seemed as though the spirits of place decided to pitch in. And in healing this living, teeming, unpredictable world, the genius loci is the chief physician, for, as Vine Deloria said, "Ecological restoration should not fall wholly on human shoulders."

(*) In Context (A Journal of Hope, Sustainability, and Change): Sarah van Gelder, Editor $24/year (four issues). Context Institute, PO Box 11470, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110;206/842-0216, cia@context.org.