Preconditions
By the closing decades of the nineteenth century the basic elements were in place for the invention of ecocentric restoration. George Perkins Marsh had created and effectively articulated a story that cast people as separate from their environment to the
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Preconditions
By the closing decades of the nineteenth century the basic elements were in place for the invention of ecocentric restoration. George Perkins Marsh had created and effectively articulated a story that cast people as separate from their environment to the extent that it made sense to say—or made it possible to see—that they could harm or degrade it. The formal closing of the American frontier in 1890 drew across history the line that eventually inspired and defined the idea of ecocentric restoration—the line between the nature we discover and the nature we inhabit and reshape. The romantics and transcendentalists had laid deep cultural foundations for the idea that nonhuman nature had value in its own right and so appealed not only to our aesthetic sense but also to our conscience. Landscape architects had brought the naturalizing school of design from its beginnings in the bosco of Italian Renaissance gardens and the naturalized landscapes and cottage gardens of designers such as Repton and Brown to the threshold that separates design from ecocentric restoration. And ecology was emerging as a science, represented by the end of the century by positions at a scattering of universities. With this in mind, we have reached the time when we can start checking out projects, looking for what we might take to be the earliest examples of ecocentric restoration. Of course, origins and firsts are notoriously difficult to identify. And this is especially true for a practice such as ecocentric restoration, the invention and realization of which lie in part in the practitioner’s intentions. Partly for this reason, the question of who invented this form of land management has no straightforward answer. Ecocentric restoration clearly developed piecemeal, in small steps, and with practice preceding realization of value and implications, in many cases by generations. W.R. Jordan III and G.M. Lubick, Making Nature Whole: A History of Ecological Restoration, The Science and Practice of Ecological Restoration, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-042-2_3, © Island Press 2011
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making nature whole
Our aim, then, is to explore these often small steps of invention, discovery, and realization, keeping in mind that we are not interested in restorative land management in general but only in the development of ecocentric restoration as distinct from these other forms of conservation. This, we will see, is a story not of a great flash of genius—someone’s “Eureka” moment—but of a series of small discoveries and realizations, more often than not by practitioners simply messing around with wildflowers or reflecting on the transformation of a landscape and the loss or degradation of a biome, practicing a version of gardening, trying to make it work, perhaps not even distinguishing it clearly from other forms of land management. It is a story not of a great watershed and wild surmise but of stepping-stones, of seat-of-the-pants experiments, modest insights, and small realizations, not by one or two but by dozens and even hundreds of peopl
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