Deep History
Although the idea of ecocentric restoration is a recent one, having taken shape in the early decades of the past century, it has deep roots. Searching through history we do not find full-blown precedents for ecocentric restoration projects, such as the UW
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Deep History
Although the idea of ecocentric restoration is a recent one, having taken shape in the early decades of the past century, it has deep roots. Searching through history we do not find full-blown precedents for ecocentric restoration projects, such as the UW–Madison Arboretum’s Curtis Prairie, which most would accept as a classic example of this form of land management. But we do find many of the elements—what we might call partial precedents—of this idea. And we find them not only in practices related to the care and management of land or ecosystems but also in ideas and practices arising from relationships people have formed with other humans and with their gods. As far as human relations with the nonhuman environment are concerned, the picture that emerges from a historical overview is mixed, with humans (like any other species) bringing about changes in an ecosystem when they first invade it but then, at least in some cases, settling down to a more or less stable relationship with the altered—and to some extent “humanized”—system. Environmental historian Curt Meine, summing up the downside of this story, describes a “sobering picture of the human past” in which “human dispersal over the past 120,000 years has been accompanied by wave after wave of extinctions and other forms of environmental degradation.”1 However, this wave of losses typically subsides as a culture settles into a reasonably stable relationship with a new—and usually diminished—suite of species. And although human societies by no means manage this consistently,2 some achieve a sustainable relationship with their environment that they may maintain for millennia and that may be characterized by high levels of biodiversity at both the community and the species level. Ecologist Fikret Berkes, who has examined the resource 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_1, © Island Press 2011
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making nature whole
management practices of a number of traditional cultures sympathetically without romanticizing them, notes that “where indigenous peoples have depended on local environments for the provision of resources over long periods of time, they have often developed a stake in conserving biodiversity.” This entails practices that reflect what he describes as “ecosystemlike” ideas, including the idea that all the elements of their world, including plants and nonhuman animals as well as humans, are interrelated. Regarding them as members of a family, they foster and maintain them through practices such as maintaining sacred areas and refugia, institutionalizing taboos that protect selected species from exploitation, and protecting critical life history stages of exploited species.3 At the same time, Berkes acknowledges the limits of traditional land management practices as far as the conservation of actual species, as distinct from biodiversity in the abstract, is concerned. Even under settled conditions, he
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