Spring 2004

Finding Hope in What We Can Do

An excerpt from The Sunflower Forest:
Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature
by William R. Jordan III

Not long ago a friend came to me with a complaint. She had just come from a meeting of her professional society at which a colleague of mine had given an address. His topic had been the conservation of natural areas, a subject on which he is expert and speaks eloquently. Yet my friend, a thoughtful, well-educated woman who takes a serious interest in environmental issues and is well informed about goings-on in the scientific community, was dismayed.

"He just had nothing to say that offered any prospect for saving these places," she told me. "After the talk we asked him questions — what can we do about this? But the response was the same. He just didn't have anything to say that provided a basis for any kind of hope."

This book is in a way a response to my friend's dismay, and my answer to the question she and her colleagues were raising. It is a summary of reflections, reading, and conversations on the act of ecological restoration, carried out over twenty-two years in the course of my work at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in Madison... In the late 1970s, when I showed up at the Arboretum, no one anywhere, with the exception of the occasional landscape architect and a handful of people involved in work such as the reclamation of land disturbed by mining, had any interest in restoration. Environmentalists almost universally ignored it, seeing it at best as a distraction from the serious work of preservation, and at worst as a threat — a false promise that could be used to undermine arguments for preservation.

Yet restoration had more to offer environmentalism than environmentalists realized... Restoration is important, I gradually realized, not because it offers a neat way of solving the problem of habitat loss in all situations, but because it offers the possibility of actively reversing environmental damage, at least in some situations. Introducing a positive factor into the conservation equation, restoration complicates it but also rescues environmentalists from an unrelieved negativity about the future of natural landscapes. In addition, restoration...offers something that has eluded environmentalists for the better part of a century — a way to "use" classic landscapes such as prairies and forests, actually participating in their ecology, without changing their character or using them up...

By the early 1980s I had come to believe that the work that had been going on at the Arboretum for the previous half century had a crucial contribution to make to environmentalism. Basically, it combined the best elements of two forms of environmentalism — the conservationist's willingness to participate in the ecology of a natural landscape, and the environmentalist's insistence on the inherent value of that  landscape, independent of its value to humans — into a single act that linked engagement with total respect....All this provides a basis for a measure of optimism, and ultimately of hope for the future of the natural landscape.

— Excerpted with permission from The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature, by William R. Jordan III, University of California Press, 2003.