Ecological Restoration and Sustainable Development

During the past few decades, ecological restoration has planted a wide swath across the conservation landscape. It has become part of the lexicon of those interested in natural areas, wilderness and conservation parks, schoolyards, and other “green” areas throughout the world. Classes, and even programs, in ecological restoration are now available in high schools, community colleges, and universities. Ecological restoration has also made its way into the political life of nations, especially those “developed” countries with the disposable income to cleanup their environment. Ecological restoration has, indeed, come a long way from its humble, but significant, beginnings in the 1930s here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. Those beginnings stressed the importance of recognizing and celebrating the restoration of what David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996) describes as the “more-than-human world.” The restoration of this “natural” world, and our relation to it, has been, and continues to be, the focus of our expanding ecological restoration efforts. Today, with several decades of restoration experience behind us—but with a long way to go in terms of perfecting our craft— some people, including the leadership of the Society for Ecological Restoration International, are envisioning an expanded role for ecological restoration—one that would pair it with a more humanly oriented goal, that of sustainable development. I do not pretend to know what sustainable development or sustainability is all about, except to say that it seems to serve as an emotional and intellectual antidote to a world that is seen as increasingly dominated by monolithic economic interests and ongoing political injustice. Sustainability, it seems, is a vision bordering on a belief system; a concept which holds that our increasingly global civilization has lost its way, that greed and profit-making have overturned earlier values of community and living within one’s means. References to self-sufficient farm communities or indigenous cultures are common among the adherents of sustainable development, as are visions of a “green” future, especially at a local or bioregional scale. I trace the first discussion and practice of sustainability in the modern era to the advocates of the “back-to-land” movement of the 1930s, most notably Scott and Helen Nearing (Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, 1954, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute). The work and writings of these people inspired various groups and individuals to look for sustainable ways to live in both the city and the countryside since the 1960s. Important as those efforts may have been in raising the issue of sustainability at the personal and local level, it wasn’t until 1972, at the United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, that a body of people from around the world agreed that a more sustainable direction was needed in order to protect the Earths’ resources. In 1987, The World Commission on Environment and Development in, Our Common Future, penned the now classic definition of sustainable development as “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” In 1992, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development/Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, world leaders and representatives of various non-government organizations agreed to a Declaration on Environment and Development and identified social progress, economic growth, and environmental protection as the “three pillars of sustainable development.” At the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg, the attendees agreed to a Declaration of Sustainable Development, which states: “We recognize that poverty eradication, changing consumption and production patterns, and protecting and managing the natural resources for economic and social development are overarching objectives of, and essential requirements for, sustainable development.” Perhaps not surprisingly, “sustainability” and “sustainable development” have become buzzwords within the community of international NGOs and elsewhere. Non-governmental organizations, such as IUCN (The World Conservation Union), IHDP (International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environment Change), The Earth Charter Commission and Diversitas, each have funded programs dedicated to promoting sustainability. Several basic tenets have become established from this ongoing, global dialogue. First, humans depend on the Earth’s resources (known in sustainability parlance as natural capital) to sustain themselves. Second, local involvement is necessary and must be open and participatory in the best democratic sense if developments are to be sustainable. Third, natural capital has intrinsic value that is often ignored or undervalued; accounting of such economic externalities is necessary. Four, humans will have to accept the fact that we live in a world of material and ecological limits, although we should make every attempt to use new technologies to help us increase longevity of the Earth’s natural capital.