Restoration ecology grew from one man’s refusal of despair

Evidence

When I was at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1980s, on summer evenings I would walk with a young Bill Jordan through the trails of the arboretum, where a collection of natural ecosystems had been put in place on abandoned farmland, homage to Aldo Leopold’s advice that “the first step to intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces.” At a time when the toll taken by places like the Solvay waste beds was finally being understood, Bill envisioned a whole science of restoration ecology, in which ecologists would turn their skills and philosophy to healing land, not by imposing an industrial blanket of vegetation, but by recreating natural landscapes. He didn’t submit to despair. He didn’t let his idea sit on the shelf. He was the catalyst for and a cofounder of the Society for Ecological Restoration. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1210

Categorization

• XREF: Leopold’s ‘save all the pieces’ precept is a hinge to eco-justice education’s whole-systems thinking and to the polyad’s integrative writing. — connects to: Restoration counteracts despair by restoring relational agency — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1203