(Reviews)

Illustration by Travis Coburn

Healing the Land

A leader in ecological restoration touts the new movement's successes—and takes on its critics.

By Keith Kloor

Like all enduring popular movements, environmentalism has been propelled by seminal thinkers and action figures. A century ago John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt got the ball rolling with their ardent championing of wilderness preserves and wildlife protection. Fifty years later Rachel Carson's Silent Spring helped expand the movement to include pollution and public health issues. Then there are the many and varied stars, from Aldo Leopold to David Brower to E. O. Wilson, whose legendary achievements have rallied millions to nature's cause. At some point, William Jordan, the intellectual leader of a relatively new but influential discipline—ecological restoration—is likely to join this pantheon.

That would be quite a feat, considering that some purists in the wilderness wing of the movement have tried dismissing Jordan and the emergent field as illegitimate offspring. But the charges haven't stuck. If anything, ecological restoration—the practice of restoring disturbed ecosystems to what Jordan calls their "historic landscapes"—has become widely accepted since he began putting his ideas to the test 25 years ago as a botanist at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum.

Today thousands of restoration projects are under way in just about every kind of ecosystem around the world, from coral reefs to tallgrass prairies and tropical forests. In the Everglades, government engineers are at work restoring seasonal river flows; in shallow-water seagrass beds along America's coastlines, biologists in scuba gear hover over the ocean floor, fastening native plants in place with metal staples; outside Chicago an army of volunteers fans out on weekends to help plant native grasses in an effort to revive historic prairies.

"Ecological restoration is the attempt, sometimes breathtakingly successful, sometimes less so, to make nature whole," writes Jordan in The Sunflower Forest. "To do this the restorationist does everything possible to heal the scars and erase the signs of disturbance or disruption," which includes pulling out exotic plants, adding nutrients to depleted soils, and cleaning creeks and rivers of toxic runoff from mines.

But Jordan, who founded the journal Ecological Restoration in 1981, would like his vision to be embraced by more than just biologists and land managers. As restoration ecology goes mainstream, he sees potential for a wider ethic. "During the past decade in particular," he writes, "restoration has matured rapidly, not only as a technology, as a discipline, and as conservation strategy, but also as a form of play and context for negotiating the relationship between our own species and the rest of nature."

Still, plenty of environmental preservationists continue to oppose restoration ecology, arguing that it detracts from the real work of conservation (such as preserving wilderness), and that at worst it may become an excuse not to do anything. Undeterred, Jordan implores his critics to stop "indulging fantasies of untrammeled wilderness or Edenic landscapes unviolated by human influence," since no such thing exists.

But because Jordan knows he's already won this battle, The Sunflower Forest is concerned more with playing up the field's innovative successes, like the extensive voluntary restorations of Chicago's oak savannas, which, in turn, have restored a new kind of human bond with nature by putting ordinary citizens literally in touch with the land around them.

Editors' Choice

Liquid Land: A Journey
Through the Florida Everglades
By Ted Levin
University of Georgia Press, 312 pages, $29.95

For Ted Levin, the Cape Sable seaside sparrow serves as a metaphor for the modern Everglades. At one point in his new book, Levin describes the plight of this critically endangered species in a watery ecosystem almost totally scrambled by human intervention. Broken into four beleaguered populations, the sparrows hang on between a surfeit of water, which floods their nests in one region, and too little water, which causes threatening fires in parched grasslands elsewhere.

Liquid Land is at once a celebration of one of our grandest national parks; a rendering of its exploitation, which has erased half of the original Everglades; and a behind-the-scenes account of tardy and contentious attempts to restore what is now "a computer-controlled watershed almost as artificial as Disney World." Levin explores the natural history of mosquitoes, panthers, alligators, and wading birds, and he introduces us to many colorful players—one a crocodile expert whose devotion once extended to giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a baby crocodile that had been held underwater by a crab. The Florida Everglades seems to bring out the best and worst in humans; Liquid Land is a love letter to a historic swamp and a probing look at the people who are fighting over its future.

—Frank Graham Jr.

Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids,
and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth
By Daniel Glick
Public Affairs, 343 pages, $26

How do we heal? The question consumed Daniel Glick two years ago, having recently lost his older brother to cancer and his wife to divorce. Spurred by predictions that nearly half of the world's precious coral reefs would die within the 44-year-old journalist's lifetime, he took his 13-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter on a "serendipitous" trip around the world to see nature's imperiled wonders before those wonders, too, were gone. During their five-month odyssey through Australia, Asia, and Europe, they saw global treasures, from the Great Barrier Reef to the Javan rhino, all the while maturing into "a genuine family of three," eventually against the backdrop of the September 11 World Trade Center attacks. More important, they came to a healing place, borne of hurt itself. "Grief and loss, I've come to believe, provide the glue that binds humanity together," Glick writes in Monkey Dancing, a poignant, affirming, ultimately courageous book.

—Robert Braile

Good Morning Midnight:
Life and Death in the Wild
By Chip Brown
Riverhead Books, 300 pages, $24.95

For physical and spiritual refuge, nothing beats the wilderness. But as literary journalist Chip Brown demonstrates in this haunting biography of outdoorsman Guy Waterman, moving there may not be the best way to exorcise one's personal demons. In 1973, entering his forties, Waterman walked away from his career as a corporate speechwriter and a Washington, D.C., political aide to become an avid mountain climber and passionate wilderness advocate. Newly remarried, he set up a homestead in the Vermont mountains. The lifestyle makeover proved a mixed blessing: Waterman became infused with self-reliance but also further alienated from his children, with whom he was desperately trying to reconnect. This is a fascinating if tragic story that Brown calls "an amalgam of elegy, meditation, and wilderness adventure."

—Abigail Wheeler

© 2003  NASI

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