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Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration

2024; Duke University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00021482-10925239

1533-8290

Jacob Darwin Hamblin,

American Environmental and Regional History

In Wild by Design, Laura J. Martin offers a history of ecological restoration in the United States that is both critical of its past and hopeful about its future. Ecological restoration refers to efforts to restore past biotic relationships among species. We tend to think of it as saving species from extinction, restoring their habitats, and helping them to thrive again. But since the nineteenth century, it has entailed a range of interventions, including selective killing, reintroduction, filling and draining wetlands, burning fields, and saturating the landscape with herbicides. Because ecological restoration compels us "to make decisions about where and how to heal," it is deeply embedded in social values and political priorities (10).In sobering and candid prose, Martin shows us how ecological restoration is tied to the complex history of racism and complicity in the displacement of Indigenous people. She interweaves the history of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Dawes Act of 1887, which the federal government used to open Indian lands to white settlement, with the establishment of game reserves and bird sanctuaries on those lands. Organizations such as the American Bison Society and the Audubon Society pitched their species restoration goals primarily to white settler tourists and hunters. Scientists saw opportunities on those lands as well: the Ecological Society of America initially argued that grasslands—formerly part of the Great Sioux Reservation—could be sites of ecological study in order to provide tools for environmental recovery in the future. Martin tells us also that the National Wildlife Refuge system as established by legislation in 1966 "depended on the ideology and the administrative apparatus of settler colonialism" (41).Defining "natural" is the bugbear of ecological restoration, as it relies on contested concepts of belonging and ecological stability. What does it mean to restore a place to its natural state? Eloise Butler, who created the United States' first public wildflower garden in Minnesota in 1907, collected and identified varieties that she viewed as native to the region. Similarly, Vassar College professor Edith Roberts created a garden-laboratory on campus in the 1920s to restore native plants that had been overrun by grasses and poison ivy. She and others tried to establish conditions in which native plants might thrive. But what plants earned the "native" designation? Often restorationists highlight the year 1492 as the obvious representation of natural conditions in the Americas. Martin views that precolonial baseline as problematic, not least because it imagines Indigenous people having no ecological impact. Moreover, blaming the first white settlers for stimulating harmful change is politically much easier than criticizing later projects such as industrialization and suburban sprawl.Much of the book focuses on debates about the degree of federal intervention in ecological restoration. Aldo Leopold emerges from the narrative not as a hero of ethical land use but as a skeptic of federal management in an era of New Deal spending. The federal government drove a great deal of ecological restoration for most of the twentieth century, and it became an official goal of the National Park Service. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 altered the priorities of the Fish and Wildlife Service and drove it to commit to programs in captive breeding and reintroduction.Martin draws fascinating links between ecological restoration and atomic energy. With ample funding from the Atomic Energy Commission, scientists explored the resiliency of ecosystems in bomb tests. Doomsday planning, Martin suggests, gave ecologists the idea of a threshold of damage beyond which an ecosystem cannot recover. Ecologists began to differentiate an ecosystem's structure from the functions of its parts, calculating whether some species could act as substitutes for ones lost. "Today the goal of many restoration projects is to restore ecosystem functioning," she notes, "but the origin of this goal in Doomsday planning remains obscured" (131).Although Martin pulls no punches in her account, Wild by Design is not a takedown of ecological restoration. Consider her discussion of the Disney Wilderness Preserve in the Florida Everglades. Its very existence is the result of Disney's negotiation with government authorities as it sought permission to drain wetlands to make way for Walt Disney World. Martin believes that projects like this distract us from sites of harm, allowing corporations to compensate for them elsewhere. She sees a different path forward, one that is focused on justice and remediation of harm. Martin cares deeply about the goals of restoring habitat and mitigating damage, and she has used her formidable research skills to write a conscientious and compelling history.