Spring 2004

Engagement & Hope
An Interview with William R. Jordan III

by Peter Friederici

	Photo by Buffy Jordan

William R. Jordan III is one of the founders of the modern discipline of restoration.

He began the journal Ecological Restoration in 1981 at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in Madison and served as the journal's editor for many years. He also helped found the Society for Ecological Restoration. And in 2001, Jordan moved to the Chicago area to create the New Academy for Nature and Culture, a program to explore the value of restoration and to critique environmentalism from that perspective.

In his book The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature, published last year, he argues in detail that ecological restoration will prove to be one of the primary ways in which people interact with nature in the new century. Writer Peter Friederici recently spoke with Jordan at his home in Evanston.

PF: Why did you write that "the neglect of restoration has been... one of the defining mistakes of twentieth century environmentalism"?

WJ: Until recently, most environmentalists believed that preservation was the only way to save an ecosystem, to fence it off and leave it alone. But preservation is a goal, not a strategy. Preservation seeks to ensure that this system will be here five hundred years from now, and that it will be on its own track from an evolutionary and ecological point of view. If that's the goal, then restoration is the best way to achieve it.

Now that's talking just about the ecosystem as an object in the landscape. The other half of the answer is that restoration is turning out to be our most fruitful context for negotiating our relationship with that landscape, for getting close to it, understanding it, for developing a sense of caring about it and building a constituency for it - a tough constituency, maybe as tough as the constituency built in the twentieth century with hunters and anglers. Restoration has the same robust engagement with the landscape that hunting and fishing do, and adds to that the naturalist's appreciation of nature in its wholeness and completeness. That's been ignored, down to the last 15 years or so, by a whole succession of environmental thinkers.

A younger Jordan at work in the prairie at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in Madison. Photo courtesy of U.W. Arboretum.

PF: Some say we should simply strive to make the land as healthy as possible without worrying about what it was like in the past. Why do you focus so much on achieving fidelity to historical ecological conditions?

WJ: Americans are very ambivalent about the past. I'm making a case that the past is important. We should take it seriously. The past is where we got our language; it's where we got our bodies, our ideas, and all these species. And restoration is maybe the most powerful thing you can do about the past.

I go back to my two reasons why restoration is important. It's important because, if you want all those species carried forward into the future, restoration is what you have to do. That would be the lesson of the prairies: you have to burn them. They're too small now to count on lightning. The Indians aren't burning prairies anymore. So, you've got to burn them. That makes you a restorationist.

The other thing, though, is that restoration that is faithful to the ecology of a place generates values for the practitioner that no other protocol generates. It is an act of self-abnegation, of deference to nature as given. You're setting aside your will, really, in stepping back and deferring to the other guy, and in this case that may be the tallgrass prairie or a wetland or a forest. That doesn't happen if you say, "we're going to make this beautiful," or "we're going to make this more productive," or "we're going to increase biodiversity." That's not deference — you've got an agenda.

PF: Your thinking has led you to the belief that performance and ritual are important elements of restoration. Why?

WJ: There are many reasons; perhaps the most obvious is that performance, broadly understood, is fun. I think it will be helpful if we can make our relationship with the landscape delightful as well as dutiful. Beyond that, our relationship with nature involves experiences — killing, for example — that are not attractive, that are in fact deeply troubling. Ritual, broadly understood to include art and performance, is really the only way we have of dealing with these aspects of relationships in a psychologically productive way.

PF: You've said that the violent or distasteful acts of restoration — such as shooting deer or girdling trees — should not be hidden away, and in fact should be highlighted. Why?

WJ: Well, I think these are exactly the actions that can bring us closest to nature, but only if we handle them properly. Killing and eating are intimate encounters with the natural fact of creative destruction, and human cultures always ritualize them. A key instance is the communion meal, which begins with a ritualized killing but concludes in communion with the food and with other humans. It only works when it is done deliberately, self-consciously, and openly. Isn't that what's going on in an event such as the Bagpipes and Bonfire festival up in Lake Forest? The folks up there are killing buckthorn, but they've made that the occasion for a festival that brings the community together and makes it more aware of its residence in and its troubling responsibility for a particular ecosystem.

PF: Chicago probably has as many people doing restoration as any place in North America.

WJ: It certainly supports a strong, vibrant restoration culture that has in many ways provided leadership nationally and has been an inspiration to many, including me.

PF: Do you think that restoration will remain a fairly specialized weekend endeavor, or can it become something that is really broad-based?

WJ: It seems to me that that's the great challenge, to make it attractive to people — lots of people. It isn't going to be for everybody — nothing is. But I hope that it will become the activity that everyone understands to be the paradigm for our relationship with the classic landscape. So even the people who would rather go on a picnic or play golf will understand that they are represented in some fundamental way in the natural landscape by people who are out there doing restoration.

Performance has an important role to play here as well. [Anthropologist] Victor Turner once said that one of the functions of ritual or performance is to "make the obligatory desirable." You turn what is, on the face of it, hard work into something that people actually want to do because it's fun. And it's fun because there are other people there, because you have a sense of accomplishment, because you're engaging nature.

PF: But these days there are so many forces that work against our forging a deeper relationship with a particular place.

WJ: That just makes it that much more important to have effective ways of engaging the landscapes that we find ourselves in, even temporarily. If I go down to see the Sonoran Desert, for example, I think it would be kind of cool to get out of the car and participate in some kind of restoration work that's going on there rather than just drive past or even hike through it. That's why I've always thought that the forest preserves here in the Chicago area and the restoration work going on in them are as important as our national parks or wilderness areas and all that goes on in them.

Restorations like those advocated by Jordan are taking place at numerous sites both locally and regionally. Left photo by B.W. Hoffmann; right photo by Gerald D. Tang.