DON GAYTON. Address to the Oct 2007 ER conference.

ECO-CULTURAL APPROACHES TO RESTORATION
By Don Gayton, MSc, PAg

I’d like to think that I invented the notion of ecological restoration, but in spite of my overinflated ego, I have to admit, there are a few people who have gone before me on this one. Quite a few, actually.

The first restorationist in this part of the world would have been a Ktunaxa man or, just as likely, a woman, who would have set a grass fire on St Mary’s Prairie or Pickering Hills a couple of centuries ago, to bring in more game or perhaps to enhance the Saskatoon crop. That Ktunaxa woman used some of the same tools and knowledge that we use now, but she didn’t think of what she was doing as ecological restoration, she thought of it simply as caring for Turtle Island. Next in the long queue of people who invented ER before I did was probably a local cattle rancher in the 1920s, who understood the delicate ecological balance between grass and trees, was not scornful of First Nations knowledge, and didn’t share the profound fear and hatred of fire that his contemporaries harbored. He didn’t think of lighting up that same grassland as ecological restoration either. He was just looking after business, in the best sense.

Next in the ER queue would have come an early Forest Service range man, an Edwin Tisdale or perhaps a Jim Milroy. The horrendous spasm that was World War II was over, and he began to turn his thoughts in earnest to the workings of the Trench landscape. A lot of observation, and a lot of time on horseback, led him to the conclusion that fire was a part of this landscape, and that fire could actually be applied and controlled, rather than just suppressed when you could, and endured when you couldn’t. He probably had to deal with match-happy colleagues who liked to do “recreational burning,” but I’d like to think that his methodical approach prevailed.

Then in the Eighties, we moved into the era of the planner, and a series of forces resulted in an almost total loss of fire as a tool.

But now, fortunately, we have the current generation of Trench restorationists, who have worked patiently since the late 1980s to bring fire out of the closet and back into the toolbox. Not only fire, but fire histories, historical stand reconstructions, public outreach about fire, the intelligent application of pre-burn fuel modification, and thinning on its own where necessary, as an analogue of fire.  

I happened to come on this scene in about 1990, when I was fresh off the boat from Saskatchewan, and started working as a Range Ecologist for the Forest Service Regional Office in Nelson. One day Ross Tozer, the Regional Manager, called me in and said, “Gayton, there’s a little problem that has developed between the ranchers and the hunters over in the East Kootenays, about access to forage. We want you to go over there and fix it.” So, full of totally unjustifiable self-confidence, and blissfully ignorant of the Byzantine eco-political realities of the Rocky Mountain Trench, I blithely drove over to my first meeting in Cranbrook. All the usual suspects were there—the three Ministries, the various hunter groups, the various rancher groups, and several hangers-on. Both the hunter and the rancher groups were further segmented into affiliated, and non-affiliated. The meeting started, and after about seven and a half minutes of niceties, the knives began to come out. The hunters didn’t trust the ranchers, and vice versa. The affiliateds didn’t trust the non-affiliateds. The sheep guys weren’t sure about the elk guys. The Ministries didn’t trust each other, District staff didn’t trust Victoria staff, Cranbrook didn’t trust Invermere, the Regional District was confused, this fight over forage had actually been going on since about 1949, vicious letters to the editor were a daily occurrence, bodies were buried everywhere, there was absolutely no trustworthy data, the participants seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the verbal violence, and here I was, completely naive, thrown into this ravenous and bloodthirsty den of wolves, saying, “Hi, I’m Ed Broadbent.”

Actually, it turned out to be quite a remarkable story. From that foul and toxic shotgun marriage of hunters, ranchers and government, came this shining newborn infant known as fire-maintained ecosystem restoration, which has gone forward to become the bright light of ecological restoration in BC, and perhaps in the country. You folks can truly claim to have invented the Trench brand of ecological restoration. The work here is the exception to the general rule that ecological restoration normally occurs only in and around large metropolitan centers. Here, you folks are proceeding apace with broad-scale restoration in a largely rural environment.

But as good as the Trench restoration work is, it is profoundly hobbled by one inescapable fact. Every restoration project in the country is hobbled by the same fact.  And this is what I want to talk about. The inescapable and crippling fact is that people don’t care about nature. Our society does not care about nature.

When you are surrounded by people with similar ecological interests and passions, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that to a very large segment of society, nature has no real meaning. It’s not that they dislike it, or are afraid of it, nature simply isn’t a part of their life.
   
Nature and ecosystems actually occupy a very low rung in our society’s priorities. A huge plethora of items come first before nature—economics, technology, transportation, real estate, lifestyle, recreation, consumption, convenience. And all of the good work that you do and I do, in restoration, in education, in conservation, in research, sooner or later runs up against this one brutal fact: nature is not really woven into the fabric of Canadian society. Nature is only honoured in the breach, when some event disrupts the ecosystem services we so casually depend on. Then we pay attention.

I don’t think it’s always been this way. I believe our culture’s relationship to nature, and by extension, our relationship to local place, has been isolated and degraded. And, like Eric Higgs says, there is a potential attachment for nature incipient in all of us, but it must be cultivated before it becomes active.

Books have been written about why nature has such low status in contemporary society. Science. The influence of technology. The suppression of women. Materialism. The shift from a geocentric, earth-as-mother social perspective to a Baconian perspective of nature as an object to be subjugated, dissected, and controlled. The possible reasons for nature’s low status make for interesting debate. But the bottom line is that we tend to classify cultures around the world based on the closeness of their relationship to nature. The ones with close bonds to nature we think of as primitive; cultures with very loose and distant bonds, like our own, we think of as advanced.

Now we all know that ecological restoration is a difficult job. The budgets are small, the payoff is long, and nobody has yet won fame and fortune by being a restorationist. But in spite of all that difficulty, I’m asking us restorationists to take on another task. That incremental task is to come up with ways of elevating the status of nature in society. Preaching to the converted—ourselves that is--is always good, because the converted are under stress, and they need positive reinforcement. But the true battlefield for nature conservation lies not in preaching to the converted, it is a battle for the hearts and minds of average citizens.

In our current cultural context of devalued nature, even the best restoration projects are one-offs, marginal activities, pathetic ecological snowballs in a consumerist July.

If we can get started on this fundamental work, this work of re-inserting nature back into our culture, then all of our restoration projects are going to benefit. I have a few ideas on how to do this.

First, we have to rethink our traditional notions of information transfer about nature and ecosystems. I’m the worst culprit. I’ve written dozens of extension bulletins, background papers and interpretive signs over the years, and I persist in thinking that if I could just write the ultimate, truly perfect extension bulletin, the entire world would experience a blinding paradigm shift, and start protecting native grasslands, caring about rivers, abandoning their ATVs and honouring the spadefoot toad.

Good extension materials will engage, and perhaps even galvanize, about 5% of the population, the ones that are onside already. The other 95% are not likely to even read the materials, much less experience an attitude or behaviour shift as a result.

Like a lot of us, I’ve been totally co-opted by information. I gather it, I file it, I summarize it, and turn it into an endless stream of extension products, in the naive belief that if I do it just right, that suddenly people would begin to care. What an idiot I am. What idiots we are. Naked information rarely changes hearts and minds.

We live in what I call the era of indifference. In other words, we know, but we don’t care. There was a time when ecological ignorance could be claimed as an excuse for the damage we do to nature, but not any longer. Splendid graphs and tables are now instantly available, providing minute detail on how we degrade our atmosphere, max out our energy resources, pollute our rivers, overplow our prairies, overcut our forests, overbuild our cities and overdrive our roads.  Information about nature is not the bottleneck; caring about that information, putting that information into a social, cultural and ethical framework and acting on that information—that’s the bottleneck.

I think there is really only one way to raise the status of nature in society, and that is to give it cultural and artistic context, or packaging, if you will. Nature needs story. Think of Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf, or Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow. Nature needs art. Think of Robert Bateman’s wildlife paintings or Allen Sapp’s evocative prairie landscapes. Nature needs music. Think of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” or Beethoven’s “Symphonie Pastorale.” Nature craves images of itself, such as the photographs of Ansel Adams or the films of Godfrey Reggio. And even closer to home, Chris Harris’ wonderful images of the Chilcotin grasslands. Nature needs poetry, pottery, interpretive dance, performance art, fabric arts and sculpture.  These cultural artifices contextualize, editorialize and memorialize species, ecosystems and landscapes, and make them important to us. The artistic works persist long after the viewing or reading or listening; they float in our minds, and manifest at odd moments. They refer, and they correlate. They are mnemonics and aides memoires for a wealth of biological detail. They link forward and they link backward in time.

This to me is at the core of the genius of Indigenous People’s Knowledge: the knowledge is all carried within the enfolding womb of story, and ritual, and culture.

In the wintertime, I swim at our local rec centre in Penticton. My idea of a good workout is half an hour in the pool’s hot tub, followed by five minutes of swimming laps, so I have a lot of time to look around. On the wall above the hot tub is a big, bright mural that depicts a cute underwater scene with lobsters and treasure chests and sea monsters. Now this is a bit picky, but why couldn’t that mural be a fanciful underwater scene drawn from the aquatic ecology of the Okanagan-Similkameen area where I live? Why couldn’t we have fierce tiger salamanders and friendly Chinooks and diving ouzels and dancing freshwater clams? Why is it we are so afraid to celebrate the local?

If there is one group more marginal in our society than us biologists, ecologists and restorationists, it is the artists. We need to join forces with them, show them the wonders of our material, and learn about their needs and desires. The barriers between art and science have been up far too long, and it is time to tear them down.
 
Ecological restoration is really just getting underway in Canada, but it has the potential for being a long-term, popular movement, that encourages people to commit random acts of kindness to nature, and thus bind them to it. One of the reasons that I keep thinking that I invented ecological restoration is that it is such a compelling idea. There is something for everyone in ER.

Restoration will not only benefit from nature being more important in our culture, it can also act as one of the mechanisms to make nature more important. William Jordan, one of the leaders of the ecological restoration movement, made what I think is a stunningly brilliant proposal a few years ago, and one that bears on this issue.

Jordan’s proposal goes like this. Every human society in history has had ritual as a major part of its culture. In our current culture, the traditional vessel for ritual is organized religion which, for any number of reasons, is no longer a part of mainstream, everyday society. So we are, for the first time in history, a culture that is bereft of ritual. What better material for the re-integration of modern, enlightened ritual into society, Jordan says, than the material of ecological restoration? Restoration touches on all the key elements of ritual. It involves humility, the recognition of past wrongdoing, and it is unselfish. It is an actual and a symbolic gift, a giving back. Restoration pays homage to the earth, to regeneration, to seasons, to water, to fertility, to science, to community.

While I’m touching on the touchy subject of religion, I might as well mention guilt. I thoroughly dislike the way guilt is used in organized religion, but I do recognize that guilt is a powerful motivating, and binding force. What if we took another stab at guilt, but this time not through the religious medium of sin, but through the medium of climate change? Climate change has a lot of guilt potential. It’s something we’re all equally responsible for, we knew we were doing wrong by the profligate consumption of hydrocarbons, but we went ahead and did it anyway. Now we’re slowly confessing our petrochemical sins, and we probably can’t completely fix climate change now even if we went full out. So let’s take a second look at climate change and our responsibility for it, as a collective, non-religious guilt device to bring us back together as a society, and to re-center our society in the earth, where it belongs.

I apologize that this all sounds so romantic and airy-fairy. Actually, I take that back. I don’t apologize. If I could see a way out of our dilemma through science, I would grab it instantly, but I don’t. As wonderful as our vast storehouse of scientific knowledge about nature is, that knowledge has not brought society one iota closer to nature.

What I am proposing sounds atavistic, pantheistic and primitive, a notion that is truly unsupportable in an age when North American society endlessly generates technological and material progress, almost whether it wants to or not. But maybe, just maybe, we should re-examine that dogma of advanced cultures being distant from nature and primitive ones being close to it. Who exactly, made up that rule? And must we be prisoners of history?

I know that as this band of committed individuals and organizations--this five percent--can only go so far with management, with extension, and with one-off restorations. The passionate, art-assisted re-weaving of nature back into the fabric of our everyday Canadian culture is our best, and perhaps our last, hope.

Don Gayton is an Ecosystem Management Specialist for FORREX and an award-winning Canadian author. His latest book of essays, Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden, was published in October 2007 by Thistledown Press. Don made the address published above to the Ecological Restoration in Southeastern BC conference held Oct. 11-13, 2007, in Cranbrook, BC. The conference was sponsored by the BC Chapter of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER-BC) and the Columbia Mountains Institute of Applied Ecology (CMI).