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The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature
Ecological restoration, the attempt to guide damaged ecosystems back to a previous, usually healthier or more natural, condition, is rapidly gaining recognition as one of the most promising approaches to conservation. In this book, William R. Jordan III, who coined the term "restoration ecology," and who is widely respected as an intellectual leader in the field, outlines a vision for a restoration-based environmentalism that has emerged from his work over twenty-five years.
Drawing on a provocative range of thinkers, from anthropologists Victor Turner, Roy Rappaport, and Mary Douglas to literary critics Frederick Turner, Leo Marx, and R.W.B. Lewis, Jordan explores the promise of restoration, both as a way of reversing environmental damage and as a context for negotiating our relationship with nature.
Exploring restoration not only as a technology but also as an experience and a performing art, Jordan claims that it is the indispensable key to conservation. At the same time, he argues, restoration is valuable because it provides a context for confronting the most troubling aspects of our relationship with nature. For this reason, it offers a way past the essentially sentimental idea of nature that environmental thinkers have taken for granted since the time of Emerson and Muir.
Drawing on a provocative range of thinkers, from anthropologists Victor Turner, Roy Rappaport, and Mary Douglas to literary critics Frederick Turner, Leo Marx, and R.W.B. Lewis, Jordan explores the promise of restoration, both as a way of reversing environmental damage and as a context for negotiating our relationship with nature.
Exploring restoration not only as a technology but also as an experience and a performing art, Jordan claims that it is the indispensable key to conservation. At the same time, he argues, restoration is valuable because it provides a context for confronting the most troubling aspects of our relationship with nature. For this reason, it offers a way past the essentially sentimental idea of nature that environmental thinkers have taken for granted since the time of Emerson and Muir.
264 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2003
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May 30, 2021
Even as someone who comes from an academic background, I had a very hard time getting through/understanding this book. Sometimes it felt like the author was writing just to convey how smart he was, rather than actually trying to make a point. There were some great tidbits in there, but they were few and far between.
August 8, 2013
When I started The Sunflower Forest, I was excited. Jordan was the first book I'd read in ages that advanced a perspective on environmental issues that seemed fresh and new. It bespoke promises of a personal paradigm shift, if a small one.
Jordan starts at Leopold's commandment to "see land as a community to which we belong." He agrees with the concept, broadly, but points out that the environmental movement has read this in an extremely superficial way. The outdoor recreation movement has largely co-opted the concept of personal relationships with nature as a narrative to sell their various products and "getaways."
As Greg Summers did in Consuming Nature, Jordan realizes that primarily consumptive modes of interaction with nature cannot yield reciprocal, regenerative, and healthy modes of interaction. The insight Jordan adds is to investigate what Leopold's mission actually means: how do communities form?
It often feels like this book is just another spin on the intellectual treadmill. Leopold says that we must change our culture's view of nature in order to enact a restorative approach. Jordan says that restoration is the key to developing a culture that sees itself as a member of the ecological community. On one hand, then, there is no problem. We should advance in both practical and cultural realms simultaneously, largely as the movement has done. On the other hand, which obtains more broadly, we are caught in a catch-22. We cannot begin large-scale restoration works until we have generated broad social support for such ventures, but it turns out that doing restoration is the only way to generate that support.
But that's not entirely fair. Jordan's idea is valuable. On whatever scale the environmental movement is capable of changing culture and restoring ecosystems, that's valuable, and we need to think seriously about how best to do it. So if the National Park System and BBC's Planet Earth aren't the best way to embrace our membership in Earth as a community, what is? Most importantly, if it doesn't hurt, it's not working. True relationships require sacrifice. This is the first sign that the outdoor recreation movement is building smug self-satisfaction and physical fitness among its customers, but not a true community. They are premised in commitment, and this is perhaps the hardest thing for Americans, who are totally absorbed in an economic and cultural system that is utterly alienated from the land where we live, to achieve.
Jordan's solution, reasonably, is to look to the sociological and mostly anthropological research on community-building. From sociology, he gets the insight that communities are not harmonious Edens of neighborliness, but rather a complex web of power struggles, heterogeneous factions, and competing value systems. At other points in the book, Jordan must struggle mightily to analogize his human examples to the problem of community-with-nature, but this one's easy. Our nature-culture needs to wrestle head on with the inevitable levels of violence, dominance, and competition involved in any human relationship with a landbase. In much environmental thinking, these aspects are simply elided in favor of the rosy vision focused on cooperation. Derrick Jensen, a great example, tried to distinguish, in ethical terms, the violence of hunting from the violence of civilization in a few pages in Endgame, a mere window dressing. Once his values were superficially justified, he went on to claim that evolution is based on cooperation, not competition :s
From the anthropological literature, Jordan ascertains that most human cultures come to terms with the violence they must inflict to live through ritual. The stereotyped example concerns the Native American hunter thanking the Deer Spirits. Jordan makes the (somewhat grasping) claim that ritual sacrifice of innocents is a "way of dealing with . . . troubling cold blooded killing of the barnyard and the systematic mass-murder of cultivation and harvest." From this analogue, Jordan is obviously looking for serious rituals - Connie Barlow's Great Story, for instance, is great but fails utterly to grapple with the enormity of the issues at hand, to plumb their dark depths and emerge with a sense of meaning. He cites only a few festivals associated with restoration projects in the Midwest. His most serious suggestion, and certainly one of the book's most memorable if not best ideas, is to destroy a portion of a restored ecosystem as a meditation on its value to us.
Instead of brainstorming ideas for meaningful and effective rituals for restoration, most of the book was spent on a garbled investigation of anthropological studies of ritual, particularly those of Frederick and Victor Turner. He is fixated by a concept he refers to as shame. This concept is, in Jordan's conception, the central theme of the book, but it was never really clear to me what he meant by it. He put so much faith in it, though, that he went so far as to say that most writers in the Western tradition "confused shame and guilt," because they didn't make the distinction between them that he does. As my bud Alex pointed out, this all reeks of an academic pet theory. Jordan, as far as I can tell, is not trained as an anthropologist, and he is simply drawing a picture that makes intuitive sense to him. Unfortunately, it's pretty idiosyncratic and doesn't come across very well to the reader.
This is unfortunate, because when Jordan's ambiguous shame thread isn't clouding the text, he is a cogent thinker and provides insightful analyses of many relevant bodies of knowledge. To demonstrate the difficulty of entering and maintaining a community, he examines initiation rites that include bodily mutilation, long periods of isolation and deprivation, and humiliation, all in order to destroy a prior identity and reshape a new identity as a community member, with all the responsibilities that entails. Piaget provides a four-stage framework for entering a community (as an outsider, primarily): achieve awareness of the other; get a job and learn the language; exchange gifts; and resolve ambiguity through ritual. Gift exchange creates an unresolved sense of mutual obligation; debts are not meant to be settled but to bind members to each other in a permanent relationship of mutual trust and interdependence. In literature, the genre of the pastoral shows us the differences between flawed and misleading narratives of humans and nature, and stories that enlighten our place.
It's perhaps unfair to expect Jordan to solve the problem he poses. After all, creating a culture's worth of ritual and symbology with enough hold on our imaginations to counteract the power of American pop culture is not easy/possible in a book like this. But there are a few interesting kernels to build on: premising environmental rituals on events like the equinoxes, which bear little relevance to the life of the community, is a recipe for weak rituals; and the awesome idea that, "like the innocent victim of traditional sacrifice, the weeds and exotic plants the restorationist kills die for our sins" (which Jordan got from someone else). Most important, of course, is the genuine valuation people place on a landscape they have invested much in creating. Most of Jordan's argument rests on the obvious salience of this process.
Reading The Sunflower Forest as a follow-up to and in light of Mark Shepard's Restoration Agriculture, it was reassuring to me that Jordan built that possibility into his definition of restoration. While he focuses primarily on the form of restoration that aspires to erase the history of ecological violence and return to a previous condition, he embraces the idea that restored landscapes must be landscapes that give to and take from humans. He rejects the concept of living lightly on the land, a sort of ecological anorexia that fixates on reducing consumption rather than on consuming better. Instead, he proposes that an eventually key component of restoration must be providing economically for the needs of the restorers. Obviously, he takes for granted that this consumption will be done in a way that respects the continued health and growth of the restored system. People who have invested sufficiently in a landbase to restore it to health won't lightly throw that away for fleeting gains.
His ideas about what form this will take are mixed. On one hand, he cites the brilliant Buffalo Commons idea that Richard Manning argued for so eloquently in Grasslands. On the other, his best idea for moister areas like Wisconsin is to include a prairie community as a cover crop, a resting phase in a crop rotation for corn and soybeans. I'm sure this is a vast improvement over the present corn-soybean rotation, but it's certainly not an ecologically appropriate way to produce food in Wisconsin.
The Sunflower Forest certainly didn't live up to its initial promise, but it has useful insights and starts a very important conversation.
Jordan starts at Leopold's commandment to "see land as a community to which we belong." He agrees with the concept, broadly, but points out that the environmental movement has read this in an extremely superficial way. The outdoor recreation movement has largely co-opted the concept of personal relationships with nature as a narrative to sell their various products and "getaways."
As Greg Summers did in Consuming Nature, Jordan realizes that primarily consumptive modes of interaction with nature cannot yield reciprocal, regenerative, and healthy modes of interaction. The insight Jordan adds is to investigate what Leopold's mission actually means: how do communities form?
It often feels like this book is just another spin on the intellectual treadmill. Leopold says that we must change our culture's view of nature in order to enact a restorative approach. Jordan says that restoration is the key to developing a culture that sees itself as a member of the ecological community. On one hand, then, there is no problem. We should advance in both practical and cultural realms simultaneously, largely as the movement has done. On the other hand, which obtains more broadly, we are caught in a catch-22. We cannot begin large-scale restoration works until we have generated broad social support for such ventures, but it turns out that doing restoration is the only way to generate that support.
But that's not entirely fair. Jordan's idea is valuable. On whatever scale the environmental movement is capable of changing culture and restoring ecosystems, that's valuable, and we need to think seriously about how best to do it. So if the National Park System and BBC's Planet Earth aren't the best way to embrace our membership in Earth as a community, what is? Most importantly, if it doesn't hurt, it's not working. True relationships require sacrifice. This is the first sign that the outdoor recreation movement is building smug self-satisfaction and physical fitness among its customers, but not a true community. They are premised in commitment, and this is perhaps the hardest thing for Americans, who are totally absorbed in an economic and cultural system that is utterly alienated from the land where we live, to achieve.
Jordan's solution, reasonably, is to look to the sociological and mostly anthropological research on community-building. From sociology, he gets the insight that communities are not harmonious Edens of neighborliness, but rather a complex web of power struggles, heterogeneous factions, and competing value systems. At other points in the book, Jordan must struggle mightily to analogize his human examples to the problem of community-with-nature, but this one's easy. Our nature-culture needs to wrestle head on with the inevitable levels of violence, dominance, and competition involved in any human relationship with a landbase. In much environmental thinking, these aspects are simply elided in favor of the rosy vision focused on cooperation. Derrick Jensen, a great example, tried to distinguish, in ethical terms, the violence of hunting from the violence of civilization in a few pages in Endgame, a mere window dressing. Once his values were superficially justified, he went on to claim that evolution is based on cooperation, not competition :s
From the anthropological literature, Jordan ascertains that most human cultures come to terms with the violence they must inflict to live through ritual. The stereotyped example concerns the Native American hunter thanking the Deer Spirits. Jordan makes the (somewhat grasping) claim that ritual sacrifice of innocents is a "way of dealing with . . . troubling cold blooded killing of the barnyard and the systematic mass-murder of cultivation and harvest." From this analogue, Jordan is obviously looking for serious rituals - Connie Barlow's Great Story, for instance, is great but fails utterly to grapple with the enormity of the issues at hand, to plumb their dark depths and emerge with a sense of meaning. He cites only a few festivals associated with restoration projects in the Midwest. His most serious suggestion, and certainly one of the book's most memorable if not best ideas, is to destroy a portion of a restored ecosystem as a meditation on its value to us.
Instead of brainstorming ideas for meaningful and effective rituals for restoration, most of the book was spent on a garbled investigation of anthropological studies of ritual, particularly those of Frederick and Victor Turner. He is fixated by a concept he refers to as shame. This concept is, in Jordan's conception, the central theme of the book, but it was never really clear to me what he meant by it. He put so much faith in it, though, that he went so far as to say that most writers in the Western tradition "confused shame and guilt," because they didn't make the distinction between them that he does. As my bud Alex pointed out, this all reeks of an academic pet theory. Jordan, as far as I can tell, is not trained as an anthropologist, and he is simply drawing a picture that makes intuitive sense to him. Unfortunately, it's pretty idiosyncratic and doesn't come across very well to the reader.
This is unfortunate, because when Jordan's ambiguous shame thread isn't clouding the text, he is a cogent thinker and provides insightful analyses of many relevant bodies of knowledge. To demonstrate the difficulty of entering and maintaining a community, he examines initiation rites that include bodily mutilation, long periods of isolation and deprivation, and humiliation, all in order to destroy a prior identity and reshape a new identity as a community member, with all the responsibilities that entails. Piaget provides a four-stage framework for entering a community (as an outsider, primarily): achieve awareness of the other; get a job and learn the language; exchange gifts; and resolve ambiguity through ritual. Gift exchange creates an unresolved sense of mutual obligation; debts are not meant to be settled but to bind members to each other in a permanent relationship of mutual trust and interdependence. In literature, the genre of the pastoral shows us the differences between flawed and misleading narratives of humans and nature, and stories that enlighten our place.
It's perhaps unfair to expect Jordan to solve the problem he poses. After all, creating a culture's worth of ritual and symbology with enough hold on our imaginations to counteract the power of American pop culture is not easy/possible in a book like this. But there are a few interesting kernels to build on: premising environmental rituals on events like the equinoxes, which bear little relevance to the life of the community, is a recipe for weak rituals; and the awesome idea that, "like the innocent victim of traditional sacrifice, the weeds and exotic plants the restorationist kills die for our sins" (which Jordan got from someone else). Most important, of course, is the genuine valuation people place on a landscape they have invested much in creating. Most of Jordan's argument rests on the obvious salience of this process.
Reading The Sunflower Forest as a follow-up to and in light of Mark Shepard's Restoration Agriculture, it was reassuring to me that Jordan built that possibility into his definition of restoration. While he focuses primarily on the form of restoration that aspires to erase the history of ecological violence and return to a previous condition, he embraces the idea that restored landscapes must be landscapes that give to and take from humans. He rejects the concept of living lightly on the land, a sort of ecological anorexia that fixates on reducing consumption rather than on consuming better. Instead, he proposes that an eventually key component of restoration must be providing economically for the needs of the restorers. Obviously, he takes for granted that this consumption will be done in a way that respects the continued health and growth of the restored system. People who have invested sufficiently in a landbase to restore it to health won't lightly throw that away for fleeting gains.
His ideas about what form this will take are mixed. On one hand, he cites the brilliant Buffalo Commons idea that Richard Manning argued for so eloquently in Grasslands. On the other, his best idea for moister areas like Wisconsin is to include a prairie community as a cover crop, a resting phase in a crop rotation for corn and soybeans. I'm sure this is a vast improvement over the present corn-soybean rotation, but it's certainly not an ecologically appropriate way to produce food in Wisconsin.
The Sunflower Forest certainly didn't live up to its initial promise, but it has useful insights and starts a very important conversation.
April 13, 2023
Jordan offers us—restorationists, nature lovers, and those interested in thinking through our place on the Earth—a deep and searching analysis of ecological restoration’s place in our culture and its potential to help free us from some of the quagmires he identifies in modern environmental thought. The book is not systematic nor particularly concise, and it draws from sources ranging from King Lear to Aldo Leopold, but he succeeds in making clear how restoration might serve humanity in the future. Taking seriously what it means to be in community with nature, Jordan offers a reading of restoration as ritual. He claims (and I was moved to agree) that this aspect of restoration holds the key to moving towards a deeper relationship with nature, moving through the complexities, contradictions, and existential dilemmas that entails. Worth a read to anyone that helps care for the land.
October 5, 2019
This is an essential book for those involved with ecological restoration, such as myself. Eco Restoration has so many approaches that developing one's own philosophy with respect to the subject is a vital way to develop our own approach to effective restoration, through actions that are driven by science, culture and necessary adaptation to appalling degradation and stressors.
March 7, 2015
A veteran prairie restoration ecologist explores the philosophy of restoration and how its practice can restore humankind's skewed relationship with the earth. It was a tough read for me because I'm not familiar with philosophical terminology or ideas, so I didn't understand a fair amount of this book. Could have been explained in simpler terms.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews