“restoration”

There are two important usages of “restoration” in the arid American West. One links to conservation; the other links to decolonization. 

The first usage of restoration is most closely related to conservation. It thus risks slipping into the same settler colonial logics of colonial-capitalism (see frame: primitive accumulation). This type of restoration, as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, is “restoring land for production of natural resources.”[1] This sort of restoration may clean up a riverbed to attract tourists or improve home values or provide recycled water to water more crops. It, however, maintains or “restores” the extractive relationship between humans and water. In a sense, this “restores” the settler state as well, ensuring that environmental threats to settler ways of life are neutralized (see frame: Settler Colonial Environmentalism)

The second usage of restoration, in Kimmerer’s words, relies on land not as property or natural resource but as cultural identity. Restoration “offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual.”[2] This definition hinges on restoring both land and relationship to land. In turn, ecological restoration by environmental scientists is the first step to repairing eco-systems, but the second step is to enter into a relationship of reciprocity and mutual responsibility for long-term resilience. “Reciprocity,” she writes, “is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land and the land restores us.”[3] In more concrete terms, one human responsibility in a reciprocal relationship is to acknowledge that we cannot control exactly how nature restores herself in any given context. 

As for water politics, I clearly endorse the second use of restoration as an alternative to the hegemonic discourse of “water conservation.” I have some ideas for bringing restoration into everyday language. (1) One step toward establishing this second use of restoration is by lobbying for “reciprocal responsibilities” to be a part of all water restoration processes. This, for example, could take place in emergency “restoration” after climate fires or oil spills or fracking pollution—or after we tear down dams. In this case, past and present environmental transgressions will be an opportunity to rethink relationships with the land as well as clean up habitats. This could mean sentencing corporations, for example, with a reciprocal responsibility to the landscape instead of just a bill to a restoration company or a government contractor. (2) Another step, and one that I think is absolutely necessary, is to link water restoration explicitly to decolonization. This linkage may not be as welcome in legal and institutional settings, but it could be a grassroots campaign. When restoration is about relationship as much as ecology, it helps us frame decolonization as a whole body of theory about how to repair human relationships (to break the settler-colonial triad), for example. Plenty of settlers with “eco-anxiety”[4] (not to mention, settler guilt) are looking for concrete modes of environmental restoration. This concrete step could be decolonial restoration. 

[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, First, Book, Whole (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 328.

[2] Kimmerer, 328.

[3] Kimmerer, 336.

[4] Eco-anxiety is what the American Psychological Association terms the “chronic fear of environmental doom.” https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-health-climate.pdf