Carbon Offsets as Ecological Restorations

Galatowitsch, S. M. Restoration Ecology 17:563-570. 2009

Adam has already summarized the arguments made by Galatowitsch, so I will jump straight to the pros and cons of this article.

First of all, the major benefit of this article is that it perfectly integrates the problems we have been struggling to understand for the past two weeks into this week’s topic. This seminar gains much from the integration of scholars from various disciplines, but it also stands to lose much from the difficulty of maintaining a coherent dialogue on any of the problems of restoration ecology with which we engage each week.

Second, most articles in consideration this week discern “opportunities” for restoration ecology due to climate change. Yet this is the main article currently suggested that seriously engages with the political opportunities at stake. In other words, the “field” of restoration ecology may expand not only into those physical areas in which plant invasions become more common, etc., but also – and more importantly – it may expand into the social, cultural, political, economic and ideological spaces created by the increasingly hegemonic discourse of climate change.

All that being said, one of the downsides of this article (though not exclusive to this one among our choices at hand) is how little attention it gives to the structures that condition the sidelining of the science of restoration ecology that is “already there” while policy-makers plow ahead.