A political ecology of restoration

In our Introduction to Geography seminar, we just read the book "King of Fish", by the geomorphologist David Montgomery. I highly recommend it, especially to restoration ecologists. Taking a broad perspective on the history of human-salmon relationships, Montgomery addresses the collapse of salmon in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. He provides details about the various land-use and river management practices that have affected salmon runs, including the conservation/restoration projects that continue to our day.

Montgomery's analysis takes us back thousands of years in order to understand the ecology of salmon and salmon rivers, and brings us deep into the hallways of local, state, federal and international politics that affect salmon runs and their rivers. In this perspective, the genocide of the American Indians and the need for restoration that confronts directly the interests of industry, agriculture and urbanization feature prominently - in contrast with a "wilderness-conservationist" bias of most restoration ecology. What is most important, this "deep" perspective is not a geomorphologist's curiosity, nor a "mere" context for fine-tuned restoration projects. The great importance of Montgomery's work lies in demonstrating how the pursuit of technical fixes, landscape management fine-tuning, and well-intentioned but politically-naive practices have perpetuated and exacerbated the negative feedbacks that continue to endanger salmon and the health and diversity of their ecosystems. (Hatcheries and managed introductions are prominent negative examples, in which restoration ecologists play no minor role.)

Montgomery's book is an excellent example of political ecology targeting a prominent conservation/restoration problem. Unfortunately, I am not sure how much this sort of work is gaining a foothold among the growing disciplines of restoration ecology, landscape architecture, and other land management related fields. The very format of his work as a book with minimal scientific citations and jargon seems to place it outside the scope of journal-publishing-oriented academia, even while particular scientific issues synthesized in his book abound in several scientific journals ranging from conservation biology and geomorphology to hydrological energy and engineering. Along with this brief review, therefore, I am also including a citation to one of Montgomery's articles, where he explicitly addresses restoration ecology as a discipline and makes concrete recommendations for its future development. Unfortunately, the publication date and the schedule of our own seminar might preclude this work from even being considered as part of our top-ten project.

I end this review commenting on a quote from Montgomery's "King of Fish":

"We know more about salmon than ever before. But are we using our knowledge of salmon ecology and fluvial geomorphology to figure out how hard we can press the resource before it collapses, perhaps forever? Many technical debates about the details of salmon recovery proposals seem to be animated by this kind of brinkmanship. In truth, the key to restoring salmon is not our knowledge of fish or streams but our ability to manage ourselves." (Montgomery, 2003: 242)

Natural scientists are among some of the most knowledgeable and, perhaps, even the best intentioned people working on ecological conservation and restoration. Unfortunately, most allow their focus on natural sciences to obscure their understanding of our own human existence embedded in the ecosystem. Taking Montgomery himself as an example, natural scientists can and ought to make a qualitative shift from attempting to apply science to manage "landscapes and ecosystems", to use this knowledge in the explicitly and directly political efforts to manage ourselves.

Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira

"KING OF FISH: The Thousand Year Run of Salmon", David R. Montgomery, Westview Press, 2003.


"Geomorphology and Restoration Ecology", David R. Montgomery, Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, Volume 134, Issue 1, pages 19–22, July 2006.

Ecosystem Services and the Privatization of Ecological Knowledge

In my own research I keep running across privitized ecological knowledge. It took me off guard at first. I was asking an environmental manager what his management practices are, and he responded that he could not tell me, that the management practices I asked about were proprietary information. States and multi-state catchments within the Mississippi Basin are all anticipating a future EPA ruling that will make reactive nitrogen reduction in receiving waters mandatory, therefore, the ability to take the most nitrogen of out of water per unit time determines the price one receives for a nutrient reduction credit. Got it, management matters. Fair enough.

But is it? And maybe this doesn't matter for anyone else, but it really bothers me that one of the last bastions of public knowledge is being privatized. The history of capilalism has taught us that the knowledge of the commodity and its mobilization is as much part of the commodity as the physical object. This being the case, with the commodification of ecosystem services, so goes the privatization of many aspects of ecological knowledge. This is privitization of knowledge of the very processes that make up our life support system. Many of you will get jobs after you graduate with environmental restoration or consulting firms that specialize in restoration for profit and verification of ecological function for ecosystem service markets. As possible future practising ecologists, I am curious what you think. Is the privitization of ecological knowledge just an inevitable price we have to pay for the market saving the environment? Or will privitization encourage ecological innovation?

my email: adam.romero@berkeley.edu

"So, do we overthrow the State?"

Another discussion thread on a very important question Melissa raised in class last week - if capitalism plays the role Nadasdy pointed out in that chapter, what is to be done of restoration ecology?

I think there may be a general feeling among people who would like to restore ecosystems - and who are aware of the situation Nadasdy points out - that the problem of capitalism is too large to be addressed by restoration ecologists. If one is good at ecological restoration, perhaps she can do her best, "do her part", and hope better days will come one way or another.

This is understandable, but I don't think it excuses us from dealing more actively and seriously with the question at hand. We must ultimately "just do our part", but *how* we situate our work in the ongoing class struggles can be widely different.

On the one hand, we can continue to pretend that "science is neutral" and that "any restoration is better than none at all", even if our work is being co-opted by socially and environmentally destructive corporations and state agencies. All restoration work will continue to be limited by the parameters of profit-making and green-washing capitalism. Indeed, the commodification of restoration is a crucial issue - and I invite Adam Romero to comment more on this subject in class and here in this discussion thread.

On the other hand, we can search for and recognize the people who already are actively engaging in class struggle and building up another possible world - and bring our privileged scientific resources to work in solidarity with them. Who these are and what this means will be widely different in different places, and it is up for each of us to situate ourselves.

On my own account, I can tell you briefly how I came to my research project. I had been doing a Masters in political philosophy at the University of Colorado, and decided to return to my native Brazil to work with the peasant movements that are occupying unproductive land and socially or environmentally damaging plantations to demand agrarian reform. By the time I decided to return to graduate school, the peasants themselves helped me understand the proper role for the academic resources which I am privileged to have. Instead of studying the peasant movements themselves, or something else that I simply "find interesting", it is more important for me to study the socially and environmentally destructive agribusiness they struggle against. I have access to resources - which they don't have - to clearly and forcefully demonstrate the extent of the environmental damage caused by agrotoxic contamination in soils and run-off into watersheds, as well as erosion and salinization of soils, eutrophication of water bodies, deforestation, displacement and loss of biodiversity, and impact on climate change. I can then analyze this environmental damage alongside the broader political economy of Brazil, the process of agrarian reform, and the democratization of our society. My intention is to use my research to strengthen the case of the peasant movements who are already struggling against the capitalist agribusiness that is preeminently responsible for ecological degradation of our ecosystems. In this way, my hope is to not only recognize the capitalist context in which we must do scientific research, but to put the struggle against capitalism as the very foundation of my scientific work.

I encourage you all to find ways to do the same.

Is replication necessary?

Hi everyone,

I thought I would post a discussion thread on the topic that came up near the end of class on Friday: does science require replication?

Here are my thoughts on the matter:

Personally, my thinking on this is evolving, partly because my background does not include any kind of formal training on how case studies are conducted. I insisted that science requires replication because I was trying to represent the importance of understanding how inference works when you are using statistics to account for natural variation in your system. I think my instinct was to make sure people understood that you should try to design studies to measure that variability and not to draw conclusions from not enough data (because people do this all the time). I apologize if I sounded really strident about it! I fully acknowledge that in many cases replication isn't possible, and we still need to be able to draw some conclusions based on that information. I also definitely believe that there is information in case studies, which are only one data point!

One of my ecology professors suggested that in 'hard' sciences like physics, chemistry, etc, the objects they study are nearly identical (atoms, molecules, etc) and when you get to ecology, the objects you study (plants, animals, etc) are not all identical to each other in important ways, which makes assessment of the variability really important. When you get to people, you have even more variation! Maybe none of your study objects are the same!

So, when you do a statistical analysis, the conceptual reason you want replication is that if you take a small sample and your sample happens to be pretty unusual, you could make a conclusion that doesn't really reflect what the rest of the 'population' in question is like. So I think this issue comes up when trying to extrapolate from your current study to other systems.

I do believe social science is science. But what I'm curious about is how one draws conclusions from one potentially idiosynchratic example. Maybe some of you with more experience with case studies could offer me some guidance? Or really, if anyone has ideas on this, please share! How do you apply information from a case study to other situations?

Landscape ecology definitions

For people that were interested/frustrated with the lack of a specific definition of landscape ecology, here are some definitions from major papers throughout its development as a science:

Landscape ecology ... focuses on (1) the spatial relationships among landscape elements, or ecosystems, (2) the flows of energy, mineral nutrients, and species among the elements, and (3) the ecological dynamics of the landscape mosaic through time (Forman 1983)

Landscape ecology focuses explicitly upon spatial patterns. Specifically, landscape ecology considers the development and dynamics of spatial heterogeneity, spatial and temporal interactions and exchanges across heterogeneous landscape, influences of spatial heterogeneity on biotic and abiotic processes, and management of spatial heterogeneity (Risser et al. 1984)

Landscape ecology is motivated by a need to understand the development and dynamics of pattern in ecological phenomena, the role of disturbance in ecosystems, and characteristic spatial and temporal scales of ecological events (Urban et al. 1987)

 Landscape ecology emphasizes broad spatial scales and the ecological effects of the spatial patterning of ecosystems (Turner 1989)

Landscape ecology deals with the effects of the spatial configuration of mosaics on a wide variety of ecological phenomena (Wiens et al. 1993)

Landscape ecology is the study of the reciprocal effects of spatial pattern on ecological processes; it promotes the development of models and theories of spatial relationships, the collection of new types of data on spatial pattern and dynamics, and the examination of spatial scales rarely addressed in ecology (Pickett and Cadenasso 1995)

Also, to follow up on important terms: 

Landscapes consist of:

• patches (relatively homogeneous areas that differ from surroundings),
• corridors (linear areas differing from surroundings that connect patches),
• edges (boundaries between components),
• ecotones (transitional areas between two components), and
• matrix (most abundant and connected component).  (from Turner et al. 2001)

I can get you these references if you want to read more...

A View from the Future: Financing Large Scale Restoration

E.O. Wilson said that the “the next century will… be the era of restoration in ecology.” But what he didn’t mention was how and by whom that era of restoration would be financed and the criteria private capital would use for their investment decisions. This week I am attending a business conference on emerging carbon and environmental markets. Many new and well known financial and investment firms (along with the usual assortment of government and academic folks) are here hoping to legitimate these new commodities (carbon allowances and offsets, stream and wetland mitigation banking, species and biodiversity banking and trading, etc) and capitalize on their investments in these emerging markets. In my first response I asked whether social and political goals should be included in how we, as scientists, evaluate restoration success. I asked this question because “social success,” especially at the international level, is now a necessary metric in securing financing for large-scale restoration efforts. If we, as dreamers of the end of Wilson’s “great extinction spasm,” want to practice the scale of restoration necessary to accomplish this feat, we will only be able to mobilize the necessary private capital by paying attention to how our applied science intersects with people and institutions. For example, credits resulting from a restored forest that sequesters carbon that includes social goals is priced higher than a restoration project without social metrics. But maybe it is not our job as scientists to care about the human dimensions of restoration. Maybe that should be left up to finance capital.

Image: Ecosystem Restoration Associates Inc. - "Bringing Carbon Back to Life" (!)

Definitions for invasive species

Here were the definitions I came up with for some of the things we were discussing when talking about the difference between invasive and exotic and so forth. Please comment with your own definitions and thoughts!

* native - historically present (need to define timescale)
* exotic - introduced from another location, not historically present (again, define timescale)
* invasive - spreading in area or population
* detrimental - any of these things can start to cause a problem (locally-adapted species with intact species interactions are less likely to have detrimental impacts)
* human-transported - might be detrimental or not
* naturalized - exotics that don't seem to be detrimental
* invasive - commonly used to mean exotics that are detrimental