Ecosystem Restoration Quotes

When we reconnect with nature, we will be restore ourselves.

What we contemplate here is more than ecological restoration; it is the restoration of relationship between plants and people. Scientists have made a dent in understanding how to put ecosystems back together, but our experiments focus on soil pH and hydrology—matter, to the exclusion of spirit. We might look to the Thanksgiving Address for guidance on weaving the two. We are dreaming of a time when the land might give thanks for the people.

Let's put heterogeneity over homogeneity. We need to design materials that can restore or rewild biodiversity on the planet. When ecosystems are more diverse, they are better able to perform essential ecosystem services like carbon sequestration.

Permaculture land-use ethics invite us to protect intact ecosystems where they remain and, where ecosystems have been destroyed, to help restore them. Permaculture design also suggests that we take care of earth while taking care of people.

Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth… Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. 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. ... Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, 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.

Do we allow unlimited visitation, or do we restrict numbers to protect a delicate ecosystem? Do we heavily advertise the park, enticing paying visitors, generating needed money for Idaho's park department, or do we sacrifice financial benefits to better preserve natural ones? Do we log diseased trees, interfering with nature, or do we allow trees to rot and fall, possibly endangering lives? Do we inexpensively repair historic structures, or do we meticulously restore them? Do we maintain this park as closely as possible to the condition in which Idaho received it, or do we develop it for multiple uses; allow overnight visitors; permit all-terrain vehicles; provide paths for those unable to navigate unpaved trails?

Climate change is inviting us to forge a different kind of relationship, one that holds the planet and all of its places, ecosystems, and species sacred - not only in our conception and philosophy, but in our material relationship. Nothing less will deliver us from the environmental crisis that we face. Specifically, we need to turn our primary attention toward healing soil, water, and biodiversity, region by region and place by place... We must enact a civilization-wide unifying purpose: to restore beauty, health, and life to all that has suffered during the Ascent of Humanity.

It is hypocritical to exhort the Brazilians to conserve their rainforest after we have already destroyed the grassland ecosystem that occupied half the continent when we found it. A large-scale grassland restoration project would give us some moral authority when we seek conservation abroad. I must admit that I also like the idea because it would mean a better home for pronghorn, currently pushed by agriculture into marginal habitats-The high sagebrush deserts of the West. I would love to return the speedsters to their evolutionary home, the Floor of the Sky. Imagine a huge national reserve where anyone could see what caused Lewis and Clark to write with such enthusiasm in their journals-the sea of grass and flowers dotted with massive herds of bison, accompanied by the dainty speedsters and by great herds of elk. Grizzly bears and wolves would patrol the margins of the herds and coyotes would at last be reduced to their proper place. The song of the meadowlarks would pervade the prairie and near water the spring air would ring with the eerie tremolos of snipe.

To avert climate crises, it's important that humanity protects and restores natural carbon sinks, like forests and wetlands. But modern advancements in architecture, materials science, and construction give us the ability to make our modern cities into carbon sinks. We have the technologies, the knowledge, and the capabilities to make cities more valuable to the natural ecosystem than forests are.

Now the white shark has returned to one of America’s most iconic summertime destinations, and it’s challenging our perception of what the ocean is to us. For the first time in a long time, we have a hazy sense of what it means not to be the top predator. For the first time in a long time, we’ve had to consider what it means to be prey, even if we’re only mistaken as such. What do we do with those emotions? Do we celebrate our ecological success—the restoration of an apex predator to an ecosystem—or do we defend our hard-won territory?

Science has long informed the environmental movement. Now it must take the lead, because we are forced to enter an era of large-scale ecosystem engineering, and we have to know what the hell we’re doing. That sermon gets a chapter. Beavers are benevolent ecosystem engineers; so are soil-enriching earthworms; so were American Indians, who terraformed a continent; so are all of us who work on restoring natural infrastructure. A chapter on that subject leads straight to the book’s conclusion: our obligation to learn planet craft, to be as life-enhancing as any earthworm, in the big yard.

To have a life devoted to art, to spiritual practice, to service to one’s community and ecosystem, restores faith in our collective human enterprise. Work on the culture is work on the self. Art can serve activism by teaching an attentiveness to existence and by enriching the culture in which our roots are set down. Culture is both the crop we grow and the soil in which we grow it. And human culture is the most powerful evolutionary force on Earth these days…art is necessary because it gives us a new way of thinking and speaking, shows us what we are and what have been blind to, and gives us a new language and forms in which to see ourselves

As long as the wetland looks pretty and also attracts ducks from time to time, it is regarded as a complete success. An attractive appearance is fine and is of considerable concern in urban developments. It is the pretense that such wetlands also create rich habitats which is objectionable, when urban development is the primary cause of loss of diversity in a wide range of ecosystems around cities including wetlands. The one ecologically positive thing that most created wetlands do a reasonable job of is water treatment, because the limited range of plants likely to survive the semi-toxic soils and waters of newly created wetlands are invariably colonisers that will also use up a wide range of nutrients.

Our bodies are living ecosystems, and like the cycles of nature, we also ebb and flow, go backward and forward, contract and expand, and move through necessary phases of growth, death, and restoration. Contrary to what we might want to believe, healing is not a linear process but an ongoing spiral into subterranean spaces of darkness where we confront the unknown. Where we rest, regenerate, and eventually expand outward into bloom. We might resist the dark spaces inside us but the truth is, most of our healing and growth happens underground and under our skin. We need dark, protected spaces to let the most tender parts of ourselves form. Rest and retreat are just as necessary as the warmth and illumination of light.

Deep underground, microbes turn half a century's worth of city waste into methane. The gases and leachate are extracted through an extensive network of subterranean pipes and then used to power 22,000 nearby homes. While 150 million tons of garbage gradually decomposes unseen below the surface, above ground, the former dump reverts to meadows, woodland and saltwater marshes, providing a haven for wildlife and a massive park for the people of New York. This is Fresh Kills in the 2020s. In 2001, the infamous landfill received its last, and saddest, consignments - the charred debris of the World Trade Center. Since then, it has been transformed into a 2,315-acre public park. Three times bigger than Central Park, it is the largest new green public space created within New York City for over a century, a mixture of wildlife habitats, bike trails, sports fields, art exhibits and playgrounds. This is poisoned land: fifty years' worth of landfill has killed for ever one of the city's most productive wetland ecosystems. Restoration is impossible. Instead, a brand new ecosystem is emerging on top of the toxic garbage

We cannot casually accept the loss of oaks without also accepting the loss of thousands of other plants and animals that depend on them. Oak declines in the United Kingdom, for example, threaten the survival of some 2,300 other species (Mitchell et al. 2019). Fortunately, there is no reason why we should accept the loss of oaks as inevitable; there is no trick to restoring oak populations, and no shortage of places in which to restore them. If you were to add up the amount of land in various types of built landscapes that is not dedicated to agriculture—suburban developments, urban parks, golf courses, mine reclamation sites, and so forth—it would total 603 million acres, a full 33% of our lower 48 states. We have not targeted these places for conservation in the past, but that was back when our conservation model was based on the notion that humans and their tailings were here and nature was someplace else. That model of mutual exclusion has failed us dismally; there simply are not enough untrammeled places left to sustain the natural world that until now has sustained us. Our only option, then, is to find ways to coexist with other species. That’s right, we must construct ecosystems that contain all their functional parts right where humans abound.

In 1995, the gray wolf was reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after a seventy-year hiatus. Scientists expected an ecological ripple effect, but the size and scope of the trophic cascade took them by surprise.7 Wolves are predators that kill certain species of animals, but they indirectly give life to others. When the wolves reentered the ecological equation, it radically changed the behavioral patterns of other wildlife. As the wolves began killing coyotes, the rabbit and mouse populations increased, thereby attracting more hawks, weasels, foxes, and badgers. In the absence of predators, deer had overpopulated the park and overgrazed parts of Yellowstone. Their new traffic patterns, however, allowed the flora and fauna to regenerate. The berries on those regenerated shrubs caused a spike in the bear population. In six years’ time, the trees in overgrazed parts of the park had quintupled in height. Bare valleys were reforested with aspen, willow, and cottonwood trees. And as soon as that happened, songbirds started nesting in the trees. Then beavers started chewing them down. Beavers are ecosystem engineers, building dams that create natural habitats for otters, muskrats, and ducks, as well as fish, reptiles, and amphibians. One last ripple effect. The wolves even changed the behavior of rivers—they meandered less because of less soil erosion. The channels narrowed and pools formed as the regenerated forests stabilized the riverbanks. My point? We need wolves! When you take the wolf out of the equation, there are unintended consequences. In the absence of danger, a sheep remains a sheep. And the same is true of men. The way we play the man is by overcoming overwhelming obstacles, by meeting daunting challenges. We may fear the wolf, but we also crave it. It’s what we want. It’s what we need. Picture a cage fight between a sheep and a wolf. The sheep doesn’t stand a chance, right? Unless there is a Shepherd. And I wonder if that’s why we play it safe instead of playing the man—we don’t trust the Shepherd. Playing the man starts there! Ecologists recently coined a wonderful new word. Invented in 2011, rewilding has a multiplicity of meanings. It’s resisting the urge to control nature. It’s the restoration of wilderness. It’s the reintroduction of animals back into their natural habitat. It’s an ecological term, but rewilding has spiritual implications. As I look at the Gospels, rewilding seems to be a subplot. The Pharisees were so civilized—too civilized. Their religion was nothing more than a stage play. They were wolves in sheep’s clothing.8 But Jesus taught a very different brand of spirituality. “Foxes have dens and birds have nests,” said Jesus, “but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”9 So Jesus spent the better part of three years camping, fishing, and hiking with His disciples. It seems to me Jesus was rewilding them. Jesus didn’t just teach them how to be fishers of men. Jesus taught them how to play the man! That was my goal with the Year of Discipleship,

As we worked to rebuild and care for our environment, it was only natural that we also turned to each other with greater care and concern. We realised that the perpetuation of our species was about far more than saving ourselves from extreme weather. It was about being good stewards of the land and of one another. When we began the fight for the fate of humanity, we were thinking only about the species’ survival but, at some point, we understood that it was as much about the fate of our humanity. We emerged from the climate crisis as more mature members of the community of life, capable of not only restoring ecosystems but also of unfolding our dormant potentials of human strength and discernment. Humanity was only ever as doomed as it believed itself to be. Vanquishing that belief was our true legacy.

Rewilding, in general terms, is defined as “restoring and protecting natural processes.” Like any ecosystem, our bodies have an inherent design for optimal functioning.

Conservation biologists John Terborgh and Jim Estes consider loss of top predators from ecosystems worldwide due to persecution by humans a crisis as significant as climate change. They suggest that as with climate change, the problem of loss of biodiversity caused by loss of keystones will only worsen until we take measures to correct it. While restoring keystones will not solve all our problems, it will create more resilient systems, help restore and maintain biodiversity, and heal some of the damage we have done to this Earth.

EcoPlanet Bamboo’s framework of forest landscape restoration converts degraded land into fully functioning ecosystems while being economically viable over the long term.

What is needed are ecosystems that are designed to produce our food, fuel, animal feed, medicine and fibers, and ecosystems that can do so without the use of fossil fuel technology, those that can tolerate extremes of weather and potentially changing climates, and that can thrive without supplemental irrigation from vulnerable and increasingly expensive public utilities.

We are called upon to transcend the ceaseless cycles of destruction wrought by the folly of warfare, recognizing their desecration of the sanctity inherent in our shared creation, bestowed upon us by our divine Creator. Let us invest fervently in peace, fostering a robust and enlightened diplomacy; let us empower the burgeoning potential of smaller nations, guiding them towards greatness; let us reclaim dominion over the world that has been entrusted to us by our Creator. Redirecting our collective energies, let us dedicate ourselves unwaveringly to the cultivation of the mind through education, the restoration of the body through healthcare, and the preservation of Earth's delicate ecosystems. In this noble endeavor, we not only fortify the physical borders of our nation but also enrich the spiritual essence that defines our collective identity. Let's fund peace, not wars, for the sake of our race, for the sake of ourselves, and the sake of our innocent children”. -Diego Hernandez

We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own—indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty, and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.” —WANGARI MAATHAI

Why I buy organic whenever possible By definition, if a food is certified organic it is not genetically modified and was not sprayed by glyphosate. I don’t think this is the only reason to buy organic produce, however. I view it as an investment in my health, our family’s health, and the health of our planet. The chemicals being used in modern agriculture aren’t affecting only us; they’re affecting the health of our soil. If you don’t have healthy soil, you can’t have nutritious food. Human health starts in the dirt. We need to protect this precious commodity. When you spend your money, you are placing your vote in a way. You are empowering an industry. I, for one, choose to empower our organic farmers and regenerative agriculture. They are healers just as our doctors are. Only with them can we enrich our soil, increase biodiversity, and heal ecosystems large (our planet) and small (your gut). Let’s rally behind them and give them the support they deserve.

What if each American landowner made it a goal to convert half of his or her lawn to productive native plant communities? Even moderate success could collectively restore some semblance of ecosystem function to more than twenty million acres of what is now ecological wasteland. How big is twenty million acres? It’s bigger than the combined areas of the Everglades, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Canyonlands, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Badlands, Olympic, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, Denali, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. If we restore the ecosystem function of these twenty million acres, we can create this country’s largest park system. It gives me the shivers just to write about it. Because so much of this park will be created at our homes, I suggest we call it Homegrown National Park.

Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them.

We might debate the authenticity of the desired reference ecosystem, but she will decide. We’re not in control. What we are in control of is our relationship to the earth. Nature herself is a moving target, especially in an era of rapid climate change. Species composition may change, but relationship endures. It is the most authentic facet of the restoration. Here is where our most challenging and most rewarding work lies, in restoring a relationship of respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. And love.

Thanks to our new biotechnologies, we now have the power to change the evolutionary trajectories of species that seem destined to disappear, to rescue and revitalize ecosystems that are threatened by the ever-expanding human footprint or that are struggling to adapt to our planet’s changing climate. We could, for example, transfer the domestic ferret’s resistance to Sylvatic plague to black-footed ferrets that are facing extinction across their native range because of the introduced disease. Or we could transfer heat-tolerance between coral populations that are suffering as the oceans warm, or immunize white-footed mice against Lyme disease so that they can no longer pass the disease to humans. We may even eventually bring something back. Not a mammoth or a passenger pigeon, but instead some trait or function or aspect of an extinct species that can, in its re-establishment, restore some missing ecosystem function and allow other species to thrive in today’s altered world.

the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), a hypothesis with a large following in the field of economics, the environment worsens in tandem with economic growth until a certain income per person is reached. At that point, resources start flowing toward environmental protection, and the ecosystem is restored.

Stringent pollution control measures are imperative to mitigate the impact of industrial and agricultural pollutants on freshwater habitats. This requires the implementation and enforcement of environmental regulations, investment in wastewater treatment infrastructure, and the promotion of eco-friendly agricultural practices. In parallel, efforts to restore degraded ecosystems can aid in revitalizing habitats and providing a lifeline for endangered fish species.

Can these systems produce enough total calories, enough carbohydrates, proteins and oils to feed the human race? Over and over again this issue is brought up and, in my opinion, is somewhat of a red herring. “This all sounds good, but we’ve got to feed the world.” I agree with this sentiment and hereby turn the question back onto the asker and state that the current agricultural system is not feeding the world! Not only is annual agriculture not feeding the rapidly increasing population, it is destroying ecosystems worldwide while doing so. The current agricultural system is dependent on extraordinary labor or cheap fossil fuels or increasingly scarce mined inputs in order to not feed the world. It contributes to the greenhouse effect and the inequitable distribution of wealth worldwide while still not feeding the world.

This is what wolves do," Joe said, his voice calm, a betrayal of what he felt. "I'm not saying they shouldn't be here, but this is what they do. They're wolves. I know it sounds real nice to say they're magical and beautiful and they balance nature and restore an ecosystem - and it's true, they do that. But this is how they do it. They go after the weakest first. When the mother stays back, the wolves open a hole in her belly and pull out her entrails. Then they wait until she doesn't have the strength to protect herself, then they'll move in and tear her throat out.

Con-Text is the centuries-old city of Islam, a great and sprawling city consisting of various edifices erected for the various purposes of living by Muslims of bygone and present times, made in different forms and out of different materials, in various states of preservation, renovation and disrepair, of wide-ranging functions with different degrees of use and dis-use, with quarters and neighbourhoods inhabited by diverse peoples doing different things—all of which are nonetheless component elements in a part of what is ultimately, for all its citizens, the same shared environment and ecosystem of living and identification. The citizen is the one who lives in a city with which he identifies and affiliates himself—even if the specific constitution of his particular identification with the city may differ from that of another fellow-citizen, and even as what he thinks is good or bad about the city (what he thinks should be knocked down or restored, what should serve as a model for further construction, and what he thinks should be abandoned) might differ from that of a fellow-citizen. As the citizen moves about the city, its diverse component elements invoke and provoke in him different responses of orientation, narration and attachment; yet, he recognizes these edifices—even the ones he does not like—as edifices of this city. And even if some edifices are at some point destroyed, they remain in the memory (until such time as they are forgotten) as edifices of this city, as a part and parcel of its history and of the meanings that its name evokes.

...As Joe walked back to them, he heard the cow elk gurgle and settle into the grass on top of her calf. "This is what wolves do," Joe said, his voice calm, a betrayal of what he felt. "I'm not saying they shouldn't be here, but this is what they do. They're wolves. I know it sounds real nice to say they're magical and beautiful and they balance nature and restore an ecosystem--and it's true, they do that. But this is how they do it. They go after the weakest first. When the mother stays back, the wolves open a hole in her belly and pull out her entrails. Then they wait until she doesn't have the strength to protect herself, then they'll move in and tear her throat out.

Like other mindful practices, 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.

In the last chapter, I try to imagine a utopian social network that could somehow hold all of this. I use the lens of the human bodily need for spatial and temporal context to understand the violence of “context collapse” online and propose a kind of “context collection” in its place. Understanding that meaningful ideas require incubation time and space, I look both to noncommercial decentralized networks and the continued importance of private communication and in-person meetings. I suggest that we withdraw our attention and use it instead to restore the biological and cultural ecosystems where we forge meaningful identities, both individual and collective.

In a paper evaluating the case for trophic cascades in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, Peterson, Vucetich, and Douglas Smith, who trained on Isle Royale and now is a project leader for the Wolf Restoration Project at Yellowstone, argue that ecosystems are too complex to trace neat relationships, particularly in Yellowstone where grizzly bears, black bears, cougars, and wolves eat bison, deer, and elk. They also point out that, when you follow the threads of prey fluctuations, you often find at the source not wild-animal predators but human beings.

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