Missions Resources - Bibliography
The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature
Authors: William Jordan
ISBN: 0520233204
Publisher: University of California Press
Number of pages: 256
Type of cover: Hard Cover
Summary:
The Fire Farmer Meditates
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see this book on amazon.ca
reviewed by Paul Grant
Bill Jordan is a scientist, but he's also a mature human being. It's in the latter capacity that he is a stronger writer. The Sunflower Forest is a defense of restoration as a discipline within the realm of human ecological agency. But what starts as a tiresome harangue within a narrow field of eco-philosophy soon becomes a hopeful, reasoned and beautifully crafted essay on humans' role in the earth's future.
If he seems a little forceful, it's because Jordan is defensive in the face of what he considers an irrational obsession in green circles with ecological purity. His background is in tallgrass prairie restoration, the most mature area of restoration science. Seventy years of prairie restoration has allowed scientists to refine (by trial and error) the use of fire as a tool. Restorationists burn prairies, clearing space for new growth, returning key nutrients to the soil, and perhaps most importantly, keeping forest out. Grasses recover from a burning within a few weeks, but most trees are killed off by the fires. Tallgrass prairies are delicate, with greater biodiversity than any other temperate ecosystems. Left alone, they will disappear and become forest within a few short years.
For many years, prairie ecologists tried to emulate lightning in triggering the seasonal burnings, lightning being the only "natural" source of heat sufficient for igniting acres of dead grasses. With time ecologists learned from their Native American neighbors in the great plains that the prairie fires were manmade, introduced by the natives to clear the forests for hunting purposes. Deer, antelope and bison congregate in the open areas, where they're easier to kill. In other words, prairie restoration is not about restoring a carbon-copy of an "untouched" wilderness. In fact, wilderness itself is a problematic concept, with racist overtones. (The wilderness concept does not include Native economic activity in calculations of the human footprint on ecosystems; Natives in this reckoning belong more properly with animals.)
The point: No place on earth is untouched, he argues, and segregating human communities from nature is an unsustainable proposition. Society cannot learn to live with nature by locking it away, because humans are in the world, not categorically other.
The ecological movement has been co-opted by the nature-as-sacred camp represented by Earth First!, Wilderness Society, and other groups, for whom the only good human footprint is a dead one. This cult of purity drains ecological resources away from restoration, and puts an unnecessary cultural wall between the environmental movement and the most important environmentalists: farmers, ranchers, and others who immediately live off the land. Any one living on the edges of civilization can name instances of obnoxious urbane activists assuming anti-ecological motives in country-dwelling folk; after a few ignorant and classist statements about the local ranchers, some of whom tend several-hundred year old pastures, these activists head back to the coastal cities and proclaim to their peers the obstacle posed by rural culture (code for the conservative Evangelical or Mormon faithful) to truely enlightened ecological harmony.
Bill Jordan says restoration is the only approach to ecological stewardship that will last in the long run, which is the only run that counts. Restoration assumes a heavy human hand, exactly something that rubs the nature-as-sacred camp the wrong way. Jordan proposes a metaphor for guiding ecology: community. One reason both "liberal" and "conservative" politicians and activists scorn restoration ecology is because we hate community. We like having friends, but true community is very costly, an observation in line with scripture. True community goes against sinful nature, and requires society's full efforts to avoid disintegration.
Jordan lists four stages of a human's community involvement in life. These four struck me as very important for understanding life, but less important for building ecological principles:
1. I am not God. Sometime in its first year of life, an infant realizes he or she is not the center of the universe. The reason the adults around him tend to his every need is not because the baby is so worthy, but because the baby is helpless. Thus the first communal discovery we make in life is that we need other people, whether we like them or not. We discover that the world wasn't created exclusively to meet our desires. In fact, we are objects in someone else's vision. As obvious as it seems, some people, and we can all name a few, never recover from the trauma of not being the center of the universe. These people either spend their lives trying to put themselves back in charge, or fooling themselves. Thomas Finger has written on narcissism in his book Self, Earth and Society: Alienation and Trinitarian Transformation. Finger points out that there's no solid boundary between the Narcissism of a newborn, and run-of-the-mill American rugged individualism; while the two are not identical, they verge toward each other in the extreme edges. In other words, individualism is a cultural value, but it is also a value that can interfere with true community.
2. Get a Job. A child grows up, and eventually reaches a point of contribution to society. Whether we're making something, as a carpenter or a farmer, or whether we're merely paying for our own room and board and taxes, becoming materially productive is crucial for community. However, if contributing to society is necessary for community, it is not sufficient. In fact, participation in the business world does not build community - it builds legal contracts. At-will employment is not community; it is a business efficiency. Legal contracts don't actually make community, they prevent chaos.
3. Giving Gifts. The difference between gifts and payment is the beginning of community. Gifts are given freely, with no legal obligation to return a gift in kind. Gift-giving is an emotional, spiritual, communal act. But while gifts demand no legal return, they do indeed create a real debt: a moral, emotional bind of the recipient to the giver. The other crucial difference between gifts and wages is the tacit agreement between the gift-exchanging parties not to count the legal value of the gift. In theory, a child's gift to her mother of a painted rock is equal to a diamond ring or a hand-made gourmet dinner.
4. Receiving Gifts. This one surprised me. How is receiving a greater communal than giving? It's a simple answer that is changing my life: receiving a gift binds us to someone else, while giving a gift only binds others to us. As long as we only give and never receive, no one has any claim on us and we retain absolute control over the relationship. In this sense, "receiving" Christ's gift of salvation is the greatest communal step in the world, because there is nothing, categorically nothing, we can do to end that debt. Our democratic, egalitarian notions notwithstanding, there is a real hierarchy in the universe: our lives are simply not as valuable as Jesus' was. So when he gave away his life for us, we received a gift which is impossible to count, and impossible to pay off.
The Sunflower Forest is a science book that taught me more about community than many books ostensibly about community. It's also an insightful, if a little "out there" treatise on restoration ecology. This would be a great book to check out from the library, but not necessarily to buy. The lessons are profound, but the policy recommendations - a debate within a narrow field of eco-philosophers - will date very quickly.
Paul Grant is a staff writer for urbana.org
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