"Ecological restoration is inseparable from cultural and spiritual restoration, and is inseparable from the spiritual responsibilities of care-giving and world-renewal" -Robin Wall Kimmerer, Restoration & Reciprocity
“This is a world of wonder and wounds. Both are always with us. If we ignore the wonder, we lose our will to live—not just individually, but our collective will to continue our species. If we ignore the wounds, they fester into unspoken needs and inhumane policy.” -adrienne maree brown, Additional Recommendations for Us Right Now from a Future
I- Building Interdependence + resisting normativation
How do questions of critical restoration intersect with issues of disability justice and the medical industrial complex? In what ways does disability justice jostle with decolonization efforts? Often environmental justice movements lean on the specter of disability induced by environmental degradation and toxicity to motivate others to join the cause. However, this ableist framework reinforces logics of normativation used to degrade, erase, and control both bodies, the land, and relations between them. This move also precludes from the outset the notion that those in disabled positions have ways of knowing and being that can and should inform the foundation of any environmental justice project. Focus should not just be on how systems that devalue the land and divergent bodyminds produce cycles of disability but on the knowledge and values gained by those who have been forced to navigate these systems while disabled.
The activists, scholars, and writers in this portion of the reading list remind us of this and offer indispensable insights to critical restoration. For one, the politics of restoration resonate with those of cure: a return to an actual or imagined prior state of health and wellness should never be considered as universally appealing or unproblematically desirable. Further, as climate chaos intensifies, its effects disproportionately make life less tenable for certain bodyminds. What does a project of critical restoration necessitate in order to make life more liveable for all and ensure no one is left behind without falling into a charity model? The disability justice tenet of interdependence threaded throughout these pieces begins to answer this question and opens up space to explore crip futurities and disability justice as inextricable from all struggles to restore relations to the land and each other and to abolish that which estranged us.
Key currents: Access, politics of cure, cripistemologies, environmental ableism
II- Transitions thru Ecological Restoration
“Ecological restoration is the process by which we engage our labor towards the preservation and promotion of bio-cultural diversity.” -Movement Generation
“So we need to be aware of how these stories of maintenance traverse geographies and scales, and take care in mining them for ethnographic insight, morality tales, aesthetic inspiration, and design solutions.” (Mattern, 2018)
How can ecological restoration be made ‘critical’ in practice? Building on the call for abolition ecology to focus on [“access to”] “fresh air, clean water, sufficient land, amelioration of toxic chemicals, and beyond” (Heynen and Ybarra, 2020, p. 2), this discussion re-turns to some of the ways geographers have thought about ecological restoration as a socio-natural process and asks: How might “changing socio-cultural values and expectations, and [current] ecological, economic, political and legal contexts” (Smith, 2013, p. 357) pry open new opportunities and challenges for restoring nature (and) society? What emerges from the confluence of the “Principles of Environmental Justice” (1991) with tellings from past, present, and future ecological restoration-type projects (including, but not limited to, brownfield remediation, river, coastal & wetland restoration, regenerative agriculture, rangeland management, reforestation, etc.), and how might thinking these together assist us in practicing more “careful” political ecologies? What is involved in the political ecology of ecosystem restoration, and how might our insights be applied toward just recovery and just transitions… what might they ‘look’ like? And, how is this specifically applicable in settler colonial states?
In other words, how can abolition (political) ecologists simultaneously critique power while (also) offering social-ecological solutions for physically shaping just, abundant landscapes? How can we account for all bodies, whether human or nonhuman, in this process?
Key currents: Critical ecological restoration methodologies: theories + practices, the political ecology of ecological restoration, systems change & environmental justice movements
III- Imagining + Planning for Liberatory Futures
What possibilities arise among the connections between speculative thought and radical planning? How can we prepare, as Anna Tsing has said, to “explore the ruin that has become our collective home” (Tsing 2015)? How and where is this already happening? Critical Restoration presents the task of reckoning with the legacies of environmental destruction, survival, and hopeful world-building as they thread through intimate ecologies as well as eco-cultural landscapes. In thinking through the work that must be done, Imagining and Planning for Liberatory Futures seeks to explore work that holds a critical lens up to the speculative and imaginative practices of restoration work with an eye towards the infrastructures of abolitionist world-building.
This meander takes up notions of radical hope in the face of ongoing apocalypses, seeking to build in the ruins and root through the cracks as current structures decompose. In doing this, we will think and grow through a mix of academic, non-academic, textual, visual, and sonic materials. This begins with Black feminist speculative interventions and moves through geographic work around abundance, futurity, and infrastructure, concluding with Black, Indigenous, and queer eco-critiques. We also invite the participants of this meander to listen and especially contribute to a collaborative playlist to sonically engage with the discussion.
Key currents: Abolition Ecologies; Eco-Speculation; Social Ecology; Infrastructure; Radical Planning; Afrofuturism; Racial Ecologies; Queer Ecologies
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