Environmental Restoration

In the future, repairing the shredded ecosystems will be one of the important great works to accomplish. Young people close to me have earned environmental science degrees. When we speak of environmental restoration, the question always arises, restoration to what, and when? 

In the spot where I live in the great northwest rainforest, ice sheets carved out our valleys in the last ice age. When they melted, the floods sculpted the hills. Later, a nearby volcano, Mt Mazama, blew its top off, becoming Crater Lake, and deposited a ten foot deep layer of hard pan ash residue on the valley floor, creating a bowl of wetlands. 

The local native people did not live here, but rather managed it, for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. They built their lifestyle and spirituality around an edible flower bulb, the Camas, traveling through every year to harvest and process the plant. You have to dig them in the spring while they are flowering because the occasional white flower is poisonous. You can only eat the purple ones.

The Indians kept the valley clear of trees by regularly burning the forest underbrush back so the Camas could flourish. Big trees survived this process, and the meadows full of flowers stayed open.

Then an invasive species took over and farms and fences popped up all around. Dams, bridges, and interstate highways followed soon after. Where I live there existed a four hundred acre farm with strawberries, pears, and cherries. The now five minute drive to town for supplies took all day round trip by horse and buggy. Twenty years ago, the farm became many five acre plots, including the one where our house now stands. 

So, after a century of fire suppression by the settlers, the forest here is dense and 'fuel loaded', and the pressures of disease and global warming have set the stage for mega forest fires. The function of which will be to change out the dominant tree species to a more dry hot climate tolerant type of trees.

Now what? The only escape, as Terrence McKenna put it, is a forward escape. Sustainability would be a good start. But I aspire to a more beautiful vision. How about the flower child's garden planet? Garden planet Earth. We have already changed the face of our planet so radically there is no going back, only forward. Not factory farm earth, but an intensively cared for, ecosystem minded, garden planet managed on a grass roots level, by the smart monkeys for beauty, nurturance, diversity and yes, sustainability. At this point, a park won't do. We want the whole world to play in.