Image by Stuck in Plastic
Summary
This episode is the second in a 3-part series. Before listening to this one, you may want to catch up with FE3.1 - Nature, by Design? Part 1: Taking the Neo-Eoscenic Route
As we continue to discuss the practice of ecological restoration, an important question emerges: is wilderness itself an illusion? We all have a picture of wilderness in our minds, but how did that image come to be? Join us for a tale of two simulacra.
Ready for part 3? Listen here
Hear also: Fortress Conservation by Outside/In
Show Notes
This episode features Eric Higgs and Oliver Kellhammer.
Music in this episode was provided by Scott Gailey, C. Diab, Hidden Sky, and Sunfish Moon Light.
This episode was produced by Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski
Special thanks to Hannah Roessler, Sadie Couture, Todd Howard, Brea Segger, Ilana Fonariov, Bastian Phelan, and Maya Gauvin, Nicole Jahraus, and Jody Baker.
This episode includes audio recorded by soundmary, klangfabrik, TasmanianPower, kasa90, juskiddink, RadioGoldProductions, pimstoltz, and egomassive, protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses, and accessed through the Freesound Project.
A lot of research goes into each episode of Future Ecologies, including academic literature and great journalism from a variety of media outlets, and we like to cite our sources:
Baker, J. (2002). Production and Consumption of Wilderness in Algonquin Park. Space and Culture, (5) 3, pp. 198-210.
Cronon, W. (ed.) (1995). Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., pp, 69-90.
Cypher, J., & E. Higgs. (1997). Colonizing the Imagination: Disney's Wilderness Lodge. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 8:4, 107-130.
Cypher, J. (1995). The real and the fake: imagineering nature and wilderness at Disney's Wilderness Lodge (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Alberta, Edmonton.
Higgs, E. (2003). Nature by Design: People, Natural Process, and Ecological Restoration. MIT Press.
Sandilands, C. (2002). “Between the Local and the Global: Clayoquot Sound and Simulacral Politics” in Warren Magnusson and Karena Shaw (ed.), A Political Space: Reading the Global Through Clayoquot Sound (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 139-167. [Another take on the concept of the simulacrum with respect to ecology, by another friend of the show: Catriona Sandilands]
You can subscribe to and download Future Ecologies wherever you find podcasts - please share, rate, and review us. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and iNaturalist.
If you like what we do, and you want to help keep it ad-free, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Pay-what-you-can (as little as $1/month) to get access to bonus monthly mini-episodes, stickers, patches, a community Discord chat server, and more. This season, we’re taking a tour of some of our Seaweed Sojourners, with the help of Josie Iselin.
Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil- Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
Introduction Voiceover 00:04
You're listening to season three of Future Ecologies.
Adam Huggins 00:12
Hi, folks. This is Adam. And this is the second episode of our series, “Nature, by Design?” which is kicking off our third season. If you haven't listened to part one, then I suggest you go back and do that first, because this is very much a continuation of a conversation. Quick recap: in part one, I introduced Mendel to two mentors of mine, Eric Higgs and Oliver Kellhammer, and their ideas about designing with nature. That episode focused on some of Oliver's work. So this time around, we're going to pivot over to Eric. This is “Nature, by Design? Part Two: The Path to the Wilderness Lodge.”
[Ominous music, like creaking machinery]
Adam Huggins 01:06
And we're back.
Mendel Skulski 01:07
It's as if we never left.
[Long pause broken by both hosts snorting with laugher]
Adam Huggins 01:16
So, when we left off with Eric, he was telling us about his involvement in helping to craft SER's definition of restoration—
Eric Higgs 01:23
Which is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that's been degraded, damaged, or destroyed.
Mendel Skulski 01:31
SER, one more time?
Adam Huggins 01:32
Society for Ecological Restoration.
Mendel Skulski 01:34
Nice.
Adam Huggins 01:35
And the definition has held up pretty well over time. But here's the thing. Eric is no longer sure that it's the best definition for going forward.
Eric Higgs 01:44
Environmental change has driven a lot of turbulence and restoration too. I mean, back in the good old days, and I'm going to say, I don't know, whatever we mean by "good old days," I say that tongue in cheek, but back in, say, the 1990s, the late 1990s, early 2000s, when we had what I'd call sort of the peak of classical restoration, most restoration ecologists believed that the best target was an historical reference ecosystem. And that was it. You would design for what the system was like pre-degradation. But when you're under conditions of rapid environmental change, climate change, lots of shifts and the bio-geo-chemical balances, it's, it's not realistic, right? So you have to shift how you think about your targets.
Adam Huggins 02:30
And swirling in and around this idea of restoration, there's also a bewildering range of terms and practices.
Eric Higgs 02:38
And then there's, you know, ecological engineering, and there's green infrastructure projects and reclamation, rehabilitation, revegetation, remediation—yeah, there's a whole bunch of things which are all, in some ways, you know, we can argue about the extent to which they are, but they're all about trying to reclaim a relationship that's missing. Something that's gone wrong.
[Low sound of whistling wind begins]
And of course, we live in this pretty urbanizing and, you know, Anthropocenic world that we need to come to terms with, and we're coming to terms with in lots of creative ways. That's why I'm not sure that the old restoration definition is apt for where we need to go. So that's, anyway, that's all that. I spoke of the positive moves around the turbulence, but there's, I think there's some, maybe some moves that are, maybe not heading in quite the right direction. And I think I've been vocal in the last couple of years about a tendency to orthodoxy in restoration. So saying, you know, ecological restoration, you know, must be, you know, within a very particular kind of box around how it looks. Very determinate historical targets, you know, the term Indigenous reference ecosystems is used. That you have a kind of tendency towards a very high level idea of restoration that many projects can never reach. And so there's a kind of austerity about how restoration's defined that may not be going in exactly the right direction to deal with all this exuberance around people trying to come to terms with what works.
Mendel Skulski 04:18
Yeah, I really resonate with that word "exuberant." I think you can probably tell.
Adam Huggins 04:23
You've been pretty exuberant this whole conversation.
Mendel Skulski 04:25
[Chuckles] Yeah.
Adam Huggins 04:26
I should clarify right now that even though Eric helped craft SER's definition, he's also in many ways a bit of a maverick in the field. And, and I think that's partly due to how he got into restoration in the first place. So, a little bit of memory lane. Like many Canadians, Eric grew up in a pretty industrial part of suburban Ontario.
[Background music begins]
Eric Higgs 04:53
My inspiration came when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. I had taken a course, a field course, with Robert Dorney, who was a professor of ecology and environmental planning. And he was a, he has this interesting lineage. His work went back to Aldo Leopold. He studied at the University of Wisconsin and took lectures from Aldo Leopold back in the late '40s, and then did all sorts of fascinating work and emerged as a, as one of Canada's early environmental consultants and environmental planners, trained as an ecologist. And he was just, he was an inveterate tinkerer. So he liked to mess with things, and when he saw all these subdivisions being developed and forests being scraped away, he thought, "well, I should be salvaging those because I can... maybe there's a way I can actually begin to restore and create these patches of biodiversity." And this was in the '70s, so it's pretty early. I remember going on a field trip as an undergraduate student, and walking from the university over to this subdivision, and wondering what the heck I was doing. Walking over to a subdivision and in the midst of this sort of, you know, classic 1970s subdivision was a suburban two story house and in front, like it was, you know, all the gardens as we walked up the street were mown grass and maybe a birch tree and a few flowers around it. And as you started to come into view was this wild front yard. And it was a miniature ecosystem that had, I don't know, 160, 170 species of vascular plants. And he had done all sorts of crazy things with it. So, on one side, he dug down and put in all this drainage gravel and created this very dry, sandy system. And he had opuntia, a prickly pear cactus, growing which was, you know, historically known in Waterloo County. And then on the other side, he, he put in a clay liner and sphagnum and then routed all of his eavestroughs, all the water drainage, into that one section, and created a bog, and he had lots of stuff. So in this 100th of an acre, tiny little horseshoe shaped front garden was this explosion of biodiversity. And it was all native plants from the region, and several which were on the then Canadian endangered species list. So, I just thought that was amazing. And so I was being steeped as a student in the mid 1970s, being steeped in this doom and gloom about degradation. And here was somebody making a tangible difference in the most unlikely place, to me, right? A suburban front yard. So the first thing I did was I took this idea home to my parents in Brantford, Ontario. And I convinced them, I don't know why they let me do it, but I, we dug up their front yard and planted a garden. So that was sort of my earliest inspiration.
Adam Huggins 07:56
So right from the start, Eric could see the value of regenerative human activity, that wasn't necessarily what you would consider classical restoration, right? And Robert Dorney's house kind of epitomizes that. It's like, that was never what that particular piece of land was ever like. But it contains all these elements of the natural ecology around it, this really rich place.
Mendel Skulski 08:18
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I presume that it's deeply pleasurable too, right? To live in that, to make that.
Adam Huggins 08:25
Yeah. So that's part of the reason why Eric has such a broad definition of restoration. To encapsulate all of that exuberance.
Mendel Skulski 08:33
[Chuckles] Yeah.
Adam Huggins 08:34
But there's always a risk that if you make that big tent, like, too big, you'll start to get these projects that actually don't result in ecologies that have integrity. Or that maybe you actually will cause damage to, like, existing intact ecologies in the process of trying to create something. Like, for example, with a plantation of eucalyptus trees in California. Like, it's going to sequester carbon, and it's going to restore a forest canopy, but would it actually create habitat for native species? Would it maybe actually create issues for surrounding ecosystems? And it would it even be resilient in the long run, right?
[Throughout, music has been fading into something softer, less playful]
Mendel Skulski 09:15
Right.
Adam Huggins 09:16
Is that restoration?
Mendel Skulski 09:17
To fulfill certain goals, you could easily be blindered to some pretty major issues when you're taking things on an ecosystem level, right?
Adam Huggins 09:25
Yeah, maybe that's the issue. Like, being like a little bit too, like, narrowly focused on a specific kind of goal. And there's like, there's always going to be failure in restoration. And that's how we learn. So it's like, I don't think that's a danger so much as like, the danger is that if we aren't explicit about our goals and our motivations, then it's possible that we can get sidetracked and maybe become intoxicated with this power that we have that we can intervene in ecosystems and even, like, design them, right?
Mendel Skulski 09:58
[Laughs] Yeah. As a...
Adam Huggins 10:00
You're a designer.
Mendel Skulski 10:01
I'm a recovering designer.
Adam Huggins 10:04
[Laughs]
Mendel Skulski 10:05
Yeah, I mean, the risk in design is losing sight of that humility, right? Taking on that hubris of even possibly being able to preconceive all of the edge cases and potential outcomes for what you're doing, right? Like, it's really an endeavor in playing God.
[Music swells and comes to a close then begins again as the theme music]
Adam Huggins 10:36
It's been said that God made man in his own image. Others say that humans made God in their own image. Today, we're going to explore the images that we impose on the natural world, and whether they derive from nature at all.
Introduction Voiceover 10:53
Broadcasting from the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the W̱SÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples – This is Future Ecologies.
[Flourish of theme music, which plays out then ends]
Adam Huggins 11:31
All right, so this series, “Nature, by Design?” takes its name from a book that Eric wrote back in 2006. In the introduction, Eric weaves together a tale of two wildernesses, and we're going to take a look at both of them.
[Scratchy old-timey recording sounds begin]
Mendel Skulski 11:45
Up first... what's up first?
[Old-timey recording noises continue; a train whistle sounds and drums and classic Hollywood-y fanfare come in]
Adam Huggins 11:53
The first is Jasper National Park, which is in the northern Canadian Rockies.
Old timey, glitzy announcer voice 11:57
In the early part of this century, the Dominion set aside a great region of this mountain country as a park, largest of all the national parks in Canada.
[Pastoral orchestral music]
Adam Huggins 12:07
And for many people, this is the kind of landscape they see when they picture wilderness, right? Like, archetypical wilderness.
Old timey, glitzy announcer voice 12:15
From the fresh charm of a meadow flower, to the deep wonder of a green valley and the white splendor of a distant peak.
Adam Huggins 12:22
Big, iconic mountain ranges, glacier fed lakes, grizzly bears, moose and elk.
Old timey, glitzy announcer voice 12:28
Perhaps a deer, a flock of mountain sheep, or even a friendly black bear or a moose by the roadside.
Adam Huggins 12:35
And endless forests.
Mendel Skulski 12:37
Yeah, it's like the Yosemite of Canada. It's the image of pristine wilderness.
Adam Huggins 12:43
Exactly.
Old timey, glitzy announcer voice 12:44
From the white glaciers to the rocky pinnacles, from the silent valleys of the back country to the slopes and meadows near the village, all the beauty and majesty of the mountains can be yours for the taking.
[Final flourish of old Hollywood-style music]
Mendel Skulski 13:04
Okay, so what's the other ecosystem?
[Train whistle sounding in the background]
Adam Huggins 13:06
The other ecosystem is Disney's Wilderness Lodge in Orlando, Florida.
Mendel Skulski 13:13
Ha! Wait, really? Really!? [Laughs]
Disney Voiceover 13:19
Just a short ride across the water from Magic Kingdom Park, discover a timeless escape steeped in the majesty of America's Great Northwest.
Mendel Skulski 13:28
[Between clenched teeth] Oh my god...
Disney Voiceover 13:29
[Sparkly Disney horns] Inspired by turn of the century lodgings from the National Parks, it's Disney's Wilderness Lodge, a deluxe resort destination. As your stay begins, towering totem poles and a roaring fireplace welcome you to kick back and relax. All while the sparkling backdrop of Bay Lake takes your breath away.
Mendel Skulski 13:49
[Uncomfortable] Ohhh.
Disney Voiceover 13:52
And when the time comes to cool off, follow the bubbling spring as it flows into a waterfall and plunges into Silver Creek Springs Pool. Or... [Voice and orchestral Disney music fade under Mendel talking]
Mendel Skulski 14:03
Oh, my god. That's on another level. Can you hear me blinking?
Adam Huggins 14:13
[Laughing]
Disney Voiceover 14:13
[Fading back in] ...Disney's Wilderness Lodge awaits your arrival.
Mendel Skulski 14:17
That's [bleep]ed. Um... okay. That's a really funny conception of wilderness. It's a five star, all-inclusive wilderness resort. That's... [laughing] I'm sorry Disney, don't sue us. Yeah, I mean, like, as someone who's like, under no illusions that basically any of the outdoor experiences I have are not, you know, in some way, curated, or at least created by human intervention at some point in time. That's just on another level.
[Rhythmic music begins]
Eric Higgs 14:53
Oh my goodness. So I remember I, so I had to go on a day visit and stay in a crappy motor lodge hotel in Orlando. But just visiting it was surreal. As you walk up and you. Walking up and seeing these, I think they were sequoias. And they were not very happy sequoias because they were growing in an ecosystem that was very un-sequoia-friendly. And then there was this sort of concierge area that you get with a lot of big hotels, you know, where the vehicles pull in, and there's a covered area, and you have the staff from the hotel that are greeting guests, and helping them with their luggage and so on. But they were dressed up in kind of ranger uniforms, Park Ranger uniforms. And so I'm thinking, "Oh, well, this is just ridiculous.” You know, “this is sort of over the top and kind of silly." And I wanted to. It was easy for me to suspend belief. You walk in. It was sort of hot and humid in Orlando. So, you know, you're in this sort of tropical or semi-tropical environment. And I'm not used to that, being Canadian. And sort of super hot. And then these sliding glass doors parted, and you walked inside to this dry, cool, air-conditioned environment, and the lobby is breathtaking because it goes up eight stories, it's a large atrium. It's all designed to reflect a kind of iconic National Park Lodge. So big timbers, a massive fireplace, and all of this. So this is all playing on one's imagination, right, and a sense of what it is that is meaningful around this experience. So again, I'm suspending judgment, because I need to be the critic. I need to be cynical in a sense about this. But we spent several hours there. And it was only when we went, left the hotel again and walked down to—there's a lake right adjacent to the hotel. And we walked down to the lake, the shore of the lake. It's now evening and the sun has set. And we looked back, turned over, looked back toward the hotel, and the illusion began to become more prominent for me in that I was starting to register it. It was starting to become normal for me that this was, in fact, this grand illusion of being a wilderness area. [Laughs] It was—I remember it being just almost like an experience, you know, sort of a sensation of vertigo, where I was being fooled and I knew I was being fooled, and yet somehow it was coming real for me. It was becoming meaningful in a different way.
[Music continues, louder, and then cuts out]
Mendel Skulski 17:49
Yeah, everything about that is just…uncanny.
Adam Huggins 17:54
And for the big reveal—it just so happens that I, too, have been to the Wilderness Lodge.
Eric Higgs 18:00
You mentioned that. You were there as a kid, right?
Mendel Skulski 18:03
You're kidding me.
Adam Huggins 18:04
No. [Both hosts laugh]
Mendel Skulski 18:07
My god. Who are you?
Adam Huggins 18:09
Yeah, well, there's a lot of things that you don't know about me, Mendel.
Mendel Skulski 18:12
It really is a small world after all.
Adam Huggins 18:16
Ughh.... [laughter] oh god. So, when I was young, my dad actually worked for Walt Disney as an Imagineer.
Mendel Skulski 18:22
Wow.
Adam Huggins 18:23
And so I spent an obscene amount of time at Disney attractions when I was a kid. And the Wilderness Lodge is exactly as Eric describes it. It's in the middle of a Florida swamp. And they've planted giant sequoias, actually kind of like Oliver. [Laughs]
Mendel Skulski 18:38
Exactly like Oliver.
Adam Huggins 18:39
Yeah. And they even built a geyser, which conveniently goes off every hour on the hour.
Mendel Skulski 18:45
You're [bleep]ing with me.
Adam Huggins 18:46
No. And the lodge is, the story is it's built on a spring, which runs through this kind of like rocky creek channel with like, painted concrete, into a pool.
Mendel Skulski 18:57
Wait. Wait wait wait wait wait. Back up to the geyser. [Laughter] What geyser. What is powering the geyser.
Adam Huggins 19:01
There's a story about the geyser. Apparently it took the technicians a really long time to figure out how to make a naturalistic looking geyser.
Mendel Skulski 19:09
Yeah, that's a ton of pressure.
[Geyser whooshing noises]
Eric Higgs 19:19
Yeah, the fire rock geyser. Apparently they hired an engineering firm to design a geyser because one of—when they did their interviews and their focus groups and their visits, they did exhaustive research on what you need to do to create a national park sensation. And you had to have a geyser. Because Old Faithful was the number one icon of wilderness, right? And so they had to have a geyser, and I don't know the substance of the story, but, it has to be apocryphal if nothing else. But, apparently the first company that was hired, you know, you don't just go into the Yellow Pages and pick out "geyser design company," so you know, it was like, I don't know. They hired an engineering firm. And they sort of, the story goes that Michael Eisner, who was CEO of Disney, you know, proudly pushed the button ceremonially to turn on the geyser, and it looked like a garden hose that shot 100 feet in the air. Just was not very convincing. So they were fired.
Eric Higgs 19:46
It's gonna be too expensive for us to fact check all of this. But yeah.
Eric Higgs 20:16
Yeah yeah! I don't know this truth of the story, but it's a good one anyway. And so they had to bring in another company that did very sophisticated hydraulic engineering to figure out how to get the mist in this sort of super saturated, humid environment. Because the magic of Old Faithful, in many ways, is the heat against that dry air, right? The water vapor against the dry air, but that doesn't happen in Florida. So how do you do it? So they had to do it with you know, robotics and fancy irrigation systems and special nozzles and jets and timing, and of course, it's... it runs on clockwork, because it is clockwork.
Adam Huggins 20:53
And when you go inside, there's these massive totem poles.
Mendel Skulski 20:58
Rough.
Adam Huggins 20:59
And this fireplace that actually has the stratigraphy of the Grand Canyon etched into it up, like, floor after floor of the building. So it really does feel uncanny. Like you're in Yellowstone and in the Sierra Nevadas and, like, in Haida Gwaii, all at the same time.
Mendel Skulski 21:15
But you're really in a swamp in Florida.
Adam Huggins 21:18
Yeah.
Eric Higgs 21:18
And it's bricolage, too, in the finest sense of that term, of being able to pull all these different elements and glue them together in ways that are kind of inconsistent if you think about them rationally. But as an impression, they start to make sense.
Adam Huggins 21:30
And because it's Disney, and this is America, it's all wrapped up in this kind of frontier nostalgia. Sort of like a G-rated version of like, intrepid pioneers and noble savages and manifest destiny.
Mendel Skulski 21:47
People just want the fantasy, right?
Adam Huggins 21:48
Yeah, the fantasy sells. And Eric uses this funny word for the Wilderness Lodge. He calls it a simulacrum.
Eric Higgs 21:57
A simulacrum.
Mendel Skulski 21:59
A simulacrum?
Eric Higgs 22:00
Yes. Right. A reproduction with no true original.
[Music begins, curiously]
Mendel Skulski 22:13
So, a simulacrum is like a recreation of something that never even existed in the first place.
Adam Huggins 22:21
Exactly. And in this one word with this, like, very extreme example we're talking about, Eric encapsulates a lot of my greatest fears when it comes to ecological restoration.
Eric Higgs 22:32
Because, does it have a true original? Probably not, but it's been reproduced a lot.
Mendel Skulski 22:37
Like you're worried that in trying to help an ecosystem recover, with the best intentions, that you're coming at that with some kind of preconception of what that recovery looks like. And you might be basing that idea off of this Disney-fied understanding of the past, or how ecosystems even looked in the first place?
Adam Huggins 23:03
Or if your motivations are skewed.
Mendel Skulski 23:04
Then you might end up creating... What did you call it? A freak-o-system.
Adam Huggins 23:12
Yeah, Eric's daughter Lyra coined the phrase freak-o-system. So, shout out to Lyra.
Mendel Skulski 23:17
Shout out, Lyra. So you might create a kind of freak-o-system that is sort of in its own little bubble out of time, and it doesn't resemble any past or present reference ecosystem. And it may or may not be resilient to change in the future.
Adam Huggins 23:35
Yeah. And, like, that's exactly what the Wilderness Lodge is, right? It's like, it's somebody's idea of quote-unquote "wilderness," but like, trapped in amber. Or, in this case, like, painted concrete, right?
Mendel Skulski 23:46
Mm.
Adam Huggins 23:47
And, you know, a lot of people visit the Wilderness Lodge every year. Probably just as many as most national parks. So when Eric and his co-author Jennifer Cypher wrote about the Wilderness Lodge originally, they were worried about people learning about nature through Disney and through a contrived experience, like this wilderness themed hotel, as opposed to through direct experience with nature. And they called this “Colonizing the Imagination.”
Eric Higgs 24:13
Yeah, that was the title of an article that we wrote, called “Colonizing the Imagination.” And that was the process by which we presumed led to this view that we were going to learn about nature through artifice and not the other way around. And so our worry back in the '90s. It seems kind of naive, maybe, now, but, we're going to get people referring to the wild through a contrived experience, through a built experience, more than through an authentic experience.
Mendel Skulski 24:42
Yeah, I think that's a totally valid concern. Although, I mean, the cat is kind of out of the bag at this point, right? Like, when most people think about sharks, they think, Jaws.
Adam Huggins 24:54
Or baby shark.
Mendel Skulski 24:56
That's not even a relevant reference anymore.
Adam Huggins 24:58
[Laughs] Is it not?
Mendel Skulski 24:59
No.
Adam Huggins 25:02
[bleep]
Mendel Skulski 25:02
[Laughing] No, those kids are grown, man! There's, there's just so much layered popular culture and interpretations of interpretations of interpretations of nature. How many of us, really, can have a direct experience at this point?
Adam Huggins 25:17
Right. And like you said previously, like, what is a direct experience with nature?
Mendel Skulski 25:24
Mm.
Adam Huggins 25:24
In a world where humans have transformed just about every aspect of the natural world?
Mendel Skulski 25:30
Yeah, what is the real thing that we should, that we're being told we want at this point?
Adam Huggins 25:35
And this is why Eric juxtaposed the Wilderness Lodge with his experiences doing research in Jasper. Because the closer he looked in Jasper, the more he realized that there's nothing pristine about even this national park in the Canadian Rockies. It has railroads and highway cut through it.
[Old Hollywood music kicks in]
Old timey, glitzy announcer voice 25:56
The meeting place of the fir brigade has become the meeting place of transcontinental train, the village of Jasper: goal of visitors from all over the world.
Adam Huggins 26:09
And the bottom lands have been farmed and logged, and fire was suppressed for most of the last century. And the previous Indigenous residents have been largely excluded.
Old timey, glitzy announcer voice 26:18
The 65-foot totem pole beside the railway station is a link with the Canadian past. A past that never seems very far away.
Adam Huggins 26:27
So in many ways, you could argue that the experience of a prestigious National Park like Jasper is every bit as pre-manufactured as the experience of the Wilderness Lodge. Just a little different. In some ways, Jasper is also pretending to be this kind of a-historic idea of wilderness.
Intense Adventure Voiceover 26:46
Like the roots of these mighty trees, ancient trails spread throughout this wild land. [Intense adventure music] Adventure beyond... [Fades out]
Adam Huggins 27:01
By the way, our friends over at the Outside/In podcast just did a fantastic deep dive episode called “Fortress Conservation” on this topic. Their focus is on Yellowstone, but the story is very much the same. The concept of wilderness is a fabrication of an industrial society, originally set aside primarily for the upper class.
Mendel Skulski 27:21
Not so much a case of life imitating art imitating life, but more like just the ideology of settler colonialism is just written on the landscape in different ways and seeping into every outdoor experience.
Adam Huggins 27:37
Like wilderness doesn't actually exist. But both Disney and Parks Canada know that it definitely sells.
Mendel Skulski 27:43
[Chuckling] That's, that's true.
Adam Huggins 27:45
And there's actually a fantastic essay about this that we can link to in the show notes by environmental historian William Cronon. It's called “The Trouble with Wilderness,” and I just want to read a short passage from it.
"The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living, urban folk for whom food comes from a supermarket or a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently have no meaningful connection to the forests in which trees grow and die. Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature."
Mendel Skulski 28:24
It's sort of held as being in balance with living in the city. That work hard play hard. You do your thing in the urban noise and in the polluted sphere, and then you go as deep and as far as absolutely possible to get away from it all and to express being out in nature and communing with nature. But it has nothing to do with actually living there. It's just about getting there.
Adam Huggins 28:48
Yeah. But that's just it. We don't have to hold something up as this quote-unquote "wilderness" for it to be wild. Jasper, in many ways, is still very wild. It's got intact predator-prey ecologies. It's got areas that are, you know, what I would call tenacious ecologies, that resist human incursion. And so, according to Eric, it's actually this state of wildness that we should be trying to achieve with ecological restoration.
Eric Higgs 29:19
Wildness instead of wilderness. Wilderness being the sort of a, well, William Cronon did such a great job of kind of articulating this idea of wilderness and kind of pulling it apart a bit as this cultural idea that we really probably ought not hold onto too much. But wildness in comparison is this notion of things that are exuberant and free flowing.
Mendel Skulski 29:46
There it is again. Exuberant.
Adam Huggins 29:49
And also free flowing. I heard Eric use the term "free flowing" a number of times. And neither of those are really scientific terms, right?
Eric Higgs 29:56
It's that kind of wildness, whether in ourselves or whether, yeah, you know, in ecosystems.
Adam Huggins 30:03
But I think they capture what Oliver was talking about with his open source landscapes, where these unique interactions and relationships can develop and evolve without being mediated or even premeditated by some designer.
Oliver Kellhammer 30:15
Yeah, they're zones of experimentation. They're sort of emergent zones where people can kind of reconfigure their relationships with each other and with the non-human subject, like plants or other organisms, and renegotiate our relationships, and, uh, in a way that's experimental and creative. So, there's very few places in life where we can actually do that.
Adam Huggins 30:42
So, if I had to articulate a shared thread between Eric and Oliver, it's that we shouldn't necessarily be trying to create something that looks or feels like wilderness, or even like a historical ecosystem, necessarily, right? Instead, we should be trying to catalyze these kinds of beneficial interactions that can evolve towards a resilient ecosystem, whether that's a forest or a garden or a salt marsh.
Eric Higgs 31:13
So this, the reason I wrote about that. I mean, I went off on this long, strange jag about the Wilderness Lodge at the beginning of Nature by Design, was to talk about a tale of two wildernesses. To talk about the experience that I was having, living at the time in Jasper National Park, and then visiting the Wilderness Lodge and trying to bring those two together in some conceptual way, in relation to restoration. And my worry was that in a technological society, we are going to become better at artifice than, um, let's call it free flowing natural process. And so how do you do restoration in a way that allows free flowing natural process and still embeds this, you know, human creativity. So it's still a kind of like a conversation or a dance with ecosystems that we're engaged with as restorationists but we are still preeminently allowing the natural process to flow.
[Low music swells a little then fades out]
Mendel Skulski 32:19
I feel excited. Hopeful.
Adam Huggins 32:21
Exuberant.
Mendel Skulski 32:22
Exuberant. And, you know, a little lost.
Adam Huggins 32:26
I always feel a little bit that way after talking to Oliver and Eric. Like, my compass needle has started just like, spinning in circles.
Mendel Skulski 32:34
Where am I?
Adam Huggins 32:35
What do you take away from our little tour of the boundaries of restoration?
Mendel Skulski 32:41
You know, like that, we should strive to only create audacious ecologies where they already exist, right? Like, audacious ecologies should no longer creep into the tenacious ecologies and into the cherished ecologies, right?
Adam Huggins 33:01
Yeah, places where our human impact has already been felt intensely.
Mendel Skulski 33:06
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 33:06
And that are therefore kind of ours. We own them to a certain extent now. Not in the, like, traditional sense of ownership, but in, like, the sense of, like, we have a responsibility to them.
Mendel Skulski 33:16
Our guiding aspiration should be to just continuously reform and reimagine these audacious ecologies and see what springs up, right? And then the tricky part is like, does that include Jasper?
Adam Huggins 33:34
It definitely includes Jasper.
Mendel Skulski 33:36
Interesting.
Adam Huggins 33:37
Or rather, it includes parts of Jasper.
Mendel Skulski 33:41
Hey.
Adam Huggins 33:42
Because Jasper is actually an incredible mix of cherished, tenacious, and audacious ecologies. Which is I think a lot what our future ecologies look like. [Music rises ponderously] But before you get too starry eyed…
Mendel Skulski 34:10
[Laughs]
Adam Huggins 34:12
…I have just a couple of closing thoughts from Eric about how to act responsibly, if and when we intervene in ecosystems.
Mendel Skulski 34:23
That's exactly what I'm looking for. That's what I'm missing here.
Eric Higgs 34:26
One of the hallmarks of restoration practice generally is about being clear about the goals that you have in mind for a project. Gosh, I sound old-timey when I say this. But back in the old days, right, of restoration, I think one of the big challenges was having lots of conflicting ideas about what you were doing. So the goals weren't so clear. In some ways, it was always about, it was always couched in terms of "oh, yeah, it's about historical reference systems, about getting back to pre-degraded states." Now there were all sorts of other ideas at play that were influencing restoration decisions, they just, they just weren't explicit. So the cards were not always out on the table. So I think that one thing that seems to work with restoration is being pretty clear about what you're trying to do,
Adam Huggins 35:09
And this process of articulating explicit goals? It does make us, for better or worse, designers, in a sense.
Eric Higgs 35:17
I use "design" as a prominent metaphor to talk about restoration because I, I wanted to emphasize that intentional human agency in restoration. That we do make choices all the time. You've got that sort of sense of human agency, and when we think about the values that drive our work, they're very often conditioned by particular institutional or wider cultural ideas that circulate and inform what we do. Like, why we decide to do what we do. And so my sense is, rather than bury that, you bring it forward and say, "huh. Restoration is about design." Fundamentally, it's about design. And we need to lift ourselves up to understand, well, what does it mean to be a designer with and alongside ecosystems? What does that look like? How do we, how do we make sense of that?
Mendel Skulski 36:11
That makes perfect sense to me as an artist and as a designer, which, you know, there's, there's always that creative leeway built in there. But don't some of these ideas come off as kind of heretical if you're positioned, say, as a restorationist who is firmly grounded in science and data?
Adam Huggins 36:36
Yeah, yeah, these ideas are a little bit heretical for restorationists. And I hope that people realize that when we're being explicit about our goals in this design process, that these designs are grounded in a scientific understanding of ecosystems and ecological processes. I think Eric has at times been made into a bit of a straw man because he's willing to point out the obvious. That it's impossible not to be influenced by other cultural factors and ideas. So it's better to just be explicit about what those ideas are, so that you can kind of interrogate them and decide how to proceed, right? Like, I grew up going to Disney World attractions as a kid. [Laughs] And those places are embedded in my subconscious. And so every time I'm thinking about ecosystems, I have to interrogate that part of myself that's like, you have these aesthetics, you have these ideas of what's natural, and you have to think about, like, what's actually driving you. You have to be very clear about your goals, you know?
Mendel Skulski 37:38
Yeah, and you just have to have faith that part of your ability is to reflect. And to actually gain some insight about your less conscious thought processes.
Adam Huggins 37:50
Yeah, which in some ways makes you an artist, too, right? And I think, coming back to that subject, we just can't afford not to consider aesthetics in the design process if we're designers with natural ecosystems.
Eric Higgs 38:04
If you look at the restoration literature, you'll find very few explicit references to aesthetics. And it's like a, it's a zone where we're not comfortable going. We don't want to talk about the idea that in restoration, there are aesthetic preferences. But we know that there are and it just is part of that intentionality that is at the center of restoration that we are people acting as, you know, as agents in this landscape. And we're trying to, if we do our work well, we are carefully attending to these ecosystems, we're listening to them, we're studying them. Listen—I use that metaphorically. But you know, we're trying to be really careful in observing and understanding what these ecosystems are and then trying to respect that.
[Music vibrates, fades out]
Eric Higgs 39:06
Maybe I'll finish with a story that I take away from Bob Dorney, Robert Dorney, back in his little miniature ecosystem in his front yard in Waterloo, Ontario. His neighbors were really upset because he actually had some weeds in there that were on the weed bylaw control list in the city of Waterloo. So these are plants that you shouldn't be growing. And so, a couple of neighbors were trying to get a petition to have this little miniature ecosystem taken up by the city, destroyed. And so it was Dorney's partner who said, "you know, people like formalism, they like structure. So why don't you put up a little, like, brick wall or something, a stone wall between the sidewalk and your miniature ecosystem. Give it that kind of formality. And I bet people will settle down." Sure enough, they did.
Adam Huggins 39:58
[In the background] Accepted it.
Eric Higgs 39:59
Right. Exactly. Yeah, and that's about durability, right? So you have, and so a lot of it involve, so I think a lot of what restoration can do well is to engage people in conversation about what it is that they are valuing and experiencing, and not necessarily to fully give into that, right? Not to say, "well, yeah, it's all about people, right? And our values and what we want." Because that's clearly not what restoration is offering; it's offering a powerful argument, in some ways, against that. It's saying, hey, there's this other than human world that's really important, and it's doing something very different and more complex than we can ever really fully understand. And our obligation as restorationists is to allow that to flourish. That's really, maybe that's finally what restoration is most significantly about—is challenging us to understand what the world is about.
[Contemplative piano]
Mendel Skulski 40:56
Yeah, that's everything to me.
Adam Huggins 41:00
I thought you'd like that.
Mendel Skulski 41:03
Yeah. I feel, you know, simultaneously exuberant, and very cautious about even so much as planting a tree in my backyard. Let alone a tree, a tomato!
[Theme music begins]
Adam Huggins 41:16
[Laughing] As you should.
Mendel Skulski 41:17
Like, can I even muster the audacity?
Adam Huggins 41:21
Are you making fun of me?
Mendel Skulski 41:22
Yes. But you said that audacious ecosystems are the ones we create, intentionally or accidentally. I feel like we've covered the intentional side, but what about the ecosystems we create by accident?
Adam Huggins 41:40
Well, Eric calls them novel ecosystems, and Oliver calls them hyperecologies, and I've got one more episodes lined up in this series. So, we'll pick up the thread next time in part three of our series, “Nature, by Design?”
[Flourish of theme music]
Mendel Skulski 42:01
Thanks for listening. This has been an independent production of Future Ecologies.
Adam Huggins 42:07
This episode was produced by myself, Adam Huggins.
Mendel Skulski 42:10
And me, Mendel Skulski.
Adam Huggins 42:13
In this episode, you heard Dr. Eric Higgs, and Oliver Kellhammer. Oliver teaches at the Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York, and you can learn about his many projects at oliverk.org. Eric teaches at the University of Victoria, and is the author of several books, including Nature by Design: People, Natural Processes, and Ecological Restoration. You can learn more about his work at erichiggs.ca. Also, an extra special shout out this episode to Eric's coauthor, Jennifer Cypher, whose work on the Wilderness Lodge inspired this episode, and also gave me permission to compose this silly music and reminisce about my childhood in the perennially disappointing state of Florida.
Mendel Skulski 42:59
We'll be back next month. Please rate and review Future Ecologies wherever podcasts can be found.
Adam Huggins 43:06
Special thanks to Hannah Roessler, Sadie Couture, Todd Howard, Brea Segger, Ilana Fonariov, Bastian Phelan, Maya Gauvin, Nicole Jahraus, and Jody Baker.
Mendel Skulski 43:19
Music for this episode was provided by Scott Gailey, C. Diab, Hidden Sky, and Sunfish Moon Light.
Adam Huggins 43:28
If you like what we do, please share us with your friends. You can also support us on Patreon. Our patrons get access to special mini episodes, interview segments, stickers, patches, and a Discord server. You can support us starting at just $1 a month by going to patreon.com/futureecologies. And as of this episode, we have passed the 100 patron threshold. So thank you all so much for supporting us. You know who you are.
Mendel Skulski 43:57
You can get in touch with us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and iNaturalist. The handle is always @futureecologies. You can find a full list of musical credits, citations, show notes, links, and now transcriptions on our website: futureecologies.net. Okay, that's it.
Adam Huggins 44:17
Bye for now.
Mendel Skulski 44:18
See you next time.
[Music vamps, frogs croak]
Mendel Skulski 44:45
It's time for a change. In the immortal words of Baby Huey, "a change is gonna come." You ever listen to Baby Huey? Classic. Classic. Talk about posthumous albums. That's a posthumous album.
Adam Huggins 45:00
It's a [bleep]ing banger. Let's do it next time.
Mendel Skulski 45:02
You know what I'm talking about?!
Adam Huggins 45:04
God... we're never gonna finish this thing. [Laughing]
Adam Huggins 45:04
Oh, soul hits! All time soul hits.
Adam Huggins 45:11
You're a tangent machine. Tangent machine.
Mendel Skulski 45:15
Okay, okay. Let's do this for real.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai, and edited by Emma Morgan-Thorp & Victoria Klein