Introduction: De-Constructing Restoration
This study offers anthropological and social scientific perspectives on the linked discourses and practices of restoration through reviews of literature in anthropology, political ecology, urban and environmental studies, and conservation science. We ask, in the context of environmental or ecological restoration, what does it mean to restore an environment? What is restored, according to whom, using what baseline, and at the expense of what? And when or where does restoration end? Indeed, the terms “restore” and “environment” would have been seen together rarely until only recently. For instance, consider the denotations of the word (viz. “restore”)1 as it appears today in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online 2023):
- I. To give back or recompense.
- 1. a.transitive. To make amends for; to compensate or make good (loss or damage). Now only with loss as object (rare).
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- II. To bring back (with a prepositional phrase indicating the state which is regained).
- 4. a.transitive. To grant to or obtain for (a person, etc.) reinstatement to (also †of) former rank, office, or possessions.
- b.transitive. To bring back (a person or thing) to (also †till) a previous, original, or normal condition.
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- III.Without prepositional phrase: to bring back or renew.
- 5. a.transitive. To build up again; to re-erect or reconstruct. Now: spec. to repair and alter (a building, or part of a building) so as to bring back something like the original form or condition. Also occasionally intransitive.
- b.transitive. Medicine. To set or reduce (a fractured bone or dislocation).
- c.transitive. gen. To bring back to the original state; to improve, repair, or retouch (a thing) so as to bring back something like the original form or condition.
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- f.transitive. Computing. To replace (a file, data) with a copy taken from a backup, typically following corruption or deletion of the original.
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- 7. a.transitive. To bring (a person or a part of the body) back to a state of health, vigour, or strength; to heal. Also intransitive: to restore health, life, vigour, etc.
- b.intransitive. To recover life, health, vigour, etc.; to revive. Obsolete.
- c.transitive. To bring back to mental calm. Obsolete.
- 8. a.transitive. To reinstate or replace (a person, now esp. a ruler) in a former office, dignity, or estate.
- b.transitive. Theology. To place (humankind) again in a state of grace; to free (a person) from the effects of sin. Also intransitive.
This long list is instructive, not least because it highlights how, in all definitions, a degree of degradation or loss is presupposed, and how the action of restoring would regain that lost state or condition (as indexed by the prefix re-). However, it is also noteworthy because it illustrates how any sense of restoring an environment or an ecosystem is missing.2 There are several ways to read this elision. One, the environment was not, until relatively recently in the long history of humankind, as widely degraded as it has become to demand inclusion in the category of “objects” that could be restored. This, of course, is in keeping with much writing that links industrial capitalism and human advancement with environmental degradation (e.g., McNeill 2001; McNeill and Engelke 2016), and hence points to global environmental degradation as a relatively modern phenomenon. While this claim can be contested (since different environments and different civilizations have seen different degrees of degradation and destruction due to resource use, political conflict, and local climatic changes), there is nevertheless a recognition, in the contemporary moment with its expanding human transformation of nature, that environments need to not merely be “conserved” but also “restored”. Relatedly, it indicates a confidence that degraded environments can be restored—that human communities now have the knowledge (and power) to be able to effect such, ostensibly positive, corrective change (cf. Lave and Doyle 2020; Martin 2022).
The Society for Ecological Restoration defines ecological restoration to be the “process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed . . . by human activity” (Society for Ecological Restoration Website 2024). Similarly, the United Nations Environment Programme uses the term “ecosystem restoration” to mean “the process of halting and reversing degradation, resulting in improved ecosystem services and recovered biodiversity” (United Nations Environment Programme 2021: 7). Implicit in these definitions, however, is a nature–culture divide that scholars in the interpretive social sciences have questioned. This literature has long been attentive to the politics of wilderness and of natural conservation, highlighting how environments are not just “out there,” away from human society, but are enfolded into human activity (cf. Cronon 1991, 1996; Williams 1973). In a similar vein, anthropologists have drawn attention to several ways in which nature and culture, the urban and the agrarian are entangled, appearing as “ecologies of urbanism” (cf. Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan 2013, 2017). Therefore, drawing on and extending the received notions of ecological restoration mentioned earlier in light of the social science literature, we maintain that discussions of the environment, and thence of restoration, must include diverse forms of the environment and of ecologies. Relatedly, we apply the optics of “restoration” to a number of different cases, including some that are not normally seen to be cases of “restoration,” but that are brought together in our analysis by treating the idea of restoration itself as a “boundary case” (cf. Star and Griesemer 1989). Accordingly, we do not privilege a single definition of restoration, instead we are attentive to how ideas of ecological restoration are applied to a number of disparate cases and how slightly different ideas of restoration can be revealed in each case.
In contrast to other fields of inquiry that have studied restoration (such as political science, literary studies, art history, or theology), we examine relatively recent restoration practices applied to different types of environments viewed through the lens of the social sciences. We seek to “unfix” received notions of what constitutes environmental restoration (and what social processes are attendant upon it) through attention to both diverse environments and the diverse ways that people seek to “repair” or “restore” them. This approach, we argue, sheds new light on the debates about restoration. We show, for instance, that the “nature” that is sought to be restored in ecological restoration is no less socially constructed than the city that is sought to be restored in urban renewal. The different cases examined in this article illuminate the practice, politics, and process of restoration in diverse ecologies. We show how all restoration efforts are politically and socially embedded, as they seek, problematically, to “cure” environmental degradation or damages.
In the following sections, we focus on restoration practices and politics as they have taken shape in varied environments and in relation to various subjects: trees and forests, animals and wildlife, as well as cities and human settlements. In the first section, we review tree planting and reforestation practices, followed by a section on the rewilding of wildlife populations. In the second section we attend to the varied dynamics of community-based restoration. We then turn to urban renewal as another instance of the politics and practice of restoration, focusing on the treatment of the fire-haze crisis in urban Thailand. Finally, we take up the ideology of “cure” that infuses restoration discourse to explore the meanings, goals and limitations of ecological restoration. Instead of “cure,” we suggest that the concept of “healing” can help us better orient our efforts at repairing degraded environments. This means more than living in “capitalist ruins” (cf. Tsing 2015), it means finding a better way to live with, and in, degraded environments. Indeed, by “staying with the trouble” (cf. Haraway 2016), by examining and comparing a number of disparate cases under the aegis of “restoration” and not just those related to capitalist processes of accumulation, we offer a critique of a complex set of interlinked ideas and values, and of the promises of care and cure, that underlie much of restoration discourse and practice.
A Trillion Trees
The idea of restoration often requires a vanished “other” to return to, and the quintessential example of this is the forest, which constitutes one of the most conspicuous domains of restoration today. Long a mainstay of conservation and development programs, there is renewed attention to reforestation today due to global climate change. Jean-Francois Bastin and colleagues (2019: 76) note that forest restoration is “among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation,” on the basis of which they argue for adding an additional billion hectares of global canopy cover. Widespread enthusiasm for such ideas is reflected in the fact that on January 21, 2020, the US government joined the World Economic Forum's Trillion Tree initiative; and three major non-governmental organizations—Birdlife International, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and World Wildlife Fund—have their own trillion tree initiative (White House 2020). The “Declaration on Forests and Land Use” at the COP 26 in Glasgow in November 2021 added to this burgeoning interest.
These heady commitments notwithstanding, the track record of large tree-planting projects is very poor. A recent study reported that half of the trees planted in major projects in the tropics do not survive (Banin et al. 2023). A story is told in development circles in India about a local forest guard who insisted to the head of a tree-planting project that they plant the ceremonial first tree in a particular hole in the ground. When asked why, the guard replied, “It's the same hole we use every time we have a new project.” Even if the story is apocryphal, it speaks to a popular belief in the history of repeated failure of such programs. Tree-planting campaigns may even have detrimental impacts on forest cover, as happened with massive plantings of eucalyptus in India in the 1980s: often carried out on common lands previously utilized by marginal peoples, the act of tree planting made the land more valuable and attracted elite interest and attempts at privatization and enclosure, leading to social conflict and even the burning of some forests. The frequency of such outcomes is reflected in recent calls for a shift in emphasis from planting to growing (Duguma et al. 2020).
Anthropologists have known for decades that tree-planting is not a simple silvicultural act, but a complex intervention involving history, culture, politics, and economics (Murray and Bannister 2004), which raises a host of questions that are rarely asked in tree-planting campaigns. The first question is whether a forest ever existed at a given site. The idea of a forested, Edenic past is often inaccurate: a generation of scholarship has demonstrated that a widespread colonial discourse blamed colonized peoples for deforestation based on an imaginary view of pre-colonial forest cover (Fairhead and Leach 1996). This historic revisionism was partly driven by a pro-forest bias that problematized other plant covers like brushland or grassland (Bond 2016; Dove 2008; Robbins 2010; Welz 2021).
If forest was in fact present at a site now deforested, the key questions to restoring it are what took it away and what are the necessary conditions for bringing it back. In mass tree planting campaigns, the answer to the second question is tree seedlings and the labor to plant them. This resolutely forward-looking approach ignores the first question—the historic causes of deforestation, including prior land uses and conflicts. Mass planting campaigns flatten the landscape, treating differences in race, class, and ethnicity—and associated questions of land tenure—as irrelevant to the task at hand. If blame for the lack of tree cover is placed anywhere, it is generally placed on the easiest group to villainize, the local people, leaving aside more powerful and blameworthy actors. These campaigns—like the possibly apocryphal Indian forest guard—focus on the hole in which the tree seedling is planted, ignoring wider market and political forces that can greatly affect the success or failure of reforestation efforts (cf. Blaikie 1985). These campaigns seek to remedy the removal of trees—a sociologically complex event—with the planting of trees—a sociologically simple event. Far more important and challenging than the act of planting a tree is creating a social niche for it.
When pledging his support for the trillion-tree campaign at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2020, the CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, observed, “The tree is a bipartisan issue. . . . No one is anti-tree” (Gelles and Sengupta 2020). Such views are key to the continued popularity of tree-planting campaigns, but they are also highly problematic. Planting trees is in fact always a partisan, political act, there is no such thing as a win-win tree-planting campaign: tenants versus landlords, smallholders versus estates, farmers versus foresters—all have different self-interests. Diana Davis and Paul Robbins (2018: 447) trace planting campaigns, which they term “arboreal biopolitics,” to the colonial era, which, they argue, “continues to haunt contemporary policy, contributing pathological ecologies, especially in the dry lands, often with pernicious effects on local peoples.” Community-based restoration and management of forests is regarded by many observers as a way to address these political issues, although some see their outcomes as mixed if not negative (Agrawal 2005; Bray 2021; Hajjar et al. 2021).
The emphasis in tree-planting campaigns on trees to the exclusion of people reflects a Cartesian divide between nature and culture, which allows the tree to be treated in isolation from its social context.3 This separates forests from local communities but not, ironically, from foresters, whose decisive intervention is generally deemed necessary to restore tree cover. But in Pakistan, for example, if deforested and seemingly barren areas in the semi-arid barani zone are fenced in, keeping goats out, in many cases the tree cover will spontaneously return. Similarly in India, when chronic battles between farmers and foresters were settled by the Ford Foundation's Joint Forest Management Project, barren common lands were spontaneously reforested. In the face of such evidence, tree-planting campaigns represent an effort to wrest agency away from nature, to assert an essential role for culture—and often the state—when doing nothing may actually be what is needed (Chazdon et al. 2020).
The case of reforestation highlights the semiotics of restoration. In massive tree-planting campaigns, a site without forests is interpreted as a worrisome ecological signature, although it is more often a political one; and it is seized upon as a motivating sign looking forward as opposed to a diagnostic sign looking backwards. The semiotics of the tree-less landscape draw attention away from the need for national and international structural political-economic change in favor of more limited, local interventions. Tree-planting campaigns, and the concept of restoration more generally, are revelatory of environmental history, landscape biases, ideas about social equity and justice, and the operation of power.
Wildlife Restoration
Just as the absence of trees seems to call out for restoration, so too does the absence of wildlife. Rewilding is a current, ambitious restoration approach to wildlife conservation (Soulé and Noss 1998; Svenning 2020). It is also considered to be a kind of ecosystem restoration, which aims to rebuild a natural ecosystem by “restoring natural processes and the complete or near complete food-web at all trophic levels as a self-sustaining and resilient ecosystem using biota that would have been present had the disturbance not occurred” (United Nations Environment Programme 2021: 31). The long-term goals of rewilding are to increase or maintain biodiversity through the restoration of species and ecological processes while reducing present and past human impact (Lorimer et al. 2015). One of the first practical applications of this approach was the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park. Yet, similar to the critique of tree-planting, rewilding is an intricate intervention comprising history, culture, politics, and economics that takes place across the ecologies of the Anthropocene (Lorimer et al. 2015). Areas with depleted wildlife numbers are often imbricated in social and political historical events (Gadsden et al. 2023), an understanding of which can shed light on wildlife restoration and rewilding (cf. Higgs et al. 2014). For example, negative human histories such as armed conflict can have significant negative effects on biodiversity (Hanson 2018). Similarly, efforts to increase wildlife numbers may result in escalating human–wildlife conflict unless they also confront problematic historical and political policies, such as shifting land use from communal grazing to privatization (Orrick et al. 2024). Thus, incorporating social-historical perspectives into rewilding activities may help us understand why wildlife populations decline in the first place and how local communities may participate (or not) in rewilding efforts (Grace et al. 2021).
However, restoring wildlife populations to historic levels may not be feasible or desirable, particularly if the ecosystem has undergone significant changes since the species was last present. The question of recovery, moreover, requires the difficult task of identifying a specific time period to which to “restore” a population, and thus bring about the restoration of a perceived past environment (Corlett 2016). For rewilding, although the desire is to restore ecosystem functioning and wildlife populations to a time of limited human intervention (Lorimer et al. 2015), determining both the historic ecosystem functioning and wildlife populations of a landscape before human intervention is challenging. A number of landscapes have been actively managed by people since prehistoric times; the grasslands and heathlands of northwestern Europe were created by past farming practices (Webb 1998), Indigenous peoples have actively modified the North American landscape (Donlan 2005), and Indigenous Australians have shaped the Australian outback for millennia (Miller et al. 2005). Additionally, returning wildlife populations to their historical numbers does not in itself mean the land or the habitat is “restored” to its original ecosystem function. Animals may change their behavior, space use, temporal activity, and even their own population numbers to accommodate humans, which can have cascading effects on other species (Wilson et al. 2020; Werner and Peacor 2003). Claims of wildlife restoration are often unsupported by baseline data. In many places across the globe, only limited amounts of data are available on historic ranges and population sizes. Additionally, in many parts of the Global South, the declines of large mammals were caused by trophy hunting by the Global North. For example, intensive sport hunting in Botswana by colonial hunters began in 1830 and by 1885 Botswana's wildlife population had already declined from over-exploitation (Schapera 1943, cited in Gupta 2013).
The rewilding of wildlife populations that previously existed on a given landscape is often carried out under the assumption that restoring native species will improve ecosystem community and function in a way that introduced species cannot. Indeed, introduced species are often assumed to be a cause of ecosystem degradation and decreased biodiversity (Kingsford et al. 2021). Certainly, there are many cases in which this has been true (Jones et al. 2021) but in other cases, the trait features of introduced herbivores can be more similar to Late Pleistocene herbivores than those of native-only assemblages, reflecting a past several million years before widespread human-driven extinctions (Lundgren et al. 2020). In fact, ecosystems have been able to flourish and develop with native or non-native species (Lundgren et al. 2021). Introduced species can provide both benefits or harms to biodiversity, ecological services, and economies (Davis et al. 2011; Pedrono et al. 2013).
Moreover, the reintroduction and restoration of wildlife species in areas where they have been depleted can, on the one hand, introduce new forms of human–wildlife interactions, posing challenges to coexistence between local communities and the restored wildlife populations. On the other hand, many solutions to human–wildlife conflicts propose various forms of restoration that span multiple trophic levels. This includes the restoration of the prey base for the focal species (Aryal et al. 2013), the restoration of habitat and corridors for the focal species (Puri et al. 2022; Rodrigues et al. 2022; Tattersall et al. 2020), the restoration of human tolerance toward the focal species (Treves et al. 2009; Inskip et al. 2016), and the restoration of awareness and the practice of mutualism between people and wildlife (van der Wal et al. 2022).
In this respect, the assumption that local communities have coexisted with wildlife for an extended period, and therefore, the restoration of wildlife populations is inherently beneficial to them, does not always hold true. While local human populations have historically inhabited landscapes alongside wildlife, evolving land use practices have introduced new challenges to wildlife restoration. As global human society evolves, its activities can impact ecosystems through factors like climate change and other anthropogenic influences, resulting in shifts in species abundance and distribution, as well as alterations in the timing of seasonal events like breeding and migration. These changes, in turn, can influence species interactions and reshape the dynamics of entire ecosystems, intensifying human–wildlife interactions, often negatively.
Indeed, human–wildlife interactions constitute an ongoing and dynamic social process embedded within evolving socio-ecological contexts (Gao and Clark 2023). Achieving sustainable coexistence between wildlife and people demands effective management of human–wildlife and related human–human interactions across various spatial, temporal, and institutional scales. Consequently, wildlife restoration is an ongoing endeavor that has no fixed end point. It is a continuous, context-specific process that often necessitates interventions not only with animals but also with human attitudes and behaviors (Madden 2004; Madden and McQuinn 2014; Rust et al. 2016; Margulies and Karanth 2018). Moreover, the restoration of many species may require intensive management efforts (Chapron et al. 2014; Bauer et al. 2015; Schweiger and Svenning 2020), often entailing substantial funding. For instance, compensation-based strategies (Persson et al. 2015) demand special social and decision-making processes (König et al. 2020). In sum, as human–wildlife interactions evolve within changing contexts, new challenges are likely to emerge for wildlife restoration, necessitating continuous adaptation to these developments.
Community-Based Restoration
Whether it is forest restoration or wildlife rewilding, the practical implementation of restoration initiatives sparks an ongoing debate regarding the decision-making locus, weighing the merits of local versus centralized control. For much of the last century, centralized forms of environmental decision-making dominated in natural resource management efforts. However, in recent decades, the effectiveness of this centralized model in conservation has been called into question (Grimble and Laidlaw 2002; Hulme and Murphree 1999; Rinzin et al. 2009). Studies in the field of political ecology have illuminated that centralized approaches have often disregarded the value of common property arrangements, the concerns of local stakeholders dependent on these resources for their livelihoods, as well as the wisdom, expertise, and regenerative practices of local and Indigenous communities (Agrawal 2001; Dove et al. 2019; Osborne 2015; Osborne et al. 2021).
At the same time, mounting evidence demonstrates the capacity of local actors to collaboratively address environmental challenges (Ostrom 1990, 1999; Roe et al. 2009; Scherr 2000; Stringer 2009; Xu et al. 2008). Through their traditional knowledge, customary sustainable practices, and collective efforts within their respective ecosystems, Indigenous peoples and local communities can assume pivotal roles in both conservation and restoration agendas. As a result, the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030 explicitly champions community engagement as one of its guiding principles. It underscores the imperative for restoration programs to promote inclusive and participatory governance, social equity, and fairness, not just at the outset but throughout the entire process and outcomes (United Nations Environment Programme 2021). Moreover, it highlights the need to integrate diverse forms of knowledge and promote knowledge exchange throughout the restoration process. Indigenous peoples pursue their own projects of restoration, albeit inflected in particular cultural and political contexts that offer pathways for repair and reconnection for communities alienated from culturally important ecosystems (Fox et al. 2017). For example, Kyle Whyte (2017) situates Anishinaabe restoration of sturgeon and wild rice within a settler colonial context that facilitated ecosystem degradation, but that can be revitalized through Indigenous practices.
A growing body of literature in this field, thus, demonstrates that the collaborative approach of community-based restoration consistently yields more successful and sustainable restoration outcomes, bolstering community engagement and garnering support for conservation efforts (see Figure 1). Community-based restoration projects hold the potential for ecological benefits, such as enhanced biodiversity, increased ecosystem services, and the restoration of ecosystem functions (cf. Higgs et al. 2014), alongside notable social advantages, including the fortification of community resilience, heightened engagement, empowerment, heightened environmental awareness and education, and the creation of conditions that mitigate conflicts over resource control (Child 1996; Fernandez-Gimenez et al. 2008; Leigh 2005).
Web of Science Citation Report of number of publications per year with the terms “community-based” and “restoration” between 1992 and 2022 (Citation Report graphic is derived from Clarivate Web of Science, Copyright Clarivate 2023. All rights reserved.)
Citation: Environment and Society 15, 1; 10.3167/ares.2024.150102
The success of community-based restoration hinges on several critical factors, including the degree of community involvement, resource availability, institutional support, and the ecological context of the restoration site, among other considerations (Moser and Ekstrom 2010; Pimbert and Pretty 1997). It is noteworthy that community boundaries and natural resource boundaries often fail to align, presenting challenges in the management of natural resources (Blaikie 2006). While restoration efforts are inherently site-specific, the drivers of ecosystem degradation are frequently linked to global trends. Similarly, the benefits derived from ecosystem restoration can directly benefit the local populations residing in and around restored areas, but they can also extend to geographically distant individuals and future generations. Various community members, such as individuals living in poverty, women and girls, members of indigenous and traditional communities, older persons, individuals with disabilities, ethnic, racial, or other minorities, and displaced persons, often experience disproportionate impacts from ecosystem degradation and may hold distinct expectations and priorities concerning the desired outcomes of restoration programs. Decisions regarding where to prioritize restoration efforts and the chosen approaches significantly impact the nature, quantity, and speed of the benefits that ensue. Besides, although restoration activities can frequently initiate the recovery of a degraded ecosystem relatively quickly, achieving full ecosystem recovery can span years, decades, or even centuries (United Nations Environment Programme 2021). This process is marked by uncertainties, as unforeseen obstacles to recovery may emerge, and opportunities for further restoration activities may arise during later stages of development. Consequently, the restoration process necessitates long-term community commitment and adaptive governance and management.
Although participation is commonly advocated as a policy option for restoration, its effectiveness may not always be guaranteed. Elinor Ostrom and Michael Cox (2010) highlighted this challenge as the “participation as panacea” issue, emphasizing that participation alone may not suffice to address complex problems unless it takes into account how programs intersect with local, national, and international contexts (Bixler et al. 2015). In practice, participatory conservation initiatives can sometimes clash with the needs and objectives of communities (Batterbury et al. 1997; Blaikie 2006). While participatory techniques can help mitigate the power imbalance between formal scientific knowledge and local knowledge, external influences may still shape local knowledge to align with their own objectives (Blaikie et al. 1997; Mosse 2001). In certain cases, governments may hesitate to delegate authority to entities accountable to and representative of local communities (Nelson 2010; Ribot et al. 2006). Therefore, despite the global appeal of the concept of participation, its implementation at both national and local levels can vary (Blaikie 2006; Cornwall and Brock 2005).
Effective community-based restoration necessitates continuous education, training, and monitoring to ensure the ongoing sustainable management and conservation of restored ecosystems. Successful ecological restoration entails not only creating the conditions required for the recovery of degraded ecosystems but also establishing and maintaining a functional community governance structure and process to safeguard the common interests of the community and balance the trade-offs between local, regional, and global interests. This section, thus, further underscores the complexity of restoration efforts, which are inherently intertwined with political and social dynamics in practice.
Urban Renewal and Restoration
When shifting our gaze from rural to urban contexts, restoration looks different—indeed, reversed—but the underlying dynamics are much the same. Urban renewal projects typically seek to restore vitality to socio-economic processes in the city, often changing the built form of the city as well as various channels of mobility, service, and access that operate therein. Urban renewal at first glance offers a counterpoint to restoration literature, especially since it does not seek to re-achieve a past state. Instead, urban renewal initiatives attempt to restore health and vitality to social processes in the context of new challenges. This often requires re-organizing cities and infrastructure to the benefit of some groups over others (cf. Kanoi et al. 2022). Although practitioners or proponents of urban renewal do not often claim to be carrying out “restoration” per se,4 the urban renewal literature echoes broader principles of restoration and points to the politics of inequality, even in the quest for justice and equity, in remaking any environment. The urban renewal literature serves to show how politically and socially embedded all restoration efforts are.
A key event in the urban renewal discourse in the modern period was the massive re-planning of Paris by Georges-Eugène Haussmann. On the one hand, urban renewal was required because of degenerated urban conditions—itself a consequence of industrial capitalism (whose environmental effects were felt well beyond the limits of the so-called city)—involving lower living standards, poor sanitation, and relatedly poor health of a large number of its inhabitants. Matthew Gandy suggests that the “Haussmannization” of Paris represented an architectural point of view that was predicated on the relationship between the human body and the city and that compared the to-be-renewed city with a healthy human body (Gandy 2014). Sanitation for the relatively disorderly masses was seen as a key concern here, with the health of the city and its inhabitants at stake (cf. Holston 1989; McNeill and Engelke 2016). On the other hand, other scholars have noted that if the construction of new sewerage systems, grand boulevards, broad streets, and splendid public parks, and the attendant re-construction of the city signaled modernity and power for the elites on the heels of industrial capitalism, it provoked anger and resistance in others, often a result of slum clearance and displacement of the urban poor (Costa Meyer 2022; Harvey 2009). Indeed, for some, the Haussmannization of Paris was about the control of populations, designed to enable the swift movement of police or military forces: in this view, urban renewal was not just about sanitation and health, or indeed about modernity, it was also about power and control (Baviskar 2020; Scott 1998).
In India and other areas colonized by European powers during this period, a similar politics of urbanization was apparent. Although there were older forms of urban planning being carried out in an indigenous Hindu idiom in India—exemplified, for example, in the construction of Jaipur by Sawai Raja Jai Singh (cf. Dhabhai 2024; Tillotson and Sachdev 2002)—it was in the presidency towns and military cantonments where increased urbanization soon required the implementation of various urban planning measures. In these settlements, the first municipal committees were initially formed to organize the powers of colonial officers, particularly in what was then called Madras, and also to raise revenue collection from city-dwellers, which was itself linked to demonstrations of colonial sovereignty (cf. Stern 2008). Subsequently, however, through newly constituted urban “Improvement” trusts, it was often public health and sanitation concerns, as with Paris, that licensed urban planning interventions. In this new colonial improvement regime, the city had to be improved from the impropriety of non-Europeans for the benefit of the Europeans (cf. Ranganathan 2018). In Colonial Bombay for instance, the first city improvement trust, the Bombay Improvement Trust, was founded in 1898 in response to the horrifying bubonic plague in the city in 1896. Subsequently, Trust officials identified slum settlements and unhygienic practices therein as the source of disease, and so determined to act upon both such poor neighborhoods and upon the bodies of those who lived in such spaces as objects of improvement (Beverley 2011; Kidambi 2001). In other places too, improvement was to be carried out upon the lives, habits, and settlements of the urban poor, which often resulted in worse conditions of living for them (e.g., Gooptu 1996). David Harvey offered a trenchant critique of this kind of social process which was as true of “urban improvement” as of urban renewal, capturing the paradox of intervention: “if we ‘urban renew’, we merely move the poverty around; if we don't, we merely sit by and watch decay” (Harvey 2009: 143). Other scholars have observed that this paradox of intervention also extends in other ways: its objects express a willingness and even desire for urban renewal, and consequently, social improvement (cf. Ghertner 2011; Harms 2016).
In the context of massive urban renewal projects in contemporary United States, scholars have shown how collective social memories and interlinked cultural landscapes are obliterated under the force of urban redevelopment projects that involve new housing arrangements, interstate highways, and so on (cf. Hayden 1995). Indeed, others have underscored the links between urban renewal and gentrification (cf. Smith 1982, 1996). Thus, as all the foregoing cases illustrate, the politics of urban renewal and urban development, which presuppose urban degradation, bear an inherent bias: it is improvement for some and not for others. Indeed, some observers suggest that what is being restored through such renewal projects are processes of wealth accumulation that further stigmatize and displace the relatively disempowered (cf. Baviskar 2020).
Whereas the urban environment and its renewal may appear to be very different from the natural environment and its restoration, we see how urban renewal does not seek to re-achieve or restore an imaginary end point that was the “natural” state of things. There is no end point. Similarly, with “natural-ecological” restoration, as we have shown through our review of reforesting and rewilding literatures, there is no natural state to return to either. Any supposed natural state is also an artificial ideal (cf. Estes 2019). Restoration too is a kind of renewal and renewal is a kind of restoration; and through a review of the literature of renewal we see how socially and politically fraught such an exercise can be. Thus, the urban renewal case illuminates how all restoration efforts are embedded in often-contested social and political relations. In the next section, we explore a particular instantiation of this process with respect to the air pollution “crisis” (cf. Masco 2017) in Thailand. Air pollution is felt most acutely in urban centers, but the politics it licenses enfold distant hinterlands into itself and thus collapse easy urban–rural and nature–culture binaries.
The Hazy Politics of Restoration
Restoration initiatives, thus, whether in rural or urban contexts, are not apolitical but are deeply embedded in local and national politics. In particular, the socio-spatial project of restoration involves state-centered visions of ecological restoration that intersect with ongoing political dynamics (McElwee 2016; Peluso and Vandergeest 2001; Scott 1998; Sivaramakrishnan 1999). In Thailand, the modern air pollution and a related haze crisis is used to license environmental restoration initiatives by a centralized state. This nexus builds on and exacerbates the marginalization of indigenous populations, while also creating new sets of political problems and contestations.
Thailand's national project is centered around projecting a singular Thai identity and regimenting an aesthetic nationalism (Charnvit 2022; Reynolds 2002; Thongchai 1994). This project has repeatedly problematized, subjugated, and exploited Indigenous populations such as the Karen, Shan, Hmong, and Lua populations, particularly through strategies of forest governance (Hirsch 1993; Laungaramsri 2002; Lewis 2022). Indigenous populations are depicted as either forest destroyers or romanticized guardians, emphasizing their role as culprits of environmental crisis and distinct from their lowland counterparts (Forsyth and Walker 2008). This reproduces a perspective that problematizes the upland population, a narrative that legitimizes state actions to enact territorial control and achieve its political objectives.
The haze crisis in Thailand offers a strong example of how these political dynamics intersect with environmental issues. Annually, between the months of February and April, haze becomes a serious concern in Thailand. Air quality plummets with hazardous PM2.5 levels in Thai cities topping global pollution indices.5 Most attribute this, albeit erroneously, to slash-and-burn agriculture by indigenous populations in Thailand. The state's and public's response to the crisis has often drawn on the discourse of tree planting as a solution to improve air quality. These restoration initiatives are seen as a green panacea, evidenced through a range of numerous initiatives from planting one million trees in Bangkok to large-scale, rural reforestation projects (Beaulieu et al. 2023). In other words, restoration provides a convenient solution to plant more trees to deal with the haze, which obfuscates and misses out on more deeply entrenched issues.
Scholars and activists note how the state has merely repeated “ham-fisted” responses, such as proclaiming a ban on forest fires without enforcement, as well as asking citizens to wear masks and stay indoors (Marks and Lulitanonda 2023). These approaches fail to substantively engage a wider and more relevant set of political, economic, and ecological issues, while further obscuring the roles of public and private actors who exacerbate the situation (Mostafanezhad and Evrard 2021).
Air pollution, and the public health crisis it engenders, thus, fuels an approach to “cure” the problem and its perceived causes. In the next section, therefore, we turn to an examination of the ideology of “cure” that informs much restoration practice.
Ecological Restoration and the Ideology of Cure
In Meditations on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure, Eli Clare identifies a shared logic underlying the politics of ecological restoration and biomedical cure. Clare relates prairie restoration in the American Midwest and biomedical treatment of disabled bodies by describing a pervasive ideology of cure in Western culture grounded on ideas of normal and abnormal and natural and unnatural. Restoration, like cure, “is to restore an object or an ecosystem to return it to an earlier, and often better, condition” (Clare 2014: 218). Instead of attempting to clarify a particular understanding of ecological or bodily health or rejecting restorative and curative practices altogether, Clare encourages us to adopt an inclusive “politics of cure” intended to undo ecological and bodily harm while respecting the complex diversity bodies, minds, and lands possessing a “brilliant imperfection” (2014: 206). We share Clare's assertion that an ideology of cure grounds ecological restoration and biomedicine and develop this comparison in order to clarify the meanings, goals, and limitations of ecological restoration.
Psychiatrist and anthropologist Arthur Kleinman distinguishes curing disease, or “the establishment of effective control of disordered biological and psychological processes” from healing of illness, or “the provision of personal and social meaning for the life problems created by sickness” (1980: 82). This distinction between curing and healing deepens Eli Clare's insight by showing not only that there are complex ways for less-abled ecosystems and bodies to be in the world and to relate to cure but also that the classification of a disorder—as disease or illness—determines how one looks back in time, attempts to identify a cause of harm, and indeed how to imagine an approach for “repair” determines whose expertise matters in that approach. Contemporary biomedicine privileges the disease curing model, which emphasizes underlying biological pathology independent from sociocultural context. Conventional ecological restoration also follows a model of cure with similar consequences: the cause of ecological harm is locally identified without a broader historical and sociocultural context; the technical and material reordering of perceived ecological disorder is favored over a healing model based on the reparation of social meaning that prioritizes a process of meaning-making based on local environmental values; and technical experts define the problem and offer solutions displacing opportunities for the inclusion of alternative perspectives on ecological harm, health, and repair.
Disability studies and political ecology scholarship recognize a close relationship between cure and technical expertise. These literatures demonstrate how overemphasis on cure simplifies and even counteracts restorative practices to the exclusion of healing-based and complexity-tolerant approaches. Physicians have long been trained to prefer “cure driven” intervention in contrast to nurses’ “being with” approaches, despite the fact that not all disability can be reduced to diseased versus cured (Linker 2013: 529–530). The fact of seeing disability as a condition to be treated and cured in the first place renders it within this realm of medical expertise (Kudlick 2018). Examining efforts to expand for-profit medical markets further clarifies this relationship between the search for cure and technical expertise (Mitchell 2015: 10, 157–158). Conservation and development practice worldwide follows a similar logic. We find instances of “rendering technical” amidst cacao plantation promotion in Sulawesi (Li 2007) and depoliticization in a World Bank development program in Lesotho (Ferguson 1990). By contrast, the practice of a “crip technoscience”—wherein the term “crip” relies on a reclaimed use of the word “cripple” and refers to the unique expertise and practices of people with disabilities in designing our material and conceptual world—challenges the rendering of disabled bodies as necessarily in need of cure (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019). This disability justice-centered practice of refusal, like Clare's politics of cure and Kleinman's healing of illness, opens a much-needed and overlooked possibility for ecological practice: confronting frequently ineffective technical fixes requires the recognition that cure-based approaches can and should be complemented by an alternative problem-framing.
Ecological Restoration beyond the Ideology of Cure
Ecological restoration beyond an ideology of cure begins by asking, who decides what is normal and natural (Clare 2014)? Whose values direct restoration? We encourage the conceptual restoration of ecological restoration, which at present relies on an untenable premise: that features and functions of ecology exist separately from culture and may be restored without meaning playing a central role in this practice. Decades of research on conservation and development projects show us that exclusively cure-driven approaches do not work; contemporary research from environmental justice, Indigenous, and Black ecologies scholars shows us that such an approach overlooks how many communities relate to landscape and its history (Hosbey et al. 2022). For instance, the perceived disease potential of land produced a “racial topography” of class and race for nineteenth-century white Americans where insalubrious land at lower elevations was reserved for enslaved people (Valencius 2002: 88), whereas those same enslaved people experienced a distinct material and spiritual landscape (Smith 2020: 29). A more capacious understanding of restoration does not dismiss cure, just as we do not dismiss the utility of biomedicine to treat underlying pathology when appropriate. Instead, as healing illness confronts the experience of symptoms of underlying disease, so too a healing-inclusive ecological restoration centers a diverse set of environmental values alongside conventional notions of biodiversity and emphasizes how that restoration process unfolds within communities.
Healing-based models of restoration differ significantly from cure-based models because they acknowledge an inseparability of human values from landscapes, recognize the importance of local and marginalized systems of environmental values distinct from Western scientific models, and prioritize the experience of the process of restoration for communities most affected by such interventions. Healing models, therefore, offer a sustainable and ethical politics of restoration unavailable to phenomenologically weak cure models. Moreover, a focus on healing-inclusive ecological restoration calls into question the dominant role of the expert technician removed from the priorities and values of local communities. The long-term success of ecological restoration depends on how local communities use and manage restored places, even when those local human–ecological relationships are driven by influences near and far (Zhou et al. 2021). Hence, an end-goal of ecological restoration, consistent with its just implementation, demands attention to how the restored is experienced locally. This is not to suggest that an imperative for local solutions implies local cause. Human and political ecology have long recognized attribution of blame on local communities for wider political-economic causes (Blaikie 1985; Thompson et al. 1986). Instead, restoration demands an act of memory capable of identifying the initial causes of ecological harm at multiple possible scales, and sensitivity to the fact, observed by scholars of post-traumatic stress, that memory is a reconstructive activity occurring in social contexts favoring certain stories over others (Kirmayer 2008: 9).
The complicating categories of disability, chronic and long-term illness reveal a complex relationship between cure and healing. In some cases, symptoms are present without an identifiable underlying pathology (Kleinman 1980: 74) and in others a pathology can be identified but not cured (Nakamura 2013: 110). So too, there are cases of incomplete cure (Chen 2014) or access to cure limited by geography and economy (Manderson and Smith-Morris 2010: 15). In the context of recovery from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Vincanne Adams recognizes interventions which fail to repair as “false cure” (Adams et al. 2009: 3). Returning our discussion to ecological restoration, Clare asks us: “to tend the unrestorable places and ecosystems that are ugly, stripped down, full of toxins, rather than considering them unnatural and abandoning them. I want us to respect and embrace the bodies disabled through environmental destruction, age, war, genocide, abysmal working conditions, hunger, poverty, and twists of fate, rather than deeming them abnormal bodies to isolate, fear, hate, and dispose of” (Clare 2014: 212, emphases in original).
These complicating cases of bodies and places demonstrate when healing, and not cure, is the best path available. Looking forward, a reimagined ecological restoration in the Anthropocene that is considerate of the critiques of disability studies offers an opportunity to establish what we believe are ultimately more durable restorative relationships between human communities and their interconnected ecological worlds.
Conclusion: Re-constructing Restoration
At first glance, the idea of ecological restoration appears to be unquestionably desirable: to once again bring about an environment that had been despoiled primarily due to human activities may appear unproblematic. However, we have sought to show how restoration is not just a simple matter of bringing a past ecosystem or environment into the present. In all restoration initiatives, there are many presumptions about what is to be (and what is not to be) restored, the means by which restoration is to be carried out, the benefits that might accrue (or not) from such initiatives, and for whom. Thus, we showed how in reforestation and tree-planting initiatives, campaigns may privilege trees over people, unwittingly resulting in the displacement of the poor. Further, such tree-planting campaigns often fail to recognize other kinds of ecological life, privileging trees over brushland or grassland. Through such considerations we become attentive to matters of environmental justice even in ostensibly desirable reforestation programs. We highlighted similar considerations regarding wildlife restoration, where there are not only technical challenges to rewilding, such as in knowing which historical states to use as baselines for wildlife populations, but also the imperative to consider human populations (cf. Higgs et al. 2014). Effective restoration strategies require interventions not just with animals but also with people, and rather than a static end point outside of human engagement, they require continuous human management.
And here too, there are no simple answers. Whereas community-based natural resource management and restoration has received many accolades, especially as a corrective to state-led restoration activities, community-based participation is not always effective. Local knowledge is not always translatable across geographical and social contexts, and the manner and mode of participation (cf. Barnes 2014), also merits careful consideration in conservation and restoration initiatives.
Finally, we showed through a review of urban renewal discourses not only how restoration dynamics in agrarian and wilderness contexts are mirrored in urban contexts but also how studying urban renewal initiatives make it easier to see through the murky politics of restoration: restoration (or renewal) can be used by the powerful to further their self-interests over those of the unempowered, whether human beings or other forms of nature (cf. Estes 2019 for a contrary view). It is not the case that restoration is “intrinsically” bad but that its methods are often problematic. A way forward may be through an emphasis on “healing” rather than “curing”—healing both people and landscapes. Although an ideology of cure has underlain so much of restoration discourse, an emphasis on healing may help us better reimagine human–ecological relations and also what it would mean to restore any environment. When seen and practiced in terms of “healing,” restoration would involve inclusive, mutually interdependent, and ever-evolving relations of care not just between human beings and the environments but between human beings and other human beings, living with each other near and far.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this article whose comments have helped to clarify and sharpen our argument. We are also grateful to members of the Environmental Anthropology Lab at the Yale School of the Environment, and to Anne Rademacher, for their feedback on this article.
Notes
This dictionary currently also lists “restore” as a noun in two senses (1. As “Restoration, restitution; (in plural) recovery. Obsolete.” And 2. “Computing. The action or process of restoring files or data from a backup location; an instance of this. Also: a software function which allows this. Frequently attributive. Cf. restore v.1 5f.”) and as a secondary verb with the following definition: “transitive. To store again.” See the web-page entry here: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/163992 (accessed 30 June 2023).
There is a separate entry in the OED under “restoration ecology” that links restoration with the environment (cf. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “restoration ecology (n.),” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2275256761). Nevertheless, it is still worthy of note that in the primary entry (viz. “to restore”), this absence remains, which is instructive for the purposes of this article.
Although different groups of people may have different configurations of the nature–culture divide at different times, a particularly influential form of modern thinking derives from Cartesian philosophical principles with which we are concerned in this article.
There are important exceptions, however, such as in “river daylighting” projects that seek both to renew hydrological flows and ecological processes in the water as well as to promote social and economic renewal on the land. In Reigning the River, for example, Anne Rademacher (2011) describes an urban river restoration initiative that sought explicitly to not just renew the city but also restore “nature.” Relatedly, the Baltimore School of Urban Ecology has sought to expand the ecological dimensions of urban systems, thus linking questions of urban renewal, ecological restoration and environmental justice (cf. Grove et al. 2015).
PM2.5 refers to fine particulate matter that measure 2.5 microns or less in diameter. They have been known to infiltrate deep into the lungs and are associated with various health issues, including acute and chronic bronchitis, as well as asthma attacks.
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