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Kansas City, Missouri: National Ecosystem Restoration Conference

After a brief plenary session on the proposed 2007 farm bill, we broke out into concurrent paper sessions. There's been some good stuff today.

The first one that inspired me to take notes was a discussion on long-term dynamics. I remember, barely 15 years ago, when everyone thought that thinking 150 years back and 100 years ahead was "visionary." Today, I heard a guy talk about long term climate cycles , about how ecosystems have histories, so to what state do we restore them? He notes that some relevant ecological processes are not observable on human time scales, that past and future must be inferred, and he advocates utilizing the fossil record (foraminifera, diatoms, pollen) to get at this.

Then, a breath of fresh air. I mentioned earlier the buzzword status of adaptive management and collaboration at this conference, something that's been around for a long time but seems to have acquired cliche status now. Judith Layzer of MIT challenged this, and looked at case studies. No surprise, it doesn't always work, sometime it results in lowest-common-denominator consensus. She notes that when it does work, it's because restoration is the primary goal, and it's essential to stay above a certain minimum standard. "Balance" will usually work out in favor of economic interests, unless political will and leadership is asserted. This is coming out through MIT Press in book form eventually, it's in manuscript form now.

Then Lee Skabelund ran through a landscape architects approach to successful restoration, citing some names and projects I'm familiar with. His slides were full of citations that I need to look up, but he talks about an ecosystem approach, involving the community, sacred-place making, doing as little as necessary to achieve goals, and longterm monitoring. He mentioned understanding a project site in terms of past, present, and possible futures. Some overlap with what others are saying, plus a couple of unique things. Simplicity and complexity all at once; it sounds contradictory, and he never quite put it like this, he's a classic western thinker; but in a zen-landscape sort of way he's right.

Earlier a guy from the Corps gave a baffling talk on modeling restoration, and what he really did was illustrate graphically (with tangled and overcomplex slides) why the 206 program is mired in inefficiency. We really should get the shovels out and just dig a new wetland by hand faster than these guys can plan one, just to make the point.

There's been some good networking, too. Had particularly effective discussions with the guys from Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, and Applied Ecological Services. The guy from AES turns out to be another former Earth Tech guy, from Sheboygan, and although he left 10 years ago it was for many of the same reasons that I did.

More talks soon, they have today very, very full. Time to get back downstairs.