Ecological Restoration across Landscapes of Politics, Policy, and Property

Abstract

Humanity - society and its institutions - plays a key role in the future viability of the biosphere. Only by managing ourselves, our resource consumption, our waste, our economies and environment as a whole, can we hope to "manage" the environment and its abundant resources toward a sustainable, healthy, and restorative future. Unfortunately, political reelections and the politics of environmental restoration often seem to be at juxtapositions. The fast-moving variables of economics and reelection generally reign supreme over their slower, foundational, and interdependent ecological components (Carpenter and Turner 2001). The scales of time and space and the constituency of voters generally don't line up, and, as a result, political and ecological concerns are often misinterpreted as rivals rather than essentials. Similarly, planning for the development of land and other resource use often conflicts with maintaining ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation , and ecological restoration requirements. To make matters more confusing, the policies and programs of different government agencies appear to contradict each other. In this chapter, I offer a "big picture" view of politics, policy, and property (the "3Ps") as they relate to ecological restoration based on a brief discussion of theory and practice stemming from the fields of regional landscape ecology, complex systems, and institutional design.