The Restorative Art of Being Natural
By Devin Kajah
To ebb and flow and smooth the colorful, shifting stones that lay just beneath the dappled surface of the water, breathing in and out every shift in the environment. To carefully carve away at the loamy banks just enough to create a welcoming place for your kin. To create a place for Belted Kingfisher to form their intimate burrow and a space they deem safe enough to rear their young. A slithering body, twisting and writhing through the lush mountains and valleys speaking only loud enough for those who want to listen, protecting every whisper heard and every story that has danced through the reeds. Currents carry instinctively across the landscape, offering the ritualistic grounds for thousands of minnows, caddisflies, and mycelium to call their home.
But what happens when landscapes become restricted? When ungrateful machines gnaw at the forests, and dark calloused fingers dredge the fishes from the waters in a rough nylon embrace–what happens then? Damaged, degraded, and destroyed patches of land now make up the mosaic of most of our world and with little to even show for it. Hopelessness, anger, fear, eco-anxiety, solastalgia, and other emerging emotions of the Anthropocene that have yet to be labeled may deepen that sinking feeling in your gut when thinking about the current and future state of our climate. I try to be as optimistic as possible. I mend the ripped knee in my pants and compost my orange peels, yet it never quite feels tangible enough.
This past summer I was introduced to the concept of ecological restoration. Ecological restoration is the act of bringing a damaged, degraded, or destroyed ecosystem back to a functioning state. This fall I also joined the Fellowship for Restoration Ecologies and Cultures, which focuses on designing and implementing landscape restoration projects in the Carse Natural Area in Hinesburg, Vermont. I have learned an incredible amount about the environments surrounding me and found my place within them through both experiences. I have learned to engage in reciprocity with the land in a way more meaningful and tangible to me, and discovered how to practice ecological and community restoration.
Additionally, I have learned so much from the act of restoration itself. How to guide my life and principles based on the restoration processes; how to navigate relationships within my life and model them after natural processes. In other words, how to be natural. Through building beaver dam analogs on the Upper Oregon Creek in Montana to slow the movement of sediments, learning about process-based restoration, and removing buckthorn and honeysuckle in Carse to make way for native stem plantings, I have learned what being “natural” feels like.
The main goal of ecological restoration is to set the degraded landscape on a trajectory toward healthy ecosystem composition and structure. Because of this, restoration practitioners often have a difficult time defining what the end of the project will look like. Of course, you can define the end of the project by time, by what species reappear, or by measuring water quality, if that was the goal. But the great thing about restoration is that it recognizes ecosystems as dynamic and changing systems–exactly how we are, too. Our lives are dynamic, changing, and unpredictable. Just as a river meanders and shifts, our lives wander through different ways of being and knowing. Just as forests grow and change and will never look the same each year, our years may not see the same places or the same faces.
Here the aforementioned “process-based restoration” makes a return. Low-tech process-based restoration includes design principles mainly used in riverscape restoration. These principles are outlined in the Utah State University Restoration Consortium's “Riverscape Design Principles'' manual from 2019 which provides restoration practitioners with low-tech structures to implement in the restoration of impaired waterways. Low-tech structures are structures that are made from simple, cheap materials that often come from the surrounding landscape to add to waterways, similar to how beavers build their dams. In this case, “process-based” is referring to the desired end goal and leading actions of a restoration project that aims to restore the natural processes and systems of the landscape.
The restoration manual outlines several key riverscape principles including, “streams need space,” and, “inefficient conveyance of water is healthy.” Dynamic streams are healthy streams! Streams and rivers regularly shift and move along the landscape. I allow myself to do the same and welcome change within myself and in my surroundings. Knowing that I am just like a stream, changing and wandering, sometimes with an end goal, sometimes not, helps me remind myself that everything will work out. Similarly, the slow and inefficient movement of water in streams and rivers allows for groundwater and aquifers to replenish, reduces erosion, and reduces flood potential– hence the stream’s need for freeflow movement. In the past, I have always rushed through things, but just as streams benefit from the slow and gradual meandering of water, we also benefit from slowing down and being present and intentional.
The low-tech riverscape design manual similarly illustrates several key restoration principles: 1) it's okay to be messy, 2) there's strength in numbers, and 3) let the system do the work. These three principles, integral components to consider for river restorations, can also be directly applied to our own lives.
The first principle expresses that the more woody debris, rocks, and plants that you add to a river system, the healthier it becomes. More nutrients are added to the system and habitats are created. A messy river also moves slowly, which as mentioned previously allows the water ample time to seep into the soils. I often find myself becoming overly tied to a good grade or making sure I hit the next milestone in my life that arbitrarily was assigned to me. Seeing how rivers benefit from slow movements that wind with no set path reminds me to do the same. It’s ok if I am not on the same path as those around me–no two rivers follow the same course. Being as intentional and slow as these riverscapes has enabled me to be more observant, attentive, present, and appreciative in all the moments of my life instead of constantly rushing to finish the next task.
Structures placed in a river restoration project illustrate the second principle–that there is strength in numbers. Whether it’s visible or not, every branch, stone, and piece of sod all work together for the desired outcome. I have found that it is far too easy to push myself to accomplish things on my own because of the pride that comes from that. And there's absolutely no shame in feeling prideful and successful over something that you worked hard to accomplish, but two truths can be held at the same time and community is the glue that holds our individual lives together. A stone on its own can be gorgeously marbled, but amongst others, a stunning mosaic of color can appear.
The third and final principle states to allow the system to do the work. This means setting it up for success so that it can grow into something even healthier than it was before. Ecological restoration is an art. As an artist, it can be difficult to declare the work finished and walk away. However, you cannot expect something that is coddled to succeed. This also means doing the best we can and knowing that it will work out. I’ve come to learn that there is never any use in stressing over something that is out of my hands and that all I can do is do my best, stay positive, and know that everything will work out just fine.
There is a lot to learn from restoration. We can learn how to slow down and be intentional in our actions, and understand that just as rivers are dynamic, we are too. Recognizing some of the principles of restoration has allowed me to see that we are inherently natural. Natural in the sense that we too have intricate lives that rely on this vast amalgamation of communities, experiences, pieces, and players that shape every one of us in our own sweet time. The way we guide our relationships, our families, and our daily patterns follow those of natural systems like rivers. Our lives will ebb and flow over the years, seeing different people and places and changing into something better with each new experience that crosses it. We often see ourselves as something other than or above the natural world. In reality, we are deeply part of it and always will be. Throughout history, we have forcefully removed ourselves from nature and removed the more-than-human world from us, harming both in the process. Once we recognize our ways as meandering, boundless, and parallel to those of natural systems, we can begin living in tandem with our surroundings. And only once we allow ourselves to understand this innate togetherness will the world finally come into focus as we see the web of all of us, together. H
Art by Rachel Lamb
