Ecological Restoration as Public Spiritual Practice
Gretel Van Wieren, Ph.D.
Michigan State University
Department of Religious Studies
Key questions
• What do mean by public spiritual practice?
• How is it modeled in actual restoration
work?
• What are some ways in which restoration
can be understood as performing spiritual
and moral functions in society?
Ecological Restoration
The process of assisting the recovery of an
ecosystem that has been degraded,
damaged, or destroyed
--Society for Ecological Restoration
Lake Calumet Region
Battle Creek River Restoration
Before
Before
After
Ecological Restoration
The attempt to heal and make the human
relationship to nature whole
Tree planting
Lewis Creek Association, Charlotte, Vermont
Wetlands restoration
Common Ground Collective, New Orleans
Restoration may attempt to regenerate
healthier ecosystem processes and placeoriented communities, but it may also come
to mean much more than this – for
participants and for broader society.
--G. Van Wieren, Restored to Earth
“What restoration could and
should be for us is the
transformation of our souls.
In addition to what this work
may accomplish in the land,
I yearn for it as the yoga that
will cause us to evolve
spiritually, that will restore to
us a feeling of awe in
something besides our own
conceits.”
--Stephanie Mills, In Service of the Wild: Restoring
and Reinhabiting Damaged Land
We care for the land because it is good for
the land.
We care for the land because it is good for
the Lake Mendota watershed.
We care for the land because it is good for
the souls of all God’s people.
--Holy Wisdom Monastery, Middleton, WI
Practice-oriented Spirituality
Robert Wuthnow
• Engaging “intentionally in activities that deepen
relationship to the sacred.”
• Communal, meaning-making function
• “The point of spiritual practice is not to elevate an
isolated set of activities over the rest of life but to
electrify the spiritual impulse that animates all
life.”
Restoration as Public Ecological
Spiritual Practice
Given its explicitly ecological basis, as well as its
enactment out in the open—in the fields, forests,
woodlots, and wetlands of society—it is apt to call
restoration a healing ritual of public ecology; or a
public ecological spiritual practice
Dimensions of Restoration Public
Spiritual Practice
• Spiritual experienceethical action
• Service orientation
• Ritual action
• Connection to the sacred
• Renewal of self in
community
• Collective action
Restoration’s Ecological and Symbolic
Functions:
Problems and Challenges
• Ecology “straight up”
• No need for salvation
• Science, religion, ethics
A Model for Public Ecological Spiritual
Practice:
Holy Wisdom Monastery, Middleton, Wisconsin
•Restoration as sacramental
practice
•“Balance of the day”: work,
prayers, study, and leisure.
– Prairie work
– Nature study
– Contemplative prayer
•Community work days
Learning, praying, working, sharing
at the table, and celebrating
community form the framework for
public spiritual ecological practice
for the Benedictine restorationists.
Restoration as Sacred Work
“Ritualization” as “a way of acting that is designed
and orchestrated to privilege what is being done in
comparison to other, more quotidian activities…[It
is] a matter of variously culturally specific
strategies of setting some activities off from others,
for creating and privileging a qualitative distinction
between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane.”
--Catherine Bell
Restoration as Sacred Work
• Connection with nature
• Connection with other
people
It is the most uplifting
thing. We are really just high
being out there in nature
working with a small group of
people.”
--Marty Illick, Lewis Creek Association
Restoration as Sacred Work:
Faithful Practice
– “the divine is present in all creation…it has a
way of waking us up to the divine—of things
we didn’t create.” – Sister Mary David
– “wide opportunity for enjoyment in the land, a
sense of serving the sacredness of Nature,
and touching it with your hands.” – Stephanie Mills
Loss of Sacred Presence
• “God’s spot”
--Holy Wisdom Monastery
• “Ecosystem absences,”
“ghosts of lost
creatures”
--Freeman House, Totem Salmon: Life
Lessons from Another Species
“I lower the fingers of one hand into the
heart of creation and stir it once, twice. For
a moment my mind is completely still. Am I
holding my breath? I am held in the thrall of
a larger sensuality that extends beyond the
flesh”
--Freeman House, Totem Salmon
In this particular restorative act, the “intolerable
significance” of doing it right, biologically speaking
– capturing the female, releasing the eggs,
squirting the milt, mixing the mixture, and so on—
takes on symbolic, ritual significance, sacred
significance. Ecological act has, paradoxically,
become sacred act; scientific work, spiritual work.
Restoration as Public Witness
“ritual is, above all, an assertion of
difference…a means of performing the way
things ought to be in conscious tension to
the way things are.”
--Jonathan Z. Smith
“If civilization consists of
cooperation with plants, animals,
soil, and men, then a university
which attempts to define that
cooperation must have, for the use
of its faculty and students, places
which show what the land was,
what it is, and what it ought to be.
This arboretum may be regarded
as a place where, in the course of
time, we will build up an exhibit of
what was, as well as an exhibit of
what ought to be.”
--Aldo Leopold, 1934 dedication to arboretum at
University of Wisconsin
Restoration as Public Witness
• Witnessing through the activity of restoring nature
• Indictment of industrial progress
“We’ve been trying to get rid of those damn weeds for
a hundred years, and now you want to bring them back?”
--Farmer, Philo, IL
Restoration as Public Witness
• “Responding to the needs of the time”
• Main house ecologically converted
• From “wasteland” to “witness”
There still is room, restoration work reminds us, to
attempt to respect the order of nature, to learn how to
live more harmoniously, more beautifully, more
meaningfully and justly with land. People can come to
know a particular landed place and be drawn into its
slow, self-healing ways. Land, if given the chance, will
come back to prolific, thriving wild life. The human
spirit and heart can be transformed and renewed in the
midst of fragmentation and degradation.
--G. Van Wieren, Restored to Earth
Conclusion
The practice of ecological restoration can be
understood as a form of public spiritual practice that involves
sacred work and public witness.
In these ways it provides a spiritual practice for creating
deeper values in relation to particular landscapes and
communities of people.
It also provides ways for religious communities to
beneficially contribute to the unfolding era of restoration.