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

After

Before

Ecological Restoration

The attempt to heal and make the human relationship to nature whole

Tree plantingLewis Creek Association, Charlotte, Vermont

Wetlands restorationCommon Ground Collective, New Orleans

Restoration may attempt to regenerate healthier ecosystem processes and place-oriented 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 SpiritualityRobert 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 experience-ethical 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 peopleIt 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

ConclusionThe 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.