PARENT SESSION
Symposium #8: Linking the Leopold Legacy and Ecological Restoration in the Southwestern U.S. and Northwestern Mexico.

Organized by: W Forbes, C Meine, and C Curtin
Monday, August 5. 1:00 PM to 3:45 PM. Maricopa Meeting Room, TCC.

The ecology of ecological restoration: from the Clementsian climax to Leopoldian land health.

CALLICOTT, J. BAIRD^*,1, ¹ University of North Texas, Denton, TX

ABSTRACT- Aldo Leopold outlined, perhaps for the first time, the concept of and a rationale for ecological restoration, in a speech, delivered on June 17, 1934, for the dedication ceremony of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum and Wildlife Refuge. In articulating the concept of ecological restoration, Leopold targeted "a sample of original Wisconsin" for restoration efforts at the arboretum. Leopold naturally assumed the then prevailing Clementsian paradigm in ecology, according to which a region would remain in its climax successional sere until disturbed by some exogenous agent (European-American settlers, in the case of Wisconsin). According to the current "flux of nature" paradigm in ecology, the condition of Wisconsin when first settled by European-American's was not static and "original," but a mere moment in a kaleidocopically and ceaslessly changing landscape mosaic. Leopold's rationale for ecological restoration--to provide, in the absence of proximate "wilderness," a point of reference for assessing the "health" of proximate economically exploited landscapes--suggests a target for ecological restoration that does not implicitly invoke obsolete ecological assumptions. For purely antiquarian reasons ecological restoration might aim to recreate a historical assembly of species on a given site. But for more practical and for more ethically defensible reasons, ecological restoration might become instead ecological rehabilitation and aim to restore a site to a condition of land (or ecosystemic) health, irrespective of that site's ensemble of species at some arbitrarily selected historical moment.

KEY WORDS: Leopold, restoration, rehabilitation, health