Welcome by Jordan Engel

Welcome to the blog of Berea College’s first ever Ecological Restoration class. We’re a group of five students and one dedicated professor, Dr. Richard Olson, who are spending the next month of our lives studying the theory and applying the practice of repairing the Earth. Ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed. With that definition in mind, there’s a lot of work to be done. As upperclassmen and students of sustainability, we have learned that the Earth’s ecosystems are all critically endangered. In the continental US alone we have lost 95% of the old-growth forests, 99% of the native prairie, 53% of the wetlands, and 70% of the riparian forests. It’s the same story of ecological murder around the world – Earth has entered into a mass extinction of biodiversity and there is just one species to blame – humans. The major indirect causes of this are exponentially rising levels of human population and consumption of natural resources. Our global actions then lead to habitat loss, climate change, and the introduction of invasive species to and ecosystem which are some of the leading direct drivers of biodiversity loss.

But why should we value biodiversity anyway? As long as humans survive, what else matters? The answer is resilience – the ability of a system to withstand change without collapsing. The more biologically diverse the Earth is, the more resilient it is against disturbance. With the many “disturbances” our society faces today – climate change, peak oil, economic collapse, food insecurity – resilience is the key to our survival. With growing agreement among scientist that it may be too late to stop climate change, the next step is adaptation. Even Bill McKibben, a leading environmentalist, recently acknowledged, “We’re no longer at the point of trying to stop global warming. It’s too late for that. We’re trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity.” While the fight to prevent further climate change continues, the fight to preserve biodiversity diversity must also escalate as we buffer the systems of resilience.

That’s why ecological restoration is so crucial – we’re buffering the systems of resilience. If we had to quantify the value of the world’s ecological services, I’m not sure we could. Is there anything that we can say is more valuable than a habitable planet? Like the planet itself, the knowledge and skills we will learn in doing ecological restoration are priceless.

In this class, we will not be resigning to sit in a classroom while the Earth is being destroyed. Dirtying our hands, we’ll be actively restoring various ecosystems while we learn because this work is so crucial and because what better way is there to learn than through experience? The class will take us from the mountaintop removal mines of Eastern Kentucky to the drained farmland of the Bluegrass Region, to the depleted oyster beds in the Chesapeake Bay. In all of our sites, we’ll be working alongside professional restorers to learn about the unique challenges in each ecosystem. Through this blog, we’ll be posting daily about our experiences, and we hope that others will be learning with us.