Restored ecosystems as instructive tactile landscapes

Restored ecosystems are compelling cultural landscapes. While ecological restoration is commonly posed as the re-creation of historic ecosystem states on damaged landscapes, restoration practices iteratively reshape notions of normativity, historicity, and the human role in proliferating biodiversity. They do so by transgressing entrenched conceptual boundaries such as nature/culture and mind/body. In this article, I examine a restoration project in the Midwestern US to theorize restored ecosystems as instructive cultural landscapes. I focus on three restoration practices which are shaped by (1) participants’ embodied experiences with the landscape and (2) the mediation of embodied experience through ecological theories and social dynamics of the project. I argue that a focus on embodied restoration practices offers opportunities to simultaneously employ discursive-materialist and non-representational approaches to cultural landscape geography. By conceptualizing ecological assemblages as self-assembling and autonomous, the project leaders give authority to the landscape to define how restorationists should engage with nonhuman inhabitants. This discourse facilitates restoration practices that rely on embodied experiences which are both non-representational and discursive. Finally, using ecosystem restoration as an example, I discuss how geographers might benefit from engaging with subjects, or events that are constituted by seemingly incongruous actors and concepts. These interstitial assemblages can serve as the basis for creating new worlds.