Without clear terminology, the eight industries of restorative development [natural: ecosystems, fisheries, farmlands, watersheds; built: brownfields, infrastructure, heritage, disaster/war] will have an exceedingly difficult time resolving their conflicts with each other. For instance, switching a farm from growing tobacco to growing cotton might contribute to the restoration of a society wishing to decrease its use of addictive, carcinogenic drugs, but it’s certainly not farm restoration. Cotton is less profitable and more damaging to the land than tobacco. Switching instead to raspberries might be both more profitable and less damaging to the land, but it’s still not farm restoration, only a change for the better. Switching to organic raspberries … now that might be restorative. All restoration is improvement, but not all improvement is restoration.

—Storm Cunningham, The Restoration Economy, p. 49

In Chapter 3 of The Restoration Economy, Storm Cunningham provides a list of the ways in which the current “restoration economy” is unique:

• This is the first time in history that the planet has been mostly developed, rather than mostly wilderness, pastures, and small-scale agriculture.

• This is the first time in history that the vast majority of our structures has been in a deteriorated state (thanks in part to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ sudden proliferation of built environment).

…

• This is the first Restoration Economy to occur subsequent to a population increase of four billion in just one century, after having taken hundreds of millennia to reach half that.

• This is the first Restoration Economy to occur in a world with tightly connected societies and economies, thanks to telephones, TV, airlines, the Internet, satellites, express freight, and international lending.

…

Bottom line: we humans are at a unique moment in our development.

Note: Cunningham gives more than one definition of Restoration Economy in his book. He regards it as the third phase of a cycle that begins with new development. New developments require maintenance, and they will eventually require restoration. A restoration economy may occur after a crisis (such as an earthquake that destroys a city), the fall of a civilization, or any time a society begins to run out of space to expand.

Storm Cunningham’s book The Restoration Economy has a good quote on just about every page, but I can’t possible fit them all in here. I did find a section of Chapter 2 that I wanted to quote, however.

From “The End of the Beginning” in Chapter 2 comes this lovely analogy:

Like a pig in a python, the bulk of economic activity is moving inexorably from centuries of frenetic new development toward a frenzy of restoration. Even if we weren’t living on a small world with a booming population (Constraint Crisis), the crumbling of our built environment (Corrosion Crisis) means the bulge can’t help but move into restoration mode. If new development proceeded in a linear, gradual fashion, the transition to restoration wouldn’t take us so much by surprise. But extended orgies of new development tend, as we’ve experienced, to be followed by economic ruin, pathological stagnation, or a sudden, healthful storm of restoration.

I’m all for “a sudden, healthful storm of restoration.” But Cunningham isn’t finished yet.

Without restoration, to continue the python analogy to its nasty denouement, it all turns to … well, you know (Contamination Crisis). Most of the energy produced by our national economic “digestive process” is wasted by a horribly inefficient industrial system (which also has a tremendous gas problem: witness global climate change), rather than being channeled into the “body” of our civilization. We must either convert the “dead pig” of previous development into the “healthy python” of restored worlds—shedding our old ways in the process—or we’re left with nothing but stinky excreta. Well, I’ve beaten that metaphorical snake quite to death, yes?

Yes, indeed, you have. And now it’s time for lunch.Pig’s feet, anyone?

In Chapter 1 of The Restoration Economy, Storm Cunningham discusses the 3 crises: Constraint, Corrosion, and Contamination. And then he discusses 3 myths that, he says, “cloud our perception of the Three Crises.”

Myth #2: The prime economic value of ecosystems is their products

For centuries, our accountants have measured only the timber, fish, nuts, deer, etc., harvested from ecosystems. … The services provided by Earth’s natural ecosystems far exceed the value of their products.

…

Ecosystem services include air and water purification, genetic resource development/storage, healthful aesthetics, and carbon sequestration (turning atmospheric carbon into oxygen and nongaseous forms of carbon, such as wood, in order to mitigate global climate change). (Chapter 1, p. 25)

And that doesn’t include services such as pollination of crops by bees and other insects and birds.

In Chapter 1, Storm Cunningham discusses three crises affecting the globe in the twenty-first century:

1. The Constraint Crisis: Simply put, we’re running out of room. We can’t continue to increase the population and increase consumerism without running into a wall at some point.

2. The Corrosion Crisis: Our built environment is not in the best of shape. And even those parts in better shape are based on less than energy efficient design.

3.The Contamination Crisis: In a word, pollution.

Toward the end of the Introduction to The Restoration Economy, Storm Cunningham muses about his travels:

As mentioned in the Preface, I’ve spent much of my last 20 years exploring our planet’s last remaining healthy jungles, reefs, and other ecosystems. I must be a masochist, because I return to some of my favorite nature spots from time to time. This allows me to perceive their decline, which is often tragic to the point of lumpy throat and leaky eyes. I’ve simultaneously encountered almost universal degradation of communities and cultures. This, too, is deeply tragic, and profoundly moving.

After witnessing a lifetime of marginally successful environmental efforts, failed urban revitalization plans, and the general decrease of satisfaction with our lives and our world in general, a bright light has suddenly appeared at the end of the tunnel.

In every development-related industry I surveyed over the past four years [this book was published in 2002], what has been most exciting to the investors and business planners has been the growth of restorative projects. This made me realize that tremendous untapped growth potential was awaiting the day that this immense economic sector came together and was recognized.

The only land in the city of Milwaukee zoned as farmland is the 2 acres on the northern outskirts on which Growing Power sits. It’s a poor neighborhood near housing projects. Executive director Will Allen, who grew up on a farm in Maryland, partnered with Growing Power in 1993 to fight what he calls “food racism” and to teach people, young and old, about farming on limited space in urban areas. Here’s a quote from the “Our History” section of Growing Power’s website:

Will designed a program that offered teens an opportunity to work at his store and renovate the greenhouses to grow food for their community.  What started as a simple partnership to change the landscape of the north side of Milwaukee has blossomed into a national and global commitment to sustainable food systems. Since its inception, Growing Power has served as a ”living museum” or “idea factory” for the young, the elderly, farmers, producers, and other professionals ranging from USDA personnel to urban planners.  Training areas include the following: acid-digestion, anaerobic digestion for food waste, bio-phyto remediation and soil health, aquaculture closed-loop systems, vermiculture, small and large scale composting, urban agriculture, perma-culture, food distribution, marketing, value-added product development, youth development, community engagement, participatory leadership development, and project planning.

Growing Power also has farms in Chicago, including one built right on top of an old basketball court.

There’s a similar organization called Denver Urban Gardens in my neck of the woods. It started in 1985 and hired co-executive directors in 1993. Today DUG has more than 80 sites in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods throughout Denver.

Tiri’s Garden “broke ground” last year at the corner of 15th and California in downtown Denver. It was the brainchild of Christie Isenberg. Here’s a Westword article that has a list of other articles about what’s going on in Denver.

How is this restoration? Well, it’s not technically land restoration, if by that you mean restoration of privately or publicly owned lands that are mostly dedicated to habitat for animals and plants. But it is restoration of the urban environment. It is restoration of health for people in poor neighborhoods who may never have learned to farm and may not have any grocery stores nearby, since the big chains tend to avoid poor neighborhoods. And you might even call it restoration of the built environment, the kind of thing Storm Cunningham mentions in his book The Restoration Economy, which I’m quoting from on this blog.

You might find more information about these kinds of projects if you searched for “Transition Towns” online or for “Transition Your City.”

A 1995 survey of 51 U.S. universities revealed that 11 had graduate programs in restoration ecology (at that time, many European universities had undergraduate degrees in that subject, but not graduate programs). Bottom line: you’ll be shocked to see how much restoration is going on around you, once you’re sensitized to it.

What does this mean for you or your organization? If a sizeable portion of your business, your investments, or your community economic development plan is not related to restoration in some way, you’re missing out on the greatest growth frontier of the twenty-first century.

—Storm Cunningham, The Restoration Economy, p. 5

That’s a strong statement. Of course, he’s including restoration of the built environment as well as the natural environment. Restoration of the natural environment is harder to see because so much of it takes place away from where people live, that is, cities and suburbs.

The current interest in landscaping with native plants, as well as the installation of green roofs on buildings, will make restoration more visible to those not immediately involved in it.

Industries that restore the built environment have far more in common with those restoring the natural environment than either group realizes.

—Storm Cunningham, The Restoration Economy, p. ix