As we all know, restoration is a big part of what RMFI does with our sweat equity. We’ve led the push to restore social trails and gullies in places such as Garden of the Gods, and played a big role in large-scale restoration projects in the Hayman Burn Area and on Pikes Peak. We all know it makes sense now, but when did this idea of restoring wild places back to their pre-human conditions first come about?

Many people believe that Aldo Leopold was one of the first to consider restoration a land management tactic. Best known for his classic book A Sand County Almanac, Leopold took a landscape approach to land management, linking conservation science, policy, and ethics in an effort to ensure the future health of land and water. An avid hunter, Leopold utilized A Sand County Almanac to communicate the true connection between people and the natural world, knowing the only way to protect the land is to foster an ethic for it.

Though at the time ‘restoration ecology’ was not part of land management jargon, it can be argued that Leopold was thinking that way before most. In one proving example, Leopold oversaw the Coon Valley erosion control project run by the Soil Erosion Service, whose goal was “not just to save soil, but to reverse the tradition of disintegrative land use that wasted it in the first place.” He also led the creation of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum “… to reconstruct … a sample of what [Wisconsin] looked like when our ancestors arrived …”

Though he might have been cutting edge in realizing the need for restoration, Leopold first and foremost believed in protecting the land and said, “there [are] no miracle cures for the symptoms of ‘land pathology’… [That] the only effective treatment was preventative.” This is a lesson that we can all learn from, knowing that while restoration is necessary, it’s easier on the body and on the land to not harm it in the first place.

From A Sand County Almanac:

"This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter down river. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these ‘resources,’ but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such."