Ecological Restoration 159
neighborhood community garden that my family has helped to tend for three generations,
then whether I regularly visit it to put in an afternoon’s work can be assessed as good or
bad because of the history that I have with that place regardless of whether it is an artifact
or not. My relationship with that place, as created by that history, creates presumptively
decisive reasons for action for me in relation to that place.
The same would be true if I were in a substantive normative relationship with another
person. There would be something lost or amiss if I didn’t contact them for a year out
of sheer indifference (for an example, see Light 2000). In such a case my indifference
could be interpreted as reason to doubt that the relationship was important to me at all.
So, too, something would be lost if I didn’t visit the community garden for a year out
of indifference. But what would be lost need not rely on attributing subjectivity to the
garden. My relationship with the garden is a kind of placeholder for a range of values
none of which is reducible as the sole reason for the importance of this relationship. To
distinguish this kind of relationship from others, I want to call it a “normative ecological
relationship,” both to identify it as a relationship involving nature under some description
in some way and just in case some wish to set aside for later consideration the issue of
how this sort of relationship might be substantively different from other normative rela-
tionships. Critically though, because this argument does not depend on attributing some-
thing like intrinsic value to nature itself, let alone subjectivity, the metaphysical status of
the object in such a relationship is not important to the justifi cation for forming a relation-
ship with or through it.
I should also note here that if I am in a normative ecological relationship with something
this does not mean that my reasons for action derived from that relationship could never
be overridden, either in the face of competing claims to moral obligations I might have to
other persons or other places, or because of some other circumstances that caused me to
separate myself from that place. It means only that my normative relationship to the place
can stand as a good reason for me to invest in the welfare of that place. Also important is
that the moral status of my relationship to such a place does not exist in an ethical or his-
torical vacuum. If my relationship to a place has been generated out of my experience of
having acted wrongly toward others at some site (let us say it is an inhumane prisoner-of-
war camp where I worked contentedly as a prison guard) then my character can be justly
maligned for so narrowly understanding the meaning of a place that has been a source of
ills for others. Outside of such extreme cases, though, my relationship to places can exhibit
the qualities that we would use to describe our relationships with others such as fi delity
and commitment.
Can ecological restorations be a source of such normative ecological relationships? It
seems entirely plausible if not unassailable that they can. There is sociological evidence
to document this effect for those who volunteer in restorations (Miles, Sullivan, and Kuo
2000). Over the past few years I have elaborated on this evidence and used it to argue that
we can maximize this potential value of ecological restorations when we open them to