Restoration as world-making and repair: A pragmatist agenda

Abstract

The UN’s Decade of Ecosystem Restoration commenced in June 2021, with the expectation that ecological restoration will be vastly scaled-up internationally. Millions of hectares of the earth’s surface is projected to be restored, from forests and peatland to rivers, reefs and grasslands. This will transform restoration from a predominantly localized, community-driven field to a highly capitalized, professional activity. As the renowned biologist E. O. Wilson proposed, the twenty-first century certainly does look likely to be characterized by restoration. And yet, thus far, the still emerging field of ecological restoration has been dominated by the natural sciences, in both theory and practice, neglecting broader questions of how to live in and with restored landscapes. This paper contends that if restoration is to be significantly expanded over the next decade, the social sciences and humanities must be involved to ensure its purpose is given adequate scrutiny, by engaging wider publics of interest in scheme planning, design and implementation. This is crucial given the dominance of natural capital accounting in restoration, which privileges economic reasoning over alternative, more radical forms. Pragmatism, which has a substantive philosophical interest in the relationship between humans and their environment, can offer a distinctive orientation to inquiry conducive to collaboration between the natural and social disciplines. Focusing on waterway restoration in the United Kingdom, and drawing on social and natural science literature, this paper outlines a pragmatist research agenda that recognizes multiplicity in nature, advocates experimentation in human-environment relations, and foregrounds community in democratic renewal. The paper considers not only ways that pragmatism can inform restoration but how restoration can advance a pragmatist agenda for invigorating public life. This encourages scholars to think with not only against restoration, attending to composition as well as critique, as part of a political urban ecology.

If the fundamental question of the political is how we could live our lives otherwise…so too is it timely to ask how a planet becomes other than it is. (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021: 4)

A cosmological shift

The biggest paradigmatic shake-up since the mid-1980s when sustainability rose to international prominence is currently unfolding in environmental science, policy and practice. Over the last five years, ecological restoration, ‘the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged or destroyed’ (SER, 2004: 3), has dramatically risen up the global agenda. As the irreversible impacts of modern human societies on ecosystems across the world have become increasingly apparent, attention has turned from conservation to restoration, from cessation of harmful activities to active recovery and repair. The UN’s Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (2021 − 2030) commenced in June 2021, which aims to ‘draw together political support, scientific research and financial muscle to massively scale up restoration from successful pilot initiatives to areas of millions of hectares’. Governments have been asked by the UN to restore at least 1 billion hectares, an area the size of China, requiring political ambition comparable to the space race (UNEP, 2021). In the United Kingdom, the focus here, ecological restoration has recently moved front and centre of debate in the environment sector, and is now regularly covered in the national media. In June 2020, a coalition of 50 leading environmental organizations wrote to the UK Chancellor calling for investment in a national nature service to restore woodland, heaths, peatland, marshes and rivers. The same month the CEO of the Wildlife Trusts insisted that ‘restoring nature needs to be given top priority’ (Harvey, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has further underlined the vital importance of natural landscape for society, adding impetus to the government's recent commitment to 'nature recovery', the focus of a green paper on restoration in 2022.

This is not simply a change of policy but a fundamental reorientation of the collective mindset that increasingly recognizes the potentially meaningful role of humans in world-making as well as world-breaking, transcending the cognitive divide entrenched in modern society between nature and culture. This may come across as passé to those versed in a particular brand of post-structural theory, which has for decades relentlessly attacked, from a multitude of analytical angles, the ‘modern constitution’ that rigidly separates the ‘natural world and the social world’ (Latour, 1993: 13). The difference now is that natural scientists are coming around to this erstwhile heterodox perspective, with growing acceptance of so-called ‘novel’ or ‘emerging’ ecosystems, characterized by structure, composition and function that depart, under human influence, from historical trajectories (Hobbs et al., 2009). Even hydrological science – that most hard-nosed of physical disciplines – has been compelled to account for the inextricable interconnectedness of humans and water cycle dynamics, leading to the development of socio-hydrology (Sivapalan et al., 2014). Under the influence of hydrological science, water management had been dominated by a technical, quantitative understanding of ‘modern water’, a resource abstracted from its social, historical and local context, and subject to engineering and hydraulics (Linton, 2010). The conventional representation of the water cycle – the core framework of hydrological science – is devoid of human social relations, portrayed in exclusively geophysical terms of precipitation, streamflow and evaporation.

As the previously distinct concerns of natural and social scientists progressively overlap as ecosystems become ever more entangled with human activity, what it means to assist the recovery of an ecosystem is becoming more fluid and contested. Like the term ‘nature’ itself, restoration is a slippery concept with multiple meanings and applications, which in the Anthropocene, an era characterized by universal human influence, has become even more ambiguous to determine. Restoration, as the term implies, suggests a return to a prior state, but in the Anthropocene this is rarely possible or appropriate, therefore it may be that function, integrity, complexity or autonomy is being restored rather than historical conditions. What unites those invested in restoration is the relatively novel assumption that reparative must take priority over preventative measures given the scale of human modification, to proactively regenerate depleted ecosystems. According to Latour (2017), the growing recognition and acceptance of human agency in ecosystem dynamics is emblematic of a much deeper cosmological shift in the contemporary metaphysics of nature, comparable to the Copernican Revolution in cultural impact. The previously inanimate earth has become animated, acting as a subject rather than object, with humans implicated in its historical unfolding: ‘from now on there are no more spectators…there are no more tourists, the feeling of the sublime has disappeared along with the safety of the onlookers’ (40). The earth is eminently unstable, historical, plural and indeed social, that is, connected indelibly with human history, characterized by values and contingency as much as facts and laws.

Increasingly, across the sciences, it is implicitly understood that life forms, human and nonhuman, do not so much inhabit as constantly and collectively reengineer the planet. This realization has precipitated, in the words of Latour, ‘a profound mutation in our relation to the world’ (8), as the earth, the ground beneath our feet and the atmosphere that surrounds us, has lost its sense of permanence and stability, as it becomes apparent that humans - some much more than others - have capacity to remake the planet, from the acidification of the oceans to the warming of the climate: ‘Humans are geological, atmospheric, and hydrological agents entangled in all the earth’s processes, which are now increasingly in flux’ (Nail, 2021: 2). As Latour states, ‘we are the atmosphere’ (105), there is nothing external to humans, whether this be termed Nature or ‘the environment’, which previously offered the reassuring perspective of distance, so integral, cosmologically, to western modernity. In this disorienting new cosmology, what Latour terms the New Climatic Regime, there is no fixed, universal outside to humankind, which the venerable if ambiguous concept of Nature previously offered, itself challenged by non-equilibrium ecology in the 1970s. Balance of nature, what Kricher (2009) describes as ecology’s enduring myth, has proven extremely tenacious as a concept, not least because it offers a comforting depiction of the earth for humans, locating order in chaos (see also Worster, 1994). Even Darwin and Haeckel, who helped found modern ecology, assumed a balance in nature, which humans could unsettle and disrupt (Egerton, 2012). Instead, humans are now faced with a multiplicity of possible future worlds which they can shape with their unprecedented geological power, in ways both benign and dangerous. The static background that has for centuries provided a fixed blueprint for human action has not so much disappeared as come alive, begun to move and mutate, wriggled loose from its bearings: ‘As if the décor had gotten up on stage to share the drama with the actors’ (Latour, 2017: 3). Henceforth, humans will be always already implicated in environmental process and change, willingly or not, as both makers and breakers of worlds.

The rise of restoration

As urbanization has accelerated in countries that until recently were predominantly rural, and more and more of the planet becomes irrevocably tangled up in wires, pipes, roads and buildings, the notion that ecosystems can be ring-fenced and protected in a natural state has become ever more fanciful. As Büscher and Fletcher (2020: 3) observe, intellectual battle lines have been drawn between new conservationists who embrace novel ecosystems emerging in the human-made milieux of the Anthropocene, and neoprotectionists that advocate for the rapid roll-out of vast nature reserves, calling for ‘a separation between people and nature on a scale hitherto never imagined’. This current rift is a contemporary expression of a more longstanding, deep-seated fault line in the conservation movement. It is rather easy to forget, in the era of ecological urbanism, just how radically outlandish the idea of urban nature conservation seemed when the first hesitant attempts were made in the UK to transplant this agenda to the city in the late-1970s, marked by ‘Bunny’ Teagle's (1978) study of urban ecology in Birmingham and the Black Country, and Mabey's (1980) The Common Ground. There were precedents such as W. H. Hudson’s Birds in London from 1898 and Richard Fitter’s London’s Natural History published in 1945, which anticipated the later emergence of urban ecology (Gandy, 2022a). Nevertheless, many in the traditional conservation movement ‘despised’ the very notion and suspected it would be a ‘passing fad’ (Cole, 1983: 282). The respected scientific field of urban ecology was initially met with bemusement, taken as an oxymoron, where the countryside was deemed the fitting home of nature conservation, isolated from the ever-expanding urban environment.

In the Anthropocene, this traditional conservation ideal of closing off pristine nature can appear rather quaint, akin to untying a constantly tightening Gordian knot (Lorimer, 2015). And indeed, policy focus is shifting from traditional conservation to ecological restoration, which recognizes the central, dominant and inevitable role of humans in ecosystem dynamics. While the multiple ecological impacts of human activities once perceived as shocking have been rendered banal by repeated daily media exposure – widespread deforestation and habitat destruction, global warming and changing weather patterns, disruption of nutrient cycles and soil degradation, massive and unprecedented species loss – so now has the solution: to repair what has been degraded by the great acceleration (Steffen et al., 2015). Restoration projects tend be applied, pragmatic and community-focused, dependent on amateur volunteers pulling up weeds and counting insects (Higgs, 2003). As Lave (2012) shows, there is a traditional grassroots folksiness to restoration. When there is growing clamour for solutions such as geoengineering, oriented towards capital-intensive, technological interventions conceived on a planetary scale, restoration remains, as a field practice, one largely for the welly-clad, waist-deep in streams, ankle-deep in peatland. And yet, this folksy culture, already increasingly professionalized since the 1990s as a vehicle for enabling development through damage offsetting (Martin, 2022), is set to change over the next decade as restoration is scaled-up through UN advocacy.

Emerging in the 1980s, restoration ecology as a scientific field is relatively immature, where its principles, methods and evidence base are still developing (Clewell and Aronson, 2013). While there had been schemes prior to the 1980s – George Perkins Marsh promoted restoration in Man and Nature in 1864 – it was not until the 1990s that restoration ecology gained a foothold as a scientific discipline, with testable hypothesises, guiding principles and peer-reviewed research (Hall, 2005). Developed amongst others by William Jordan III, John Cairns, Anthony Bradshaw and Richard Hobbs, restoration ecology was initially ad hoc and site-specific, focused on small-scale projects on prairies, grassland, forests, marshes, wetlands and waterways. Even as it was being hailed by advocates as a new ecological paradigm, it lacked a coherent theoretical framework and professional agenda, and was a mixture of scientific and lay assumptions (Hobbs and Norton, 1996). The 1990s and 2000s was therefore a period of ‘academic soul-searching’, with restoration ecologists ‘trying to discover and develop conceptual bases for their emerging science’ (Young et al., 2005: 669). The main objective of contemporary restoration ecology has been to provide the concepts, techniques and evidence base for understanding how an ecosystem functioned before it was modified, degraded or destroyed. By manipulating structure and composition, through landscaping and species reintroduction, a site can have key processes reinstated. With the growing understanding of complexity in ecosystem dynamics, the focus of restoration ecology has gradually shifted from attaining a pre-disturbance ‘natural’ state towards attaining an acceptable level of functionality; service has come to supplant that of composition.

A new paradigm

Ecological restoration marks a new paradigm in environmental theory and practice. First, and most fundamentally, the underlying assumption of restoration ecology is that ecosystem change or degradation is not a permanent, irrevocable condition. If restorative measures are taken to reduce or remove stressors before a certain threshold is reached, current conditions may prove temporary. As Young (2000: 79) observes, ‘[o]ne may even say that restoration ecologists tend to be optimistic, and conservation biologists pessimistic’. Certainly, there is a risk that such an assumption can divert resources away from traditional conservation. Government policy already reflects the assumption that altered ecosystems can be subsequently restored, even though the success rate of restoration remains inconsistent (Suding et al., 2015). In the UK, the natural capital agenda perpetuates this logic by reconceiving environmental features as a fungible asset base, rendered exchangeable through the pricing mechanism. Furthermore, as global environmental change continues to drive ecosystems beyond thresholds into alternative states, restoration to historical benchmarks may no longer be viable or appropriate (Pettorelli et al., 2018). Nevertheless, as the excitement surrounding rewilding demonstrates (Carver et al., 2021), restoration can enthuse and galvanize when the prospect of reversing damage is ventured.

Second, when compared with conservation and sustainable development, ecological restoration tends to be project-driven and characterized by site-based engagement and on-the-ground experimentation. Where sustainable development has been very much policy-driven and propagated through global summits, and conservation has traditionally been orchestrated by governments, restoration has been the concern of practitioners operating at a local-scale, with strong grassroots links with adjacent communities (Gross, 2006). This is partly a result of epistemology: where conservation has a scientific background in zoology, genetics, description and theoretical development, restoration is rooted in botany, organism interactions and community assembly, and applied, experimental techniques. At risk of caricaturing both conservation and restoration, the former has tended to be driven by top-down drivers, requiring large field studies and laboratory testing, while the latter has evolved from the bottom-up, through community initiative and nature groups (Young, 2000). This background arguably makes restoration conducive to experimentation of a social scientific kind, through community-based engagement.

Third, and most provocatively, restoration ecology differs markedly from traditional conservation by recognizing that humans have a constructive, ongoing role to play in the dynamics, functionality and regeneration of the physical environment (Gross, 2003). As Jordan et al. (1988: 55) stated in an early intervention, ‘[i]n restoration, the goal is to return degraded biological communities to their original state with human help. Though such efforts have generally played a minor role in conservation efforts…it seems likely that this role will increase as pristine habitat becomes scarcer and as opportunities to ‘recycle' ecosystems disturbed by human activities and unusual natural events become more common’. Indeed, the unprecedented capacity of humans to modify, transform and harness earth processes can be restorative as well as destructive. This may include the initial repair of a modified or degraded ecosystem, and its continued maintenance going into the future, which can serve to root communities in the landscape, whether these are scientists, conservationists or local residents. Rather than containing ecosystems in protected spaces as conservation traditionally advocates, restoration puts human agency and creativity front and centre.

Restoration from the inside

This has profound implications for how the physical environment is conceived as more-than-human but less-than-natural. Whereas conservation hitherto focused efforts on the immediate cessation of damaging types of activity, ecological restoration instead shifts attention to the production of new environments, endowing humans with great effectivity and responsibility. Ecological restoration has a redemptive quality, an act of healing scars resulting from human activity (Jordan, 2003). The UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration will dramatically scale-up, mainstream and commercialize this conventionally grassroots practice, therefore it is imperative that a social scientific and humanities perspective is provided, to deliberate its purpose and wider implications. Certainly, the social sciences and humanities have contributed to ecological restoration theory for decades (Gobster and Hull, 2000). However, this has largely been from the outside of practice, as evaluative lessons from restoration experiences or consideration of its moral and ethical foundations, as opposed to in situ collaboration with natural scientists on design, planning and implementation, to deliver social objectives through on-the-ground experimentation. Technical concerns have driven restoration activity rather than questions of how to live in and with restored landscapes, which are invariably addressed post hoc (Buck, 2019). This may appear counterintuitive to those, often ‘harder’ natural scientists, who complain that restoration ecology has been driven by social rather than ecological concerns, to the point of bringing its status of science occasionally into question. Yet, without the input of social scientists and humanities scholars, engagement with social concerns has lacked the necessary sophistication, rigour and ambition, understandably so given the different expertise of restoration ecologists. This is problematic as ecological restoration, whether river, peatland or climate, entails the making of new worlds, the cultivation of alternative futures, and the reinvention of humans’ relationship to the environment. As Haraway (2016) contends, worlds can be made and unmade through comings-together between species and milieux in different and surprising ways.

Although Haraway declares herself ‘not interested in reconciliation or restoration’ (10), the tentacular ontology that she describes can inform thinking on restoration, showing it to be fundamentally an exercise in collaborative ‘worlding’ (16). Developing similar ideas, Tsing (2015: 152) considers how ‘world-making projects’ abound everywhere and often go unnoticed, but together, by overlapping and interacting, create the planet upon which all life depends: ‘Bacteria made our oxygen atmosphere, and plants help maintain it. Plants live on land because fungi made soil by digesting rocks’ (22). Life forms, from microbes and vegetation to animals and humans, are no longer understood to live in but constitute the environment; the earth is reconceived as an entangled muddle of overlapping, imbricated lifeways. This is world-making in a very literal sense of life making life on earth possible, extending further more longstanding assumptions in ecological thought that organisms engineer their surroundings, to the extent of bringing the environment itself into question, as something external to life. This cosmology of entangled co-existence is important as the earth is reconceived as a temporary outcome of interactions between living things, especially humans, which, through their actions, intentional and otherwise, can destroy and create worlds. A corollary of this shift is that the natural world becomes pluralized, opened up to different arrangements and possibilities, and thereby politicized, as these arrangements determine how life forms are able to exist and co-exist (Escobar, 2018). While the planetary implicitly universalizes earth’s communities, features and systems into a singular collective subject (Derickson, 2018), scholars such as Haraway, Latour and Tsing mobilize the terms world and worlding to achieve precisely the opposite, to draw attention to the plurality of presents and futures: ‘we are going to try to descend from “nature” down toward the multiplicity of the world’ (Latour, 2017: 36).

Restoration can therefore encourage humans to recognize that worlds can be arranged differently and composed otherwise in the context of what pragmatist thinker William James (1977 [1909]: 147) termed the pluriverse. For James, who had a background in biology, if one studies the concrete flux of life empirically, it becomes clear that nature is plural not singular, a ‘manyness-in-oneness’, not an integrated complete whole governed by universal laws. This has become evident in the Anthropocene, characterized by the increased volatility, indeed mutability, of the earth. The Newtonian universe of homogeneous, unified, mechanical space is collapsing into a livelier, more unpredictable cosmology, endowing the earth with a long-suppressed heterogeneity, contingency and history. As pragmatist Dewey (1920: 71) observed, ‘[t]he very things that make the nature of the mechanical-physical scientist esthetically blank and dull are the things which render nature amenable to human control. When qualities were subordinated to quantitative and mathematical relationships, color, music and form disappeared from the object of the scientist's inquiry’. The new cosmology owes more to biology and ecology than to physics, with attention turning from space to matter, extension to intensity, laws to contingency (Debaise, 2017). Within the natural sciences, as understanding of thresholds and tipping points consolidates, the notion of a singular Earth is giving way to the idea that multiple Earths have succeeded one another, due to shifting chemical, biological and physical conditions (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021). This subject matter, in both senses, has been ripe for social scientific and humanities study, opening up a realm dominated by the natural sciences to critical, imaginative inquiry.

Just as the Anthropocene started out as a scientific concept but migrated to the humanities and social sciences, it is crucial that restoration is subject to similar critical scrutiny. Restoration is attracting growing interest from the humanities and social sciences, particularly in this journal (Brock, 2020; Clay, 2019; Dunlap and Sullivan, 2020; Hrckova, 2021; Kotsila et al., 2021; Lockhart and Rea, 2019; Oviatt, 2020; Parish, 2020; Prévost and Rivaud, 2019). This work has predominantly focused on restoration as socio-ecological fix under neoliberal capitalism, enabling and depoliticizing ‘accumulation by restoration’ (Huff and Brock, 2017). And yet, the generative possibilities for social and political engagement have been limited, which must also be considered if restoration is to be scaled-up. As a world-making practice, ecological restoration can provide a tangible basis for cultivating new futures, but critical scholars must be prepared to offer alternatives to the mainstream capitalist approach ‘from the inside’ of practice (Ingold, 2013: 5); thinking with not only against restoration, engaging with restoration’s procedures, techniques, materials, tools and concepts. This requires opening the black-box of restoration as well as critiquing it from the outside as just another example of green capitalism. It is certainly this, but much more too.

Pragmatism and naturalism

Restoration in many ways resonates with pragmatist philosophy, which is currently enjoying another resurgence of interest across the humanities and social sciences. A modern philosophical tradition that emerged in America in the late nineteenth century, established by Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey, pragmatism sought to refocus social inquiry around the everyday, applied and empirical: ‘It was a philosophy of practical achievement. Ideas were labelled true when they enabled us to get things done’ (Barnes, 2008: 1544). For pragmatists, thinking and learning, and indeed something resembling truth, occurs through everyday interventions in the physical world, through application and experimentation in concrete settings, rather than in abstract language, thought and concepts. Plurality in practice and form is emphasized over singularity in representation and concept, providing ontological wiggle room for multiple, overlapping worlds of practice, experience and being (Law, 2015). Indeed, pluralism is a defining feature of pragmatism, which, as James captured in his notion of the pluriverse, opens up the possibility of coexisting realities. For James, a primary objective of pragmatism was to ‘dramatise the manifold nature of the world in the face of its imperial “monification”’ (Savransky, 2021: 142). The world is not a coherent, unified reality that can be known in its entirety like the mechanics of a car, but is constantly being made and remade. Reality is additive and open-ended rather than synergistic and unified.

Thirty years ago, Emel (1991) proposed that pragmatism offered a more practical basis for addressing the ecological problem than academic Marxism, which, articulated in a rather general sense, privileges critique, theory and singularity over reform, practice and multiplicity. In contrast, ‘[s]ocial experimentation is the basic norm of this [provocative] pragmatism. Rebirthing of nature-society relations must be experimental in dialogic evolution and in practice because we are seeking to articulate not only what is, but “what has never been”’ (387). The natural world, and human society’s relation with it, was a driving concern of pragmatism. With its commitment to empiricism and scientific method, pragmatism has traditionally been described as a form of naturalism. Pragmatists sought to transpose the scientific method to social inquiry, taking the natural sciences, particularly biology, as its inspiration. The intellectual fulcrum of pragmatism, as Pearce (2020) contends, is the organism-environment relationship, where the natural biology of Darwin makes for a more lively kind of philosophy than does Newton’s physical mechanics. As James (2000 [1907]: 27) wrote, pragmatism ‘turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power…[i]t means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth’. Whereas rationalist philosophy, dominated by Descartes and Kant, takes as its ontological basis physics and mathematics, pragmatists went into the field to observe the flux of life in process.

Dewey himself described pragmatism as naturalistic, owing not only its method but its subject matter to evolutionary theory, particularly that of Charles Darwin: ‘[Pragmatists] conceived of human practices as the behaviors of a social species both shaping and responding to its environment, and in the process modifying its own ethological makeup’ (Bagger, 2018: 3). The human self and physical world co-evolve, mediated through knowledge, customs and habits, challenging sharp dichotomies between the subject and object, mind and body (Bernstein, 2010). The task of pragmatism is to probe the categories and assumptions that structure and direct human experience in relation to the environment, where truth is always situated, limited, yet practical (Bridge, 2020). By situating democracy in an environmental setting, pragmatism, particularly that of Dewey, sought to emphasize the networked interdependence of human life with its surroundings, revealing the fallacy of the sovereign liberal individual (McDonald, 2004). Democracy was pre-political for Dewey, in the sense of formal institutions, cultivated at a more fundamental, biological level via intersubjective association between social organisms, which constitutes communal life. As Dewey (1978: 135) intimated, ‘[d]emocracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience in nature’. For Dewey, changes in social behaviour are necessarily environmental and cannot occur through reflective intention alone, while efforts to improve environmental conditions will necessarily implicate human practices. As Barnett and Bridge (2017: 1193) observe, ‘[i]n Dewey’s view, inquiry is initiated by a situation in which the normal functioning of organisms in their transactions with the environment becomes disturbed or doubtful in some way’.

Pragmatism has provided a distinctive philosophical orientation for environmental thought over the last three decades (Norton, 1991; Light and Katz, 1996; Minteer, 2012; Weston, 2009), offering what Minteer (2006) describes as a third way between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, shallow and deep ecology, declining recourse to the intrinsic value of nature for direction and validation. A growing subfield of ‘environmental pragmatism’ has developed around the assumption that humans are embedded in, and integrated with, the physical environment, requiring an applied, open-ended understanding of the natural world as necessarily experienced in and through human cultural practice. Environmental pragmatism is, therefore, unapologetically humanistic. For environmental pragmatists, this does not negate the value of the more-than-human world or subsume it within an instrumentalist frame, but instead recognizes that humans are inevitably implicated, always already invested, in its destiny. To understand ecosystems humans must interact with them, through on-the-ground experimentation and concrete problem-solving (Minteer and Collins, 2005), rendering the notion of pristine, external nature untenable. Knowledge of the physical world accumulates precisely in transaction with it, making human understanding of the environment situated, historical and partial (Weston, 2009). For Minteer (2012: 9), this demands humility and a ‘pluralistic ethos’, which will become increasingly important as baselines shift under human activity and novel ecosystems proliferate, requiring adaptation to an ever-changing planet.

Reorienting restoration: Pluralism, experimentation, community

Pragmatism is an orientation to inquiry rather than a coherent theoretical framework, which can guide decisions in the methodological context of a specific problem. Here, a pragmatist agenda for restoration is outlined in respect to three orientations to inquiry that entail collaboration between the natural and social disciplines, using the example of waterway restoration. As Bernstein (1992: 832) proposed, ‘[t]he prevailing spirit of pragmatism has been…not deconstruction but reconstruction’. Indeed, restoration and repair, whether of buildings, infrastructure or ecosystems, can be socially generative, as it foregrounds the background of everyday life, exposing the seamless, taken-for-granted fabric that permits functionality and yet engrains normativity. For Sennett (2018: 289), breakdown and repair serve as occasions for reconfiguring and not simply restoring urban processes, allowing for new compositions from existing elements, whether this concerns transport, energy or utilities: ‘Repair cast in these terms has political resonances’. Dewey himself was concerned with ‘repairing troubled situations’ (Barnett and Bridge, 2017: 1194), seeking to use disturbance for social evolution. When things fall into disrepair, become dysfunctional, a liminal space to rebuild otherwise temporarily reveals itself (De Coss-Corzo, 2021; Ramakrishnan et al., 2021), and what appeared fixed becomes unsettled: ‘there is, in other words, a politics of repair and maintenance’ (Graham and Thrift, 2007: 17). Nowhere is this more palpable than when it concerns environmental repair, where the stakes are indeed planetary (Corwin and Gidwani, 2021; Knuth, 2019; Webber et al., 2022). If repair is political then, especially environmental repair, restoration should be inclusive, public and experimental.

Pluralism: Multiple futures rather than single natures

First, in respect to the purpose of restoration, deliberation of ecosystem baselining should be opened up to the humanities and social sciences, and more importantly, to communities that are in close proximity to schemes. The baseline is considered an appropriate frame of reference that guides restoration, conventionally in reference to a previous ecosystem state predating a specific human disturbance, serving as an historical benchmark (Bull et al., 2014). Baselines establish the desired condition that restoration efforts seek to emulate, and from which they are evaluated, offering a practical mooring for action. Historical fidelity has therefore been integral to restoration ecology, the historical reference point a ‘cornerstone concept’ (Balaguer et al., 2014: 13) for guiding scientific investigation and providing validation to projects. As the Society for Ecological Restoration state, ‘[r]estoration attempts to return an ecosystem to its historic trajectory. Historic conditions are therefore the ideal starting point for restoration design’ (SER, 2004: 1). For Higgs et al. (2014: 500), ‘[t]o ignore the legacy of an ecosystem, even in cases where specific historical information is scanty, is to practice something other than restoration’. While baselines are critical to restoration and environmental management they remain principally the preoccupation of natural scientists, based primarily on physical and ecological criteria. The process of baselining, through data collection, monitoring and modelling, has grown increasingly sophisticated, yet remains largely black-boxed, presided over by natural scientists. As Ureta et al. (2020: 4) disclose, baselines are ‘everywhere, working stealthily and behind the scenes to channel ecological restoration efforts towards particular historical periods’. However, although the presumption of pre-disturbance naturalness has been influential in restoration, there has been growing debate amongst scientists and practitioners about the feasibility and appropriateness of aspiring to former states in increasingly human-influenced contexts (Cole and Yung, 2010). The notion that a ‘natural' baseline can ever be determined given the historical dynamism of ecosystems, and partiality of human knowledge, is certainly moot. Some suggest whether restoration is suspect in principle, which can never compensate for lost wildness, no matter how informed (Elliot, 1997). And arguably, there has been a gradual ratcheting down of expectations regarding baselines as ecosystems have increasingly depleted with successive generations, obscuring long-term trends.

Notwithstanding the critical threat of shifting baseline syndrome and trophic downgrading (Estes et al., 2011), it is evident that natural baselines are becoming increasingly difficult to ascertain – let alone replicate – on an increasingly volatile, changing planet, losing their viability as reference points. So-called novel ecosystems are largely a corollary of human activity, which are producing socio-ecological assemblages that are multiple stages removed from what could be considered natural baselines. With the expanding influence of humans on earth’s ecosystems, the case for involvement of the humanities and social sciences continues to grow as the expertise of the natural sciences is stretched ever further. Certainly, Arthur Tansley (1935: 304), early advocate of the concept of ecosystem and first chairman of Britain’s Nature Conservancy, recognized that humans are integral actors in ecosystem dynamics, and insisted that ecology must not limit itself to the study of ‘so-called “natural” entities’. In the Anthropocene, this undertaking is becoming ever more urgent, which highlights the need for interdisciplinarity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in cities, which are expected to become home for 70% of the global population by 2050. In the context of planetary urbanization, it is not viable to determine and return to former states in many cases, as ecosystems here have been so radically modified. Understandably, this could be met with anxiety and grief for a natural world being irrevocably lost. Thrift (2021: 10) has drawn attention to the silent violence that urban infrastructure occasions on wildlife, acting as a ‘snare and scythe’, which is habitually downplayed by advocates of cities as the sustainability solution of the twenty-first century (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020). However, while urbanization can be seen as detrimental to ecosystem dynamics, cities are where the most intense modification has occurred, and consequently offers the greatest potential for remediation and public deliberation (Kowarik, 2011).

This can be seen with the surge in popularity of daylighting, a radical form of restoration that entails the opening up of buried waterways to reinstate compromised hydrological, ecological and geomorphological processes, through culvert removal and landscaping. Systematic culverting of waterways occurred in cities throughout the twentieth century, resulting in ‘urban stream syndrome’ (Vietz et al., 2015). These waterways, to be blunt, are biologically and socially dead, lacking in connectivity, instream complexity and biotic activity, having been straightened, culverted and buried underground. In the worst case, waterways have not only been culverted but diverted into combined sewer systems (Broadhead et al., 2015), transforming not only their functionality and structure – to such an extent that they no longer resemble a river or stream – but also their cultural identity. There have been significant technical difficulties associated with reverting urban waterways to more natural states, as reference points to previous conditions, characterized by braiding channels and shifting mosaics of vegetation, no longer exist. This has made standardization of restoration practice difficult as each scheme must be adapted to context, revealing a ‘tension between science’s ideal of universal physical laws and the particularity of restoration knowledge and practice’ (Eden and Tunstall, 2006: 665). While this could be considered a limitation, the lack of reference system provides greater design and engagement possibilities as subterranean waterways have often been forgotten by communities above (Francis, 2014).

This is why a global movement has quickly coalesced around daylighting, where an entirely novel ecosystem is reinstated in dense urban centres. Here, research in the natural sciences on novel ecosystems can inform thinking in the humanities and social sciences, which recognizes originality, multiplicity and unpredictability in ecological life (Hobbs et al., 2006; Hobbs et al., 2009). This does not imply ‘anything goes’, whether this concerns spatial planning or species introduction, which should focus primarily on heavily modified ecosystems lacking stable baselines (Hughes et al., 2012). Instead, it emphasizes that baselines, especially in cities, are no longer characteristic of natural states and therefore objectives should be subject to deliberation, opening up restoration to public scrutiny. In the natural sciences, an ‘open-ended’ approach to restoration has been advocated where baselines have become difficult to identify and replicate, where targets are oriented towards future trajectories of change rather than prior historical states, allowing for alternative ecological pathways (Hughes et al., 2011; Seastedt et al., 2008). For instance, non-native species may be more appropriate than local species in a warming climate, departing from conservation tradition (Butterfield et al., 2017). Consequently, as Higgs and Roush (2011: 555) acknowledge, there is an implicit ethics to decision-making on ecological restoration, which ‘extends beyond scientific knowledge’, in terms of how much intervention is necessary and desirable when decisions can no longer be justified by historical reference points.

When function rather than fidelity becomes the driver of open-ended restoration, as is increasingly the case (Higgs et al., 2014), novel questions arise concerning desirability of ecosystem structure and process, and appropriate level of human intervention. Involvement of the humanities and social sciences will be critical to identify, account for, question and mediate the social implications of ecological open-endedness, through the development of analytical frameworks and engagement methods. As Francis et al. (2013: 683) observe, novelty in urban ecosystems is broadly recognized now but ‘remains poorly explored from anything but an ecological perspective’. Communities should be involved in the planning and designing of schemes, to collectively deliberate the preferred structures, functionality and benefits of restored local ecosystems, from the perspective of all invested stakeholders, human and nonhuman. Indeed, baseline reference points should include social history as embedded in ecological processes, which can actually facilitate community engagement through the force of memory, storytelling, local knowledge and resources (e.g. maps, photographs), encouraging rather than restricting dialogue and creativity. As Kinchy (2017) reveals, the collection of baseline data on waterways by volunteers can prompt reflection on shared ecologies and may offer democratic renewal if linked to clear action in the present.

This socially and politically generative aspect of baselining, as a grounds for envisaging alternative futures rather than replicating prior natural states, can stretch the restoration agenda to include socio-ecological relations, and the repair of human practices and institutions. The notion of alternative states in restoration ecology, which recognizes the possibility that ecosystems may develop and climax in unexpected, non-linear directions (Suding et al., 2004), has pluralized ecological futures, but what this means socially is yet to be explored. Here a pragmatist orientation can be instructive, which, from its anti-foundationalist standpoint, would encourage scepticism of baselines, as denoting a universal, fixed nature. Restoration should not always seek to ‘mirror nature’ (Rorty, 2009 [1979]: 37) as accurately as possible, deduced from idealized ecological functioning, but instead pursue a form of inquiry that is strongly empirical, adapted to the changing local context. For pragmatism, it is not that knowledge is relative but reality is plural, which can always be composed and articulated otherwise. In this way, pragmatism offers a middle ground between realism and constructivism, where nature exists in a concrete sense but is constantly mutating (Proctor, 1998), not least due to human activity.

This does not indicate pragmatism’s lack of ‘humility’ to the ‘non-human environment’, as British Philosopher Bertrand Russell (1996 [1946]: 737) remarked, amounting to a charge of ‘cosmic impiety’, of which restoration ecologists have sometimes been accused. The scientific method is in fact exalted by pragmatists, yet pluralism in understanding, and dynamism and heterogeneity in nature, is emphasized instead. Pragmatism encourages quite the opposite to hubris: human knowledge is indelibly fallible due to multiplicity in nature, therefore truth is what functions most effectively in a dynamic, volatile world, which consistently evades total human understanding. According to Dewey (1929), relations between humans and their environment are always changing, therefore knowledge must also continue to evolve. This includes restoration ecology, especially so given its substantive concern with human-environment relations. For Dewey, the role of scientific inquiry is to facilitate social adaptation to a changing environment, due to global warming or biodiversity loss for instance, by experimenting with new forms of thinking and practice. As Savransky (2021: 152) affirms, appositely for restoration, ‘[t]he ongoing generation of divergently plural forms of life is not something to be overcome, but something to be honoured, cultivated, and enlarged’.

Experimentation: Enacting human–environment relations

Commitment to pluralism requires an experimental frame of mind, a willingness to configure the world otherwise. Pragmatism is a practical, action-oriented philosophy that advocates learning and understanding through experimentation, and the pursuit of empirical not universal truth: ‘Like all facts subject to observation and specification, they are spatial-temporal, not eternal’ (Dewey, 2016 [1927]: 52). Peirce and James had scientific backgrounds and were committed to empirical investigation, which they insisted would take philosophy in a more applied direction. Dewey even referred to pragmatism as experimentalism, revealing the profound influence of scientific culture on this philosophical school. However, as Bernstein (1992) observes, it was a biological science of interrelations rather than a physics of mechanical laws that informed pragmatism. Methodologically, problematization forms the basis of experimentation, focused on particular situations in concrete, local settings, where social objects and relations are adjusted ‘in ways that are active and operational’ (Bridge, 2021: 429). For Dewey (2016 [1927]: 185), experiments are intended to manipulate taken-for-granted habits which in turn encourage new patterns of thinking, in and through modification of everyday practice: ‘Habit does not preclude the use of thought, but it determines the channels within which it operates. Thinking is secreted in the interstices of habits’.

What distinguishes pragmatism from other forms of investigation is not primarily methodological but how it assumes a connection between experimental inquiry and democratic politics. Democracy, a driving preoccupation of pragmatism, is itself conceived as an ongoing experiment, which can be recalibrated through the material culture of communal life. According to Dewey (2016 [1927]: 172), democracy was an ‘outcome primarily of technological discoveries and inventions working a change in the customs by which men [sic] had been bound together. It was not due to the doctrines of doctrinaires’ (see also Mitchell, 2011). This has profound implications for how politics is conceived and practiced, and similarly, how social research and experiment are conducted. For Dewey, experimentation in fact requires democratic principles – autonomy, free speech, public interest – to be effective, while democracy suffers from lack of experimentation to trial new ways of living in a shared world. Collective problem-solving is a meaningful, consequential activity in pragmatism, as its outcomes are considered to be enactive rather than representative; they produce rather than simply reflect reality, worlds emerge through interaction with surroundings. As Bridge (2014: 1648) surmises, ‘human organisms do not simply react to their environment in some sort of stimulus-response way but, with certain dispositions (or habits), project themselves into the environment and are acted back upon by that environment’.

Pragmatist concern with enaction is transforming how human-environment relations are conceptualized in the humanities and social sciences, and its growing popularity is reflective of the cosmological shift towards an understanding that humans, like other organisms, are not in but of the environment; they shape and are shaped by their milieux. In psychology, under the new paradigm of enaction, influenced by pragmatism, cognition is no longer studied as an isolated process occurring within an individual’s mind but as embedded in material surroundings, linking the brain, body and environment (Gallagher, 2017). Pragmatist enactive thinking has also influenced the wider social sciences, encouraging scholars to take material culture – objects, devices, materials and settings – more seriously as an experimental basis for engagement, which enacts rather than represents publics (Marres, 2012). Drawing on the ideas of James, Law and Urry (2004: 391) contend that social scientific research does not simply describe but enacts reality, ‘[i]t gets involved, in other words, in the business of “ontological politics”’. This neglected world-making capacity of social inquiry, which James recognized over a century ago, offers an alternative relational metaphysics to Newtonian cosmology: ‘It is a shift that moves us from a single world to the idea that the world is multiply produced in diverse and contested social and material relations’ (Law and Urry, 2004: 397).

Enactive thinking is transforming how cities are researched, planned and designed, as a site of experimentation. The radical upsurge of interest in so-called urban experiments, which seek to mobilize and recalibrate embedded infrastructural systems to trial alternative ways of making, administering and living in cities, is the clearest expression of an enactive turn (Bulkeley et al., 2019; Evans et al., 2016). Urban infrastructural networks offer many possibilities for unlocking the deep-rooted performativity and normativity of the built environment, reconfiguring how people relate to one another and their surroundings. Richard Sennett, a contemporary pragmatist thinker and arguably the tradition’s most consistent practitioner, has developed Dewey’s thinking on habit and habitat, reiterating the importance of the material environment for social evolution. Sennett (2018: 205) demonstrates how urban design can precipitate social and ethical change through experimentation with ‘open forms’, encouraging a deeper consciousness of the city by introducing complexity and ambiguity to simplified, overdetermined urban spaces, inviting improvisation and interaction. What makes cities amenable to experimentation is the dense thrown togetherness of buildings, infrastructure and ecology, which connect the intimate and every day to the systemic and institutional: ‘It is the coming together of overlapping sociotechnical systems that gives cities their world-making power’, allowing for ‘many possible configurations and arrangements’ (Amin and Thrift, 2017: 2). As Simone and Pieterse (2017: 178) insist in their case for urban experimentation, ‘[t]his means borrowing from the language of logistics, infrastructure and technical networks to sense things in movement and formation and to learn multiple “languages” of translation that provide access to different practices to deploy here and there’.

And certainly, restoration can provide a technical language to experiment with co-existence, through the reconfiguration of water infrastructure. As Blok et al. (2016: 6) propose, infrastructure offers a primary means for reordering the world experimentally, turning environments inside out to ‘hybridize and multiply what counts as society and nature’ (see also Escobar, 2018). This underlines the critical importance of including humanities and social scientific work in the scaling-up of restoration, which hinges on widespread modification of infrastructural systems that have locked in ecologically damaging routines and arrangements. The lack of natural baselines in urban milieux opens up significant opportunities for experimentation with human-environment relations (Hinchliffe et al., 2005), and like their urban counterparts, so-called wild experiments are enactive; they actively produce ecologies by rewiring relationships between organisms and their environments (Cooke and Lane, 2015; Crowley et al., 2017; Prior and Ward, 2016; Lorimer, 2015). Here, wildness should be understood as denoting spatial vitality rather than historical fidelity, which calls for greater public involvement in restoration schemes to deliberate ecosystem structures, dynamics and functions (Usher et al., 2021). This is important in the context of increasing ecosystem novelty in urban areas, which requires new interdisciplinary approaches to restoration given their motely composition (Francis et al., 2013). The built environment is a primary mediating factor in ecosystem dynamics, putting human activity at the centre of urban ecology (Pickett and Grove, 2009).

With their lack of historical reference points and taken-for-granted pervasiveness, the restoration of culverted urban waterways offers huge potential for social and ecological experimentation regarding how rivers and streams could and should look and function. Although urban schemes face significantly more challenges than rural projects, the opportunities for social outreach are far greater, using the floodplain as a site of experiment and engagement. Riparian and floodplain zones, characterized by complex water-land interactions, generate highly diverse, fluctuating ecosystem structures, dynamics and processes, making them ripe for experimentation (Hughes et al., 2005). Floodplains are unique given their extreme dynamism and biologically productive and diverse ecosystems, connecting terrestrial and aquatic environments, containing many animal and plant species. Floodplains are however one of the most modified ecosystems by humans, with 90% having been reclaimed in Europe by the end of the twentieth century (Pedroli et al., 2002). These areas have therefore become a priority for restoration in recent years, aiming to reinstate complexity and diversity by re-establishing connections between waterway and floodplain. As Di Baldassarre et al. (2013: 3237) recognize, given this complexity and variability, ‘populated floodplains are ideal laboratories for the study of socio-hydrological processes’. In waterway restoration, simulation models incorporating alternative design and management options, from reach profile to vegetation type, under a variety of hydrological conditions, has been used to evaluate the system effects on flow dynamics, floodplain connection, channel migration and biotic recovery (Clilverd et al., 2016). Experimental modelling has been dominated by hydrologists, and consequently, social dynamics have not been integrated into simulations and scenario planning in a sophisticated or meaningful way (Fernandez et al., 2014; Massuel et al., 2018). The new field of socio-hydrology has begun to address this discrepancy in modelling by accounting for two-way feedback between co-evolving human and environmental systems (Blair and Buytaert, 2016).

Not only does this provide a more realistic depiction of hydrology, particularly in the urban setting, but it offers unprecedented opportunities for experimental interdisciplinary research, to provide a forum for deliberation across the social and natural sciences (Sivapalan and Blöschl, 2015). Residents could construct a model in collaboration with researchers, based on a pictorial representation of the main components, processes and linkages that will produce system-level outcomes, in order to visualize the potential feedbacks between alternative design options. This will involve identification of key variables to include in the model, across hydrological, ecological, geomorphological and social domains. This would capture the diversity of values, preferences and expertise across implicated groups, human and nonhuman, and encourage a broader understanding ecosystem interconnectivity. Through this, participants will become cognizant of ecosystem services for different human and nonhuman users, and appreciate the competing demands, trade-offs and spatial synergies associated with restoration projects (Konar et al., 2019). For instance, channel stabilization, as traditionally preferred by community residents, will often conflict with hydrological flow regimes and sediment load. The social value of experimental modelling, how it fosters understanding and cooperation across different groups, has been a neglected area (Xu et al., 2018). Experimentation can provide a basis for democratic renewal, allowing the envisaging and enactment of more convivial human-environment relations. The subfield of urban reconciliation ecology operates on this premise (Francis and Lorimer 2011), which seeks to integrate nonhumans into the novel milieux of the city without compromising human use. The city is ecologically novel in evolutionary terms, allowing and indeed necessitating the development of new-fangled entanglements between humans, biotic and abiotic elements, troubling conventional understandings of community.

Community: The biological and the moral

The idea of community may attract derision in critical theory for being parochial but it is fundamental to pragmatist philosophy: ‘pragmatism is a clarion call to connect research to community’ (Wills and Lake, 2020: 31). For Dewey, the engaged community is a prerequisite to democracy, achieved through participation rather than representation (Westbrook, 2005). According to Dewey (2016 [1927]), a community is a public that emerges in relation to specific issues that enable collective living, more so than by identity or locale. Therefore, what constitutes a public is relative and fluid, implicated by issues of common concern in respect to shared concrete problems (Marres and Lezaun, 2011; Newman and Clarke, 2009). The role of the pragmatist is to collaborate with communities on collective problems, by identifying affected parties, developing the capacity to cooperate on technical issues, revealing differing opinions and perspectives, with the intention of fostering solidarity in the context of uncertainty. As Dewey (2016 [1927]) recognized, this task is critical in modern liberal civilization where technology has reduced face-to-face interactions, with local community giving way to a diffuse, networked society consisting of increasingly atomized individuals. Dewey called this the ‘problem of restoration’ (Ibid: ix), used in a different register to ecology, referring to how communal life must be continually reconstituted in a technological, fragmented society. Dewey did connect the problem of restoration to environmental concerns, which for him provided the necessary physical basis for community, implicating the natural sciences in democratic renewal. Indeed, Dewey’s understanding of community is deeply informed by naturalism, offering a unique perspective on democracy, as realized through associations that are moral and political but also physical and organic.

However, what distinguishes a human community from biological aggregation is the moral consciousness of public life and the capacity to steer mutual ambitions towards common goals. For Dewey, the human community is defined by interplay between the biological and moral, where the former provides the resource, energy and force, and the latter the purpose and language to direct action and establish new relations: ‘Lightning strikes and rives a tree or rock, and the resulting fragments take up and continue the process of interaction, and so on and on. But when phases of the process are represented by signs, a new medium is interposed…[which] facilitates calculation, planning, and a new kind of action…A community thus presents an order of energies transmuted into one of meanings’ (179). According to Dewey, therefore, a community manifests with the shift from physical and organic associations, which occur naturally, to one of meaningful communal life through communication, which occurs through learned, cultural practices, establishing new links between habits and habitats. This foregrounds the centrality of physical environment in the development and transformation of community, while also recognizing the role of community in the shaping and reorganization of the environment.

This perspective is unique in that it recognizes the integral role of scientific knowledge in democratic politics, where understanding of the physical, ecological world is central to public life. Dewey therefore insisted that a ‘considerable part of the remediable evils of present life are due to the state of imbalance of scientific method with respect to its application to physical facts on one side and to specifically human facts on the other side’ (55). For Dewey, there was a gulf between science and society, resulting from the division between values and matter, the latter of which concerns the natural sciences, ‘which in the minds of many convey a note of disparagement. They are taken to be foes of whatever is of ideal value in life, instead of as conditions of its manifestation and sustained being…a fundamental and ever-operating aim would be to translate knowledge of the subject-matter of physical conditions into terms which are generally understood’ (195). This is a primary objective of pragmatism, which emphasizes the importance of communication and education to cooperation and democracy, linking scientific knowledge and political organization. Pragmatists adopt terminology that facilitates practical application in concrete situations, and bridges the social and physical domains of value and matter. Rorty (1991: 14) insisted pragmatists must develop a ‘new vocabulary’ to integrate different groups and foster solidarity, ‘to extend the reference of “us” as far as we can’, to re-describe reality in ways to conducive to action and cooperation. Similarly, environmental pragmatist Norton (1991: 195) argues that a common interdisciplinary language is the necessary first step to cooperation: ‘The language…in which this discussion should be articulated is the language of ecology supplemented with ethics, not the language of economics’. This methodological orientation is pertinent today given how entrenched the language of natural capital accounting has become in the environment sector.

Thinking community more broadly in restoration could enable interdisciplinary research and push thinking on the categories used by both physical and social sciences, whether they overlap, dovetail or contradict. In restoration ecology, a desirable ecosystem is expected to have a community with a composition of organisms that maintains a stable pre-disturbance state (Hobbs and Norton, 1996). Successional theory, fundamental to restoration ecology, contains implicit assumptions of ‘functional communities’, and how a multispecies community is supposed to look, function and develop (Young et al., 2005: 663). However, to understand community assembly in the Anthropocene, human activity must be taken into consideration when studying composition, abundance and diversity, and indeed, how disassembly and reassembly are becoming equally important. As Hilderbrand et al. (2005) contend, the notion that a community develops predictably towards a single end-point in response to physical structure is a myth that nevertheless drives restoration schemes. Elucidating the process of multispecies community assembly is ‘one of the oldest challenges in ecology’ (Pavoine and Bonsall, 2011: 793), yet there has been little serious contemplation of human factors. While the natural sciences would be prompted to broaden their understanding of community to include humans, the humanities and social sciences should also incorporate nonhumans into their research on communities, perhaps even fostering a more-than-human ethics (Ginn, 2014; Krzywoszynska, 2019). With growing understanding of how ecosystems benefit society, it is increasingly short-sighted to analyze community dynamics without considering environmental factors, how green space impacts unequally on wellbeing and cohesion for instance (Shanahan et al., 2016; Weinstein et al., 2015). Concepts used in a social and natural register such as community can be investigated together, particularly in urban areas where human-nonhuman interactions are concentrated, recurrent and complex.

In restoration, indicators can be devised that account for stressors, constraints and benefits for human and nonhuman members of a community, and recognizes tensions and synergies between social and ecological factors. Furthermore, questionable assumptions from both a biological and sociological perspective may actually be mutually reinforcing, illustrated by the distinction between native and alien species, which has perpetuated a narrow, conservative formulation of community (Warren, 2007; Antonsich, 2021), which increased dialogue in restoration may expose to open discussion. Waterway restoration can again provide an illustration of how shared language can facilitate inquiry. Connectivity is a fundamental attribute of any functioning community, social and ecological, enabling interaction and exchange necessary for communal life. Lack of hydrological connectivity is the primary cause of urban stream syndrome, where channels have been severed from floodplains laterally, and reach sections have been disconnected longitudinally, by the built environment. This reduces water quality and dramatically impacts the biotic community, resulting in waterways devoid of fishes, insects and plants (Vietz et al., 2015). Fortunately, restoration has been found to increase a biotic community even on a reach-scale (Dahm and Hering, 2016; Thompson et al., 2018), with some species recolonizing waterways in a matter of months (Lorenz et al., 2018). Biotic community recovery is dependent on enhanced connectivity between river, riparian area and floodplain, through removal of culverts and embankments and introduction of debris and gravel, leading to diversification of vegetation, higher habitat heterogeneity, and ecosystem complexity (Friberg et al., 2016; Modrak et al., 2017). In fluvial geomorphology, the importance of hydrological connectivity for biotic communities has been emphasized for some time (Gilvear et al., 2013; Pringle, 2003), alongside fragmentation in some cases where pollution or invasive species are restrained, proving influential in waterway restoration.

However, as geomorphologists Kondolf and Pinto (2017: 182) affirm, to appreciate the significance of urban waterways, research on connectivity should also account for social aspects; ‘communication and movement of people, goods, ideas, and culture along and across rivers’, in addition to matter, energy and organisms. They argue that river straightening, culverting and damming not only undermines the ecological integrity of river systems but their social embeddedness, reducing awareness of riverine systems, functions and conditions within human communities, undermining their social and emotional connection (May, 2006). Yet, social connectivity of urban waterways has been overlooked as both research topic and policy objective in restoration, mainly due to the prevailing focus on biophysical criteria (Palmer et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2014). Wohl et al. (2015: 5985) therefore argue that ‘deeper involvement of the social sciences and humanities’ is necessary if the social relevance of waterways is to be adequately accounted for in public engagement processes. Communities may oppose restoration where social and cultural values are undermined by ecological objectives, requiring sensitive and responsive engagement with non-scientific issues (Fox et al., 2016). In waterway restoration, innovation in scientific application has not been matched by public engagement methods; on the ground, it remains largely ‘science-led’ rather than ‘society-led’ (Eden and Tunstall, 2006), putting social, cultural and political aspects on a second footing.

Connectivity could be mobilized as a bridging concept, enabling deliberation across the physical and social sciences, to address two gaps simultaneously: the ‘social gap’ (Usher et al., 2020: 6), denoting the predominance of natural sciences, and the ‘monitoring gap’ (Gurnell et al., 2019: 1360), referring to the lack of data on waterway conditions. As Buytaert et al. (2014: 2) observe, ‘despite its critical societal relevance, this area of science is characterized by an acute scarcity of data in both the spatial and temporal domains’. There has been widespread criticism of waterway restoration that baselining and monitoring has not been effectively carried out, limiting the possibility for target-setting, priority identification and design of schemes (Roni et al., 2019). Local residents could be enrolled to conduct baseline monitoring of a waterway, including ecological data on water flow and quality, vegetation, and biodiversity, while social monitoring, a growing area of interest in restoration, could be conducted in respect to usage patterns. Old photographs, maps and documents would provide a comparison for historical usage while also providing an evocative basis for public engagement. Baselining and monitoring would consider both hydrological and social connectivity to determine whether a waterway is integrated into a community, through citizen science methods for instance, and how they can be mutually enhanced in the interests of communal living.

Political urban ecology: Critique and composition

The problem of restoration, as Dewey understood it, concerns the renewal of democracy at the intersection of the environment and community. For Dewey – closer intellectually to Darwin than Descartes – knowledge should allow one to inhabit the environment more efficaciously not represent it more accurately, through hands-on adaptation rather than abstract contemplation, ‘constructed by the organism to help it deal with the world’ (Rorty, 1991: 10). Here, democracy is collective intelligence of how to live together, ‘the clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications’ (Dewey, 2016 [1927]: 176). Focused on the physical basis of communities, the natural sciences have an essential role to play in democratic life, offering a perspective and vocabulary that raises public consciousness of mutual interdependence. As Dewey acknowledged, what makes social life possible is the fostering of commonality through communication, including and particularly through science. Pragmatism continues to draw on the life sciences in its advocacy of a political naturalism opposed to atomized individualism and market dominance (Coles, 2016). And yet in the UK, under the natural capital agenda, the language and culture of the environment sector, particularly restoration, has been profoundly transformed, shifting orientation away from life sciences to financial economics. An abstract, financial language has saturated environmental policy, which privileges universal metrics over biophysical heterogeneity, tethering communication and deliberation to economic reasoning. Capital is not a thing but a process: investment based on the expectation of profit, which is hardly a basis for community-making, undermining the notion of shared natural commons (Standing, 2019). Dewey (1922 [1916]: 2) identified a shared etymology between commons, community and communication, which are mutually reinforced in collective endeavour, ‘through action upon the environment’.

There has been a revival of interest in commons as an oppositional schema to neoliberal economics, resurrecting a neglected tradition linked with the rise of democracy (Stavrides, 2016; Amin and Howell, 2016; Federici, 2019). Ostensibly mundane landscapes such as urban gardens offer a tangible, physical basis for cooperation, mutuality and commoning outside of market relations, an experiment in community and belonging (Ginn and Ascensão, 2018). Monbiot (2017) takes inspiration from the commons tradition, long overlooked in mainstream politics, to envision a new approach to democratic engagement, which can be cultivated, literally, through the tending of local environments: ‘A commons makes sense of community…[i]t embeds people in the lives of others: sustaining the resource means cooperating with other people to develop rules, moral codes and means of enforcing them’ (95). Solidarity and mutuality is fostered within a community in the process of managing a shared resource, whether this is a brownfield site, public park or allotment, uniting diverse members around a physical environment held in common (Eizenberg, 2012). Waterway monitoring, as considered above, could perform as commoning, reinforcing the boundaries of community and environment when shared river commons are increasingly under threat by illegal pollution by water companies (Woodward et al., 2021). Restoration of community is therefore connected to restoration of local environment in the renewal of democracy. This is where the humanities and social sciences would be vital in opening up the imaginative possibilities of restoration. How can restoration figure in the broader project of revitalizing the public realm, by inviting engagement in the restoration of communities conceived as social, political and ecological entities? What affordances and assurances can a restored local environment offer residents in the pursuit of community? Can restoration of community and environment be mutually affirming and through what processes?

In pragmatism, new worlds are created from what exists already: a matter not of rupture but reconfiguration, realignment and recomposition. This is not to suggest lack of ambition but a willingness to work with existing conditions, communicated in language that can integrate and organize communities on and in their own terms, to meet them half way. For pragmatists, reality must not simply be critiqued but composed, requiring a reparative rather than suspicious orientation (Lake, 2017). In this way, pragmatism has informed thinking on cosmopolitics, an alternative conceptualization of the political to that currently dominant in critical theory (Barnett, 2017), which ‘begins with the contestation of a unified cosmos and the realization that it is necessary to reshuffle and recompose the common world’ (Farías and Blok, 2016: 9). Cosmopolitics is tasked with ‘construction of the common world’ (Stengers, 2005: 995), broadening the rollcall of entities implicated in the composition of public life. And indeed, a compositional politics ‘carries with it the pungent but ecologically correct smell of “compost”’, as its remit is first environmental: the reparation of the commons that make life on earth possible (Latour, 2010: 474). Cosmopolitics is a contemporary inflection of the commons tradition, which takes the relationship between community and environment as the fulcrum of democratic life. Restoration, a cosmopolitical undertaking par excellence, must operate at this intersection, where ecological science can inform and inspire thinking on democratic politics, from the perspective of composition rather than critique.

As Gandy (2022b) has recently argued, urban political ecology, intellectually grounded in Marxist political economy (Ernstson and Swyngedouw, 2019; Heynen et al., 2006; Keil, 2003; Loftus, 2012), has overlooked the political, democratic potential of ecological scientific practice. This is largely a consequence of urban political ecology’s historical lack of engagement with the dynamics of biophysical processes, where ecology has featured as another term for environment rather than a natural science (Forsyth, 2003; Walker, 2005). Gandy (2022a) suggests that urban political ecology would benefit from increased engagement with the biophysical sciences, and with the agency, intricacy and diversity of ecological life, to provide a basis for a more pluralistic, cosmopolitan conception of the more-than-human city (see also Tzaninis et al., 2021). This would require greater collaboration between natural and social scientists, not only in knowledge production but political intent (Lave et al., 2014). Such an undertaking is less about de-scientizing environmental discourse as Castree (2021) proposes for the social sciences and humanities, but the scientization of political ecology, at least in this particular context. This would also entail scientists recognizing their own political agency in the revealing and remaking of worlds. A political urban ecology can thereby complement an urban political ecology, foregrounding the scientific and technical underpinnings of democratic life (Callon et al., 2009). As Latour (2017: 269) proclaims, ‘[i]f democracy has to start over [in the context of the planetary ecological crisis], it will have to begin at the bottom. The soil is a good starting point: there is nothing lower!’

Highlights

• This paper suggests a profound, indeed cosmological shift is unfolding in environmental thinking as efforts turn from cessation to repair.

• Unique opportunities for social engagement have consequently emerged as humans are seen as formative, meaningful actors in ecosystem dynamics.

• The case is made for greater collaboration between the social and natural disciplines to adequately deliberate the purpose of restoration.

• It is suggested that pragmatism, which is philosophically invested in human-environment relations, can offer a distinctive orientation to restoration practice.

• Scholars are encouraged to think with and through restoration, from the inside of practice, as a socially generative process.