Ecological restoration provides practices and challenges to thought that may bring us into a new type of knowledge. Ecological restoration is an expression not of humanity’s desire to conquer and finally control nature. Ecological restoration expresses the human not by considering man as the king of creation but as an eternal custodian of the machine for the making of gods. Henry Bergson says in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, “Humanity lies groaning, half crushed under the weight of its own progress. They do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on our refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.” There is no need to redeem the past. The past can redeem itself. One can even come to love the past, to love one’s pain, if at the same time one forgives one’s pain. Our bodies and lives are composed of our scars. It is reconciliation with everything that is shameful. Shame creates ethical and practical modes of attention to a given ecosystem through the mechanisms of ecological restoration. We can define restoration as everything we do to a landscape or an ecosystem in an ongoing attempt to compensate for novel or ‘outside’ influences on it in such a way that it can continue to behave or can resume behaving as if these were not present. Against the appeal to the “innocent wild” ecological restoration knows it is not innocent, for it holds a memory of the forbidden fruit that made us into living creatures of becoming not content to merely be. It is sense of guilt to restore the origin. Time is invention, it has to invent the lost. Nature, if we are to say it is written at all, is fundamentally written in poetry or drama not in the language of some reified mathematics or physics, but through a mathematics or physics given dramatic form. Restoring value-at-the-origin, this is a value that comes from actualizing a memory as there is no real discrete origin that can be separated out of the flow of the pure past. We are ashamed that the origin has been lost. Shame is a sense of existential unworthiness, the painful emotion a person naturally feels on encountering any kind of shortcoming or limitation, beginning with the infant’s discovery that he or she is not omnipotent but is instead one of many others and dependent on those others for every kind of pleasure, of satisfaction, and even for life itself. This shame is inseparable from any experience of relationship for the simple reason that any relationship forces on us an awareness of difference, and therefore of limitation.

Emotion is then not a private experience, but a social and political one. Emotion is propelling to individual action and corporate action and creating the right kind of emotion that leads to changes in the social and political makeup of relations in a society of which we must add the ecosystem. What is this emotion, if not precisely a cosmic “Memory” that liberates man from the level that is proper to him, in order to make him a creator. As Bergson puts it famously: “When music weeps, all humanity, all nature weeps with it. In point of fact it does not introduce these feelings into us; it introduces us into them… Thus do pioneers in morality proceed.” Bergson continues, “Joy and sorrow, pity and love, are words expressing generalities, words which we must call upon to express what music makes us feel, whereas each new musical work brings with it new feelings, which are created by that music and within that music.” Harsh criticism of ecological restoration is predicated on the idea that restoration is just a way of cleaning up a mess already made by humans and cleverly covers over the desire to dominate all of nature that caused the mess in the first place. It is the capability to drive and direct the creative energies of the universe, which eternally express this underlying divinity.