Henry Ouellette, '26

Summer 2024

PDF available with citations and footnotes here

Prof. Laura Martin: LM, Henry Ouellette: HO

HO: What’s your name and what you study?

LM: My name is Professor Laura Martin. I am an associate professor in Environmental Studies at Williams and I study environmental history and Science and Technology Studies. Environmental history looks at how historically people have shaped the environments and how the environment has shaped people, and Science and Technology Studies looks at how scientific practice and ideas and regulations shaped society and vice versa, how society shapes environmental regulations. My research is specifically focused on the history of how societies have shaped habitat for non-human species, so thinking about how social systems including laws, including regulations, shaped the biological environment itself.

HO: And so your book Wild by Design is about the restoration movement. Could you describe just sort of what that is and how it got started? 

LM: Wild by Design looks at the history of restoration as an idea, scientific practice, and a matter of policy. I define restoration as an attempt to collaborate with non-human species in order to design nature. Ecological restoration is defined by the Society for ecological restoration, which is an international scientific society, as a way to sustain the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded or damaged or destroyed. I mean, I define it a little bit differently, but the big things to know about ecological restoration movements are that, first, restoration is an attempt to do something active to undo environmental harm caused by people and by corporations and by societies. So, it's a type of active environmental management, and that distinguishes restoration from preservation, which would be using actual physical protection like fences or using legal protection to set aside an area from use and assume that it will kind of passively heal itself. And so, restoration can be understood in distinction to that more passive management; restorationists do lots of different direct interventions, whether that's taking out dams on a river to restore an ecological flow with that river, whether that's attempting to kill invasive species, whether plants or animals. [The book is about] the politics of why people try to do that, why they're killing certain species in the name of protecting other species. Restorationists could set up captive breeding programs to try and increase the population sizes of endangered species. They could reintroduce a native species to habitats. They could plant trees and former mining sites to try and do soil reclamation. There's all of these very different practices that restoration has to do. They all fall under the umbrella of restoration. In the book I looked at the history of that idea that people need to intervene in the system in order to try and rejuvenate or restore it.

HO: So what role has regulation played in that? Are there some regulatory features that you see impacting restoration in the way that it wouldn't for preservation? 

LM: Starting with how preservation is shaped by regulation, environmental management in the United States is fabulously complicated because there are twenty-something different federal agencies that do environmental work—almost every federal agency does environmental work as part of their mandate—and some of those agencies are land holders and others are not. The simplest way to think about how regulation works in the United States is that we can separate out the US into public lands and private lands. And, by and large, land owners have power over the plant species on their properties, but not the animal species. By common law, animals are considered property of the state, and this becomes an interesting state rights issue: the federal government has very little say over laws and regulations surrounding animals. There’s the kind of famous counterexample of the Endangered Species Act, which a lot of people like states rights advocates consider to be federal overreach. But, in general, technically I'm not supposed to kill a squirrel on my property without a permit from the state. I can do whatever I want with the plants on my private property, unless they're endangered. Setting aside private lands, which comprise 70 something percent of land in the United States, there are many different entities that have some jurisdiction over how management is done on [public] land. Maybe you're in a national park or maybe you're on Forest Service land. Maybe you're on a national wildlife refuge, which would be US Fish and Wildlife Service land. And then in addition to that, there's agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, like Fish and Wildlife Service, that are going to have different and maybe conflicting visions of how to manage that. 

HO: How did you end up with this animal being a state thing, plants being a private thing? And then how did the Endangered Species Act  overcome that?

LM: The state owning animals is through English common law and the idea of the Monarch owning the wildlife in a country. And the idea is that the state had some interest in having access to emerging game populations. I think that the architects of the Endangered Species Act, overcame the argument that states determine the fates of species [by framing] things in terms of interstate commerce, [saying] that they have jurisdiction over animals that are found across state boundaries. And [so] much of the Endangered Species Act actually pertains to federal actions. So in that way, there's not a conflict—the federal government is deciding how they're going to manage the issues on federally held lands. So where the Endangered Species Act actually becomes controversial is when it's upheld to penalize actions taken on private land.

HO:  Okay, and when you say an action is taken privately—you can harm species in a couple of ways, right? Like you can shoot the squirrel but you could also put chemicals into the [federally regulated] waterways then that kills all the fish in the river. So does reservation or restoration policy depend on that sort of directness factor, if that makes sense?

LM: Yeah, in Wild by Design I argue that there isn't there isn't really much legislation that pertains to restoration. It all emerges through regulation. So we [can] think about how restoration emerges under the Clean Water Act, specifically under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act: if a developer is going to decrease the area of a wetland, they have to get permission from the Army Corps of Engineers. This legislation was put into place thinking that the Army Corps would sometimes deny permits to do development. But, basically, what's unfolded over the past decades is that they never turned down a project. They always permit the projects, but, in permitting the project, they sometimes require developers to do remediation and to compensate for wetlands loss with wetlands restoration. So restoration emerged as this regulatory requirement of developers that were impacting wetlands under Section 404. Let's say—in the late 1970s and 1980s, when these permits were first being filed—Walmart is paving over wetlands in order to get a parking lot; the Army Corps would require Walmart's to build new wetlands on site. And then, in the early 1990s, through changes to regulation and guidelines to developers, there emerged the possibility of developers paying for restoration to be pursued off site in order to fulfill their permitting requirements. And I argue in the book that this the hugest administrative precedent and ideational precedent for the carbon offsetting market. It's really[with] very in the weeds and kind of obscure regulations that developers and agency scientists came together and developed the idea that environmental harm at one site can be compensated for with incremental restoration and separate site. So today, it's very rare that a developer would compensate for wetlands loss on site. Instead, they would typically pay an entity like the Nature Conservancy to do restoration somewhere else. Think about all the interesting scientific and ecological questions that raises, like, is the wetland that's being restored 60 miles away anything like the wetland that was paved over?

HO:  So there's a bunch of regulation that plays out. It's all ending up in various administrative capacities, various industry agreements with different aims, various overlapping state and local and federal jurisdiction on the same issue, all kind of jammed into administrative coordination and [being decided] on sort of technical things not super related oftentimes to the projects themselves. Does that influence how we think about restoration and what public recognition or support it has?

LM: That's not a question that I actually look at in the book. I think it'd be a really interesting follow up for someone to do to my book. It has me thinking about [how] even the mandate within one agency can be at conflict with itself. In the book, I looked at the ways in which the Fish and Wildlife Service implemented the Endangered Species Act. The federal government itself was the party that was largely responsible for endangering many of the species protected by the Endangered Species Act in the first place. What became the Fish and Wildlife Service, [as part of] the federal government, systematically killed millions of individuals of predatory species like wolves. So the same expertise that was built up in the Fish and Wildlife Service by the 1960s 1970s were people who were experts at killing animals. And then, with the passage of the Endangered Species Act, in 1973, suddenly that same agency was responsible for saving species. That's not the expertise that they had; that wasn't what people in the agency were committed to. You get this real mismatch in agency goals even within one agency, and then you think about [the fact that] there's so many different memoranda of agreement and other informal agreements through which restoration has to proceed. It gets really complicated. There were [also] interesting ways in which the management and norms of different agencies came to influence each other a bit: the National Park Service was very invested, in the 1960s and 1970s, in recreating historical ecosystems, with the language very specifically of making national parks look like ecosystems looked to white settlers. Very explicitly, their goal is to create this white supremacist settler colonial mythical landscape. That's where, interestingly, getting rid of non-native species really emerges—through the management actions of the National Park Service and that specific goal which is tied to settler colonialism imported into the Wildlife Service, into the Forest Service, into other agencies.

HO: Do you see the jurisdictional interactions as a foil to actual actual change or just as the way that any sort of incremental preservation or restoration has to work? Is there a better way?

LM: I think what I see to be the biggest barrier to restoration in the United States is not the jurisdictional overlap and lack of clarity in environmental management, but rather the public lands-private land divide. It’s sort of the opposite: on public land, there are many different entities that, by law, have some say over how restoration is done. And in the book, as federal agencies wrest control of endangered species from nonprofit environmental agencies and individuals in the 1970s, over the years all that's left for those land trust and volunteer groups to be able to do is to work with invasive species, so the shifting regulatory landscape, I argue, does impact goals and actions of non- government environmental entities. But I think that while that overlapping jurisdiction leads to the need to collaborate across different agencies, the bigger issue is that all the national attention is on that management of public lands, but 70-something-percent of land in the United States is privately held, and there are very few mechanisms for policymakers to try and promote restoration on the private lands. It really is all voluntary. There's not always the tools in place. And so you get this incredibly uneven attention where the only place that the government can do reservation work is on federal land. There's really interesting tribal restoration initiatives as well, ones that go back for decades. Nancy Langston, in her book Climate Ghosts, overviews a few that are happening now in the Midwest, including Ojibwe wild rice restoration. And the Department of Interior has been returning management privileges to tribes in a number of different places right now. In Wild by Design I talk about the history of the first wildlife restoration site in the country, which was carved out of the Flathead Indian Reservation in an attempt to further erode tribal sovereignty under the Dawes Act, and the Department of Interior, just a few years ago, returned ownership of that bison herd to the Flathead Nation. And there are some cases right now where the federal government is voluntarily returning jurisdiction to tribal nations [specifically] within the world of restoration, so that's a whole area of research for future scholars.

HO: You are also now doing research on the manufacturing of herbicides. Do you see any parallels there with how regulation has worked for the restoration movement and how it impacted what I guess would sort of be the inverse of that, which is production?

LM: Yeah. I'm really grateful for this question, because I'm just starting this herbicide project and the questions that you're asking me are going to influence how I'm thinking about this. The regulatory landscape looks really different for biocides than it does for species management and restoration, because chemical regulation in the United States is an entirely different beast than species. This is part of the problem that Rachel Carson famously pointed out in Silent Spring in 1962, that the agricultural and chemical industries was putting all of these biocides into the environment and there was no federal mechanism or federal agency to account for what the non-target impacts of those biocides were, the collateral damage to wildlife that was occurring, because they were the wildlife agencies that were studying wildlife but not pesticides. And then there was drug administration and a few particular pieces of legislation they were concerned with, but specifically at the end of the food supply chain, so that food growers can still put tons of pesticides on their apples, say, and then wash them off before they go to consumers. And that would be permissible because all of the regulation around pesticides at the time was focused on consumer safety and not the safety of agricultural workers and obviously, wildlife. That question is prompting me to think about the ways in which the intersection of wildlife recreation and chemical regulation is creating this gap in our knowledge and our ability to make healthier environments. 

HO: Thank you.