Care and moral repair: Restoring historical land-caring practices

Do we have an obligation to restore historical land-caring practices as an act of moral repair? Recently, Almassi has put forward ecological restoration as a form of moral repair between humans and the environment. However, this account relies on the anthropocentric notions of ‘trust’ and ‘forgiveness’. In this article, I develop the moral repair justification using the non-anthropocentric terms of ‘flourishing’ and ‘care’. I argue historical land-caring practices involve a moral relationship of mutual dependency between humans and biotic communities, and restoring such practices can be act of moral repair. Using the example of fire-stick farming by the Martu people of the Australian Western Desert, I show that the restoration of historical land-caring satisfies a plurality of environmental ethics.