Ecological Restoration on the Half Shell: The Cultural Ecology of Oyster Management and Restoration in North Carolina

Restoration efforts have been spurred by the recognition of long-underestimated benefits related to water quality and biodiversity, which arise from the direct and indirect ecosystem services that oyster reefs provide as they filter-feed and accumulate three-dimensional structure. The interconnectedness at the center of process-based restoration efforts must encompass geographical, ecological, and physical factors while also addressing the cultural and social contexts of ecological systems. I explored how cultural and social considerations can influence our understanding of restoring oysters to North Carolina's estuarine systems. I studied how stakeholders conceptualize oyster restoration by combining cultural modeling approaches with participatory mapping methods using semi-structured interviews. I investigated how views of oysters and oyster restoration differ among stakeholders by identifying the explicit and implicit cultural-ecological knowledge, values, and beliefs that stakeholders possess in order to assess whether the degree of difference in perceptions and perspectives suggests shared or distinct underlying cultural-ecological models. Each stakeholder group's cultural model of restoring oysters is unique in certain propositions, but important perspectives, though conceptualized differently among groups, are shared across all models. All models include a proposition regarding the value of ecosystem-based approaches to address the effects of large-scale environmental changes, such as increased runoff from changing land use patterns, for efforts to restore oysters. Groups differed in their conceptualizations of the use of dredges for oyster harvest and its relationship to sustaining oyster populations. Stakeholders consider oyster restoration a success when it encompasses economic, ecological, and heritage values. Successful restoration is about what stakeholders want the world to look like, not what makes sense economically. The complexity of both individual and group values and knowledge about specific places, processes, and resources suggests that there may not be right answers to restoration questions, but rather cultural plurality, which informs notions of right and wrong behavior towards nature