I have been thinking about the ethics of ecological restoration for a few years now and look forward to more deeply contemplating these issues during my sabbatical this year. After all, there is much to reconsider. For example, my favorite question about restoration - Can we ever truly restore nature? - deserves a fuller treatment. Initially posed by environmental philosophers in the 1980s, this question has many easy answers (like yes, no, and sort of). Unfortunately, I believe, it is largely ignored by those in the restoration community, perhaps because we wouldn't like the answer.
This question inevitably leads to a sticky corollary: If we can restore nature, then why should we continue to preserve nature in its relatively unaltered state? This question is really fun to play around with - because, really, if we could perfectly restore a wetland or a coral reef or a temperate rainforest, we may not have any good reason to protect existing systems. Oh, this is a doozy!
Another question has emerged for me out of the answers to the previous ones. Some restorationists and philosophers have turned their attentions to the value of restoration for people. Restoration gives us a chance to reconnect with nature, heal our relationship with the land, couple cultural values with natural processes, reintroduce indigenous interactions with the land, and perhaps develop new rituals of reflection. These all seem like incredibly positive actions. Yet, is there a risk in using restoration to do these things? Does focusing on the human benefits of restoration distract us from the ecological possibilities? Does it distract us from the nonhuman-centered values of nature?
Finally (but not really - I am sure there are many more questions), I wonder what all this means in the face of global climate change. How can we restore specific places now when so much is going to change over the next decades? Are we focusing on the right things, spending the right money, engaged in the good fight by focusing on our local urban stream when the steady march of exotic species will overwhelm our efforts within a few years? This is likely a very difficult question to answer but certainly worth some exploration.
Over the next year, I will be working on answers to these questions through work on various restoration projects, discussions with restoration practitioners, and my own reflections. Specifically, I am investigating urban restoration in Cleveland, OH (my hometown), exotic species eradication and rare species planting efforts in Santa Barbara, CA, indigenous-inspired forest restoration in British Columbia, and good old exotics restoration in my backyard in Chapel Hill, NC. I should also confess that one of the motivations for me to reconsider restoration is that I'm reconsidering my own role and future as a restoration ecologist. I look forward to sharing my insights/questions/confusion here and welcome comments on any of these posts.
1 comment:
I am working on an ambitious stream restoration project (including invasives removal) in Chapel Hill. These are the kinds of questions I struggle with daily.
I believe ecological restoration is a matter of degree - what level of effort are we willing to undertake to restore what aspects of an ecosystem or community? Theoretically, an ecological community could be nearly completely restored, but it would probably require removing people altogether and vigilance to remove continuing threats (such as invasive species). From a practical standpoint, however, I don't think near-complete restoration is an achievable goal.
Focusing on human benefits of restoration has grown out of the need to somehow convince those around us that it's a valuable goal. Just a few of us can't do it by ourselves. Sadly, I think the majority of people will never have a nonhuman-centered view of the natural world. Thus, we have to present ways in which restoration is valuable to people, through concepts such as "ecosystem services" and the like.
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