Restoration Ecology Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The repair and restoration of ecological communities has been undertaken as a conscious endeavor at least since the 1890s, and has grown to become a recognized sub-discipline within academic ecology, as well as a sprawling professional and amateur practice. Although environmental reclamation and rehabilitation attempts have been attempted throughout human history, resembling acts of “restoration ecology” avant la lettre, as a disciplinary practice it thus only became possible with the reification of “the ecosystem” as an object of study in the ecology of Ernst Haeckel and Frederick Clements. Using the mechanistic metaphors of the day, the first ecologists in the late 1800s reasoned that if human actions degraded an ecosystem, then repair was possible and even necessary; the task took on epic dimensions in the context of George Perkins Marsh’s 1872 Man and Nature, in which he linked the fall of classical civilizations to the destruction of ecosystems. The advanced state of German forest science, and its influence on North American environmental management in the late 1800s, makes it unsurprising that the first attempts to repair ecosystems as such were made in the context of silviculture.

The restoration of native biotic communities for their own sake was first widely articulated by Aldo Leopold during his tenure at the University of Wisconsin’s Arboretum, both in his book A Sand County Almanac and his design for the arboretum. Unlike most such institutions, this arboretum was intended to showcase native ecosystems, and consisted of large areas of the oak savanna and prairie native to southern Wisconsin. It was intended as a laboratory rather than a museum, and the first ecologists to study restoration as a special case of plant community succession worked under Leopold there in the 1940s and 1950s: Henry Greene, John Curtis, and Grant Cottam. While academic interest in native ecosystems faded with the turn to systematics in ecology during the 1960s, in the 1970s the arboretum became the focus for the rising popular environmental movement.

Restoration ecology as a discipline and activity grew out of at least two other areas of technical practice, however: mine reclamation and dredge spoil disposal. These forms of industrial reclamation, areas of applied ecology, have increasingly drawn on the principles of restoration ecology to achieve the stability and repair of mine sites and navigable waterways. However, their goals are not to restore native ecosystems, but rather to design ecosystems that will perform certain desired functions (such as toxic remediation or spoil stabilization). The scientific practice of wetland restoration ecology, for example, grew largely out of the activities of the Dredged Material Research Program of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1970s.

The European tradition of restoration ecology came from these kinds of industrial mitigation concerns, rather than from the interest in pre-settlement ecologies that characterized American practice and that must be recognized as rooted in a peculiarly American romanticism. English restorationists such as A.D. Bradshaw came to the discipline through concerns about the treatment of mine leachate, while the thriving Dutch academic restoration community grew from initial work on maintaining polderland agro-ecosystems. There is thus something of an international cultural divide in restoration ecology; Europeans tend not to be concerned with “original conditions” as much as with the construction of viable and stable ecosystems of sufficient complexity. Americans respond that native ecosystems are precisely those that are likely to be the most viable, stable, and complex. While all landscapes have been shaped by humanity, geological change, and climate to the point where asking questions about “original conditions” can be thoroughly critiqued, there remains at the heart of American restorationist practice a hard core of prelapsarian (or Edenic) commitment. That is, while it may be impossible to know or return to original conditions, the overall ideology of the approach often guides those who advocate it toward somewhat romanticized ideals.

As an area of academic ecology, restoration ecology has drawn from three disparate areas of ecological theory. For some, the restoration of particular species has been grounded in population ecology, nonequilibrium dynamics, and metapopulation studies. For others, the restoration of ecosystems has been grounded in a Clementsian notion of climax in community ecology and in assembly theory. A third orientation is to approach the restoration of nature using the tools of landscape ecology and considerations of scale, fragmentation, and spatial dynamism. These theories point in very different directions, and break on the belief in such a thing as a coherent “community” that is to be restored, a proposition that population and systems ecology have rejected since their inception. Complicating this debate is the large community of amateur enthusiasts and professional technicians practicing restoration ecology-now a multimillion-dollar industry driven by requirements of environmental law to repair and restore environmental damage.

Restoration as a popular movement and a bureaucratic imperative requires “the ecological community” as a unit on which to affix the romantic imaginary and environmental governance, respectively. In short, the stochastic existence of a metapopulation of an endangered species doesn’t excite the same level of passionate environmentalism, nor serve to extend the same kind of governmental management oversight, as does the existence of a “tallgrass prairie” community. Debates over the proper aim, methods, and theory behind restoration ecology have occupied the pages of the main professional journal (Restoration and Management Notes, now Ecological Restoration) and the main academic journal (Restoration Ecology) since their inceptions in 1981 and 1993 respectively, as well as the annual meetings of the Society for Ecological Restoration, founded in 1987. Social scientists have entered the debate as well, finding in restoration ecology fertile ground for investigating the human acts of boundary making between natural and social/cultural phenomena.

Bibliography:

Donald Falk, Margaret Palmer, and Joy Zedler, Foundations of Restoration Ecology: The Science and Practice of Ecological Restoration (Island Press, 2006);
Paul Gobster and Bruce Hull, eds., Restoring Nature: Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities (Island Press, 2000).