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as human intervention being absent. This absolutist
approach would require humanity to be removed
from the history of the Earth. The principal difficulty
lies in the conflation of 'unnatural' with 'intentional'.
If all intentional acts are committed by humans alone,
this permanently bars all other animal life from
claiming sentience, which is in itself indefensible,
and there are few suggestions that a precise fac-
simile of a previous system is either feasible or desirable.
Vogel (2003) and Light (2003) have argued against this
absolutist stance, and in favour of ecological restora-
tion as a culturally worthwhile project, while firmly
confirming humanity and artefacts as part of nature.
The concepts of nature and naturalness are diffi-
cult to define easily. The principal difficulty crystal-
lizes around humanity's role in nature - separate from
or part of it? For example, Callicott et al . (1999) have
detected a dichotomy in current schools of thought
regarding nature conservation; compositionalism ver-
sus functionalism. They suggest that the latter sees
humankind as part of nature, and the former separ-
ates humankind from nature; interestingly they sug-
gest that ecological restoration belongs to the former
school, i.e. humankind is separate from nature. We
believe that this is a misapprehension, resulting from
the strong focus of current restoration ecology on tech-
nical aspects: indeed, the scope of journals dealing
with ecological restoration must be widened. A more
comprehensive overview was presented by Swart et al .
(2001). They identified three archetypes of nature, as
follows.
COMMUNITY
SCIENTIFIC
Local
Regional
National
International
Fig. 1.2 Degree of weight given to community versus
scientific arguments in relation to scale (after Harris
et al . 1996).
increasing political pressure in the industrialized
world (Kleinman 2000). It is likely that there will be
an increasing move to 'citizens' juries' to come to deci-
sions on topics of a quite complex technical nature
(Kleinman 2000, Marris et al . 2001). Whether the old
regime persists, or this new democratized approach
is adopted, the onus for providing clear, objective advice
to decision makers based on well-founded ethical
experimentation and observation falls squarely on
the shoulders of scientists.
So, are there formulations of how society can, and
does, act on the findings of restoration ecology
research programmes? In the European context there
is increasing advocacy for going beyond simple agri-
environment schemes, and combining them with
carefully targeted large-scale habitat restoration
(Sutherland 2002). This addresses several problems
simultaneously, including sea-level rise, water catch-
ment protection, flood defence and biodiversity
issues. Before going into more detail we will address
the choice of targets which themselves depend on the
concept of nature that people have.
1 The wilderness concept ('natural landscapes', see
Westhoff 1952; 'natural ecosystems', see Christen-
sen et al . 1996; 'primitive attitude', see Schama 1995).
Central to this concept is the idea that nature regu-
lates itself (Foreman et al . 1995). Humans do not
play a significant role except for practical issues
like legislation to protect areas, safeguard against
poachers and the like. Typical discussions asso-
ciated with this view are whether or not to intro-
duce top predators into a restored area (e.g. Fritts
et al . 1997) or the number of large herbivores that
should be introduced to keep an area in a desired
(i.e. open) state. Not surprisingly, this view is espe-
cially supported in less-densely populated areas
like large parts of the USA, Russia and Africa.
However, examples of this approach can also be
1.2.1 Concepts of nature
The debate over the meaning of what is natural is
neither casual nor unimportant with respect to eco-
logical restoration. Katz (1992) and Elliot (1997) have
put forward the argument that restored landscapes are
no longer natural, and therefore of little or no value.
They base this argument on the definition of natural
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