Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
be to bring an ecosystem back within an histor-
ical range, 'or closer to a long-term average' than is
currently the case, as a result of ill-advised over-
exploitation or ill-management by previous genera-
tions. The alternative approach is that of considering
a restored ecosystem as a special category of 'emerg-
ing ecosystems' and therefore to relax our concern with
historical authenticity and strict references to focus
instead on pragmatic issues and what Clewell (2000b)
- also a founder and past chairman of SER Inter-
national - has called 'natural authenticity'. Many
authors seem to be converging on this approach, while
others remain adamantly in favour of historical ref-
erences (see Egan & Howell 2001). This issue will
be discussed further in Chapter 17, but for now we
simply re-iterate that answering the question, why
restore?, first of all is the first step in deciding on the
best way to proceed.
merits our attention here, and indeed merits much
more comparative research (Hobbs & Hopkins 1990,
Hobbs & Saunders 1992, Hall 1998, 2000, Aronson
et al.
2002). Nevertheless, in Africa, south-east Asia
and Oceania, human influence has had a major impact
not just for millennia but for 100,000 (Australia) or
millions of years. Europeans should keep this in
mind when evoking a possible specialness of the
European perspective. Still, there is a major difference
of intensity, as indeed in the contrast between the entire
geopolitical north, and the geopolitical south, a dif-
ference called the 'digital divide' in a pivotal paper
by Kates
et al.
(2001) on sustainable development and
sustainability science (see section 16.2.8 and Chap-
ter 17).
Returning to the question of reference areas and
ecosystems, we note that it may be easier in Europe,
most of Asia and tropical Africa, than in any of the
neo-Europes - or the few remaining remote parts of
the world where the 'human footprint' (Janzen 1998)
is still relatively shallow - to accept the idea that
a full return or restoration to the past is simply
not possible. This idea is expressed in Fig. 16.1,
which revisits Fig. 1.6, in light of global ecological flux
(global and demographic changes in the so-called
Anthropocene Era), and the growing preponderance
of emerging ecosystems. The notion of restoration to
the future implies a paradox, but this paradox is
an inherent part of the problem of ecological restora-
tion, and of restoration ecology as well. Note that
degraded systems in Fig. 16.1 differ from emerging
ecosystems in that their autogenic succession is gen-
erally more or less blocked. The feasibility of a return
to the past is questioned, as in Chapter 1, because of
the moving-target syndrome. Restoration (or rehab-
ilitation), or designing ecosystems for the future,
will require jump-starting investments and sustained
investments, and also dedication, on the part of local
populations and institutions. But is the representation
in this model really useful in our current state of plan-
etary flux? At least it keeps us aware of the need to
extrapolate our limited current knowledge of bio-
complexity towards future developments, rather than
to seek to restore the past in a strict sense. Figure 16.2
recasts the model in a different light. The notion
of sustainability includes both ecological and socio-
economic aspects and challenges restoration ecology
to become a multidisciplinary science, or a key
An under-studied axis of comparison:
European versus neo-European perspectives
Before continuing, and completing, our list of eight
hot topics, let us pause here to consider if there is any-
thing special or different about restoration ecology
in Europe? After all, nearly all European ecosystems
and landscapes are emphatically not wilderness or pris-
tine ecosystems of any sort such as North American
and Australian conservationists, for example, are
largely concerned with, even though they seldom
represent more than 5 -10% of their national or
regional territories. Indeed, ecosystems and especi-
ally landscapes in Europe are almost all strongly cul-
tural, or semi-cultural, and should probably best be
described as long-standing, but still evolving, socio-
ecological systems, given the predominant influence
of human activities on vegetation, wildlife and nutri-
ent, energy and water flows over many millennia (see
Chapter 1). This contrasts sharply with the situation
in the USA, Canada and other 'neo-Europes' (Crosby
1986); that is, Australia, New Zealand and parts of
southern Africa and South America, those temperate
(or extra-tropical) regions of the planet where, since
the 16-19th centuries, there has been imposed the
form of overwhelming human domination that Alfred
Crosby called Europeanization of landscapes, resources,
biota and of course ecosystems. In evolutionary and
ecological terms, this contrast is an important one that
