Restoration, Revisited

An earlier post on this blog gave practical tips for restoring your property ecologically.  This post gives some reasons why you should undertake that restoration.  We all need big-picture motivation as much as hands-on guidance, right?

First, a quick definition of ecological restoration:  work that puts back in place the original relationships on your property among native plants, animals, and physical features, to produce a healthy biome.  Keep in mind you’ll never get to some static ideal of those relationships since they’re dynamic and, therefore, constantly changing.  And determining what “original” means in this context (before humans arrived?  or before white settlement?) is something even environmental historians can’t agree on.

But the general contours of restoration work are easy to understand:  re-establish habitat for native plants and animals, restore water flow to what and where it once was, keep soils in place, and improve soil fertility lost to human development.

It's easy to talk about the goal, much harder to get there.  Here are some things that might motivate you to undertake ecological restoration and keep it going:

Restoration work, however big or small, gives hope.  Among all the negative news about species extinction, habitat loss, and general degradation of the environment, this kind of work puts something in the “win” column.  You can actually turn things around ecologically, if only on the small scale of your property.  This little success can give hope that larger-scale successes are possible too.

Restoration work is a form of justice.  We think of systems of justice as repairing harm done by some people to their relationship with others in the human community.  The same kind of repair is possible to the relationship between us and our natural-world community.  Ecological restoration is the method for the repair.  It feels good doing the work of justice.

Restoration work reminds us that preservation and conservation may not be enough.  Just “leaving nature alone”—the strategy behind environmental preservation—makes sense if the landscape's ecology is healthy and reasonably intact.  Historically, managing nature for future use—the strategy behind conservation—makes sense if a given landscape is intended for resource extraction or human recreation.

Both strategies have limits, though.  Nowadays, even relatively pristine landscapes managed for the goal of preservation (wilderness areas, for example) need some level of restoration, given the reach of human impacts.  And, speaking historically, the idea behind conservation—that we can extract resources and recreate everywhere, now and forever—seems awfully naïve and dangerously anthropocentric.

But restoration work is hard to criticize beyond questioning methods and materials.  Given the breadth and depth of our past impacts on landscapes, most now need repair.  Going forward, the accelerating effects of climate change will require fixes on the run almost everywhere, likely for centuries.

Restoration is and will be needed globally and locally—“locally,” including right out your back door.