Restoration Ecology

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.

U.S. interest in restoring pre-settlement ecologies has its roots in a distinctly American romanticism.

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 [Page 1506]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.

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