ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION − ANDREW LIGHT

The term «ecological restoration», which often is used interchangeably with restoration
ecology, refers to the science and social practice of re-creating ecosystems that have been damaged
or destroyed by human activity or natural events. Ecological restorationists have attempted to
recreate a wide variety of ecosystems, including tall-grass prairies, oak savannas, wetlands, forests,
streams, rivers, and coral reefs. These projects can range from small-scale urban park reclamations, 2
such as ongoing restorations in urban parks in New York and Chicago, to huge wetland mitigation
projects encompassing hundreds of thousands of acres, such as the $8 billion project to restore the
everglades ecosystem in Florida. Also included in ecological restoration are attempts to reintroduce
species, principally to save those which are endangered, and the removal of exotic species thought
to be a threat to native biodiversity.

ACADEMIC BACKGROUND AND FIELD PRACTICE

As a scientific practice restoration ecology has its background primarily in academic

disciplines such as field botany, conservation biology, landscape ecology, and adaptive ecosystem
management. As an exercise in environmental-design practice most restoration in the field is
orchestrated by landscape architects and environmental engineers. However, a range of other
academic disciplines, including philosophy, have been attracted to restoration both as an object of
study and as an opportunity to apply their ideas on the ground (Gobster and Hull 2000). Some of
the first tall-grass prairie restorations in the United States were initiated by Aldo Leopold at the
University of Wisconsin Arboretum and on his own land on the Wisconsin River (Meine 1988).

Environmental philosophers attracted to restoration initially focused principally on the issue

of whether a restored ecosystem could be an adequate substitute for the original ecosystem it was
emulating and, as part of that inquiry, whether restored ecosystems were really natural or instead
humanly produced artifacts. The most influential and widely discussed work by environmental
philosophers on this topic is that of Robert Elliot (1982, 1997) and Eric Katz (1996, 1997, 2002,
2007a and b), both of whom argued that ecological restorations do not produce natural entities and
that restorations may harm naturally evolved systems, especially if one considers those ecosystems
a subject worthy of moral consideration in their own right.

THE THEORIES OF ELLIOT AND KATZ

The initial concerns of Elliot and Katz were based on their objections to the claims of some
professional restorationists and, for Elliot, some corporations that suggested that a restored
environment could replicate the value of the original environment it was replacing. Elliot began an
article on restoration titled ‘‘Faking Nature’’ by identifying an Australian corporation that claimed
that it should be allowed to mine ore from a pristine environment on the grounds that it could
restore that environment fully at a later time. Elliot called that view the restoration thesis and stated
that it consists of the claim that ‘‘the destruction of what has value [in nature] is compensated for
by the later creation (re-creation) of something of equal value’’ (Elliot 1982, p. 82). Elliot rejected
the restoration thesis by using an analogy based on the relationship between original and replicated
works of art. Just as we would not value a replication of a work of art as much as we would value
the original we wouldn’t value a replicated bit of nature as much as we would the original thing.
What gives value to a work of art, for Elliot, is its origins (who produced it, at what time, and in
which artistic milieu and its respective importance in that milieu); equally, what in part gives value
to nature is its origins, most importantly the fact that it is not human-made. In light of their 2
anthropogenic origins, restorations are not natural entities if one understands nature as having
nonhuman origins.

Elliot supplemented that general claim through a series of thought experiments that show
how a person who placed high value on wilderness could find fault with a series of humanly
produced simulacra, including a restored environment modeled on a naturally occurring
wilderness. That argument is expanded and given a stronger philosophical foundation through the
development of a subjectivist account of intrinsic value in Elliot’s 1997 book, which also was titled
Faking Nature.

Katz went much further than Elliot in making a case against restored environments. He used a
similar distinction between the natural and the nonnatural −specifically between the natural and the
artifactual− as a starting point. For Katz it is not just that ecological restorations are artifacts but
that they are artifacts whose existence demonstrates human hubris (people presume the ability to
replicate and replace natural environments and therefore may be inclined to destroy as much as
they want of such environments on the assumption that they can recreate them) and exemplifies a
form of domination over the natural world by imposing people’s will on it. People restore nature to
the form they want it to take, make it perform the functions they want it to perform, and in doing so
constrain natural systems from evolving as they would without human interference. In this view
restored ecosystems are an embodiment of everything that is wrong with anthropocentrism. Katz
makes the point that “the practice of ecological restoration can only represent a misguided faith in
the hegemony and infallibility of the human power to control the natural world” (Katz 1996, p.
222).

REACTIONS TO KATZ AND ELLIOT

The initial concern of many other environmental ethicists who added to the literature on
restoration was to respond to what might be called the Elliot-Katz view (Gunn 1991, Scherer 1995,
Throop 1997, Lo 1999, Light 2000). Those responses took the form of general criticisms of the
distinction between the natural and the nonnatural (the nature-culture dualism) in those accounts
(Gunn, Scherer, and Lo), questions about the propriety of Elliot’s analogy between the value of
nature and the value of art (Gunn), and criticisms of the potential lack of appreciation in the Elliot-
Katz literature for specific restoration practices with a particular focus on the necessity of removing
exotic species of flora and fauna to maintain biological diversity and ecosystem integrity and health
(Throop and Light).
 In addition, many restorationists wrote about the kinds of issues raised in the Elliot-Katz
literature, responding in large part to the publication of a version of Katz’s 1992 influential paper
on restoration “The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature” (reprinted in Katz 1996) in one of the
two main journals in the field of restoration ecology, Ecological Restoration, then called
Restoration and Management Notes. In large measure the responses took the form of claims that
restorationists could avoid the concern that restorations are not natural by strictly prescribing that
ecological restorations would have to reproduce as closely as possible the exact ecosystems that 2
had existed at the same locale in an identified natural state. Although that answer does not address
the ontological claims in the Elliot-Katz view, it began what has become known as the
«authenticity debate» among restorationists.

Discussion of the original propositions advanced by Elliot and Katz has continued (Vogel
2003). However, in the first decade of the twenty-first century the philosophical debate on that
topic went beyond the criticisms raised by Elliot and Katz. On the one hand, earlier philosophical
focus on restoration has led to increased critical questions about the conceptual foundations of
restoration without entailing a wholesale rejection of restoration as an environmental practice. On
the other hand, some of those who have rejected the criticisms of Elliot and Katz have gone on to
make a positive case for the moral or social value of ecological restoration.

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES

The issues discussed above can be divided into three categories: defining what restoration is
(something that has plagued the Society for Ecological Restoration [SER], the principal
international organization of restorationists and those studying restoration), distinguishing between
native and exotic species (which in part drives the activity of restorationists who define the practice
in part around the removal of exotic species and the maintenance of native biodiversity), and
determining the period to which people should endeavor to restore a place, with attention to the
specific question of whether the goal should be pre-Columbian or presettlement. None of these
issues could be considered settled, but each has been the subject of interesting work. Eric Higgs
(2003) contributed important work on the first and third topics in his scholarly publications on the
distinction between restorations and good restorations and as a president of SER.

Mark Woods and Paul Moriarty (2001) argued that the second issue should be resolved
through a defensible set of distinctions concerning what makes an exotic species exotic, and Mark
Sagoff (2000) encouraged abandonment of the distinction. Numerous philosophers have weighed
in on the issue of the alleged naturalness of the pre-Columbian ecosystem as part of a general
criticism of the idea of wilderness (Callicott 1995).

Among those who have made positive cases for restoration that have been discussed and
criticized are Higgs, William Jordan (2003), and Andrew Light (2000, 2002). Higgs (2003)
combined an understanding of the philosophical questions at the heart of restoration with field
experience in the design of restorations. In one important respect, Higgs fully embraced the cultural
aspects of the practice, arguing that the reference ecosystems for restorations of necessity have
cultural components insofar as humans have evolved a variety of modes of interaction with
different places that have shaped their coevolution. A well-designed restoration not only
contributes to the ecological integrity of a site but also helps improve the human relationship with
particular places.

Jordan (2003), one of the founders of the modern science of restoration, argued that the
2
practice of restoration not only can improve people’s relationship with the natural world but also
overcome the “existential shame” that humans have in relation to the natural world insofar as their
existence relies on and is maintained by the destruction of nature. Light (2002) argued that the
positive value of restoration lies in its ability to provide opportunities for direct public participation
in environmental management and thus serve as a foundation for building ecological citizenship.

New critical work on these figures and others has led to a reassessment of the original
arguments by Elliot and Katz as well as potential new directions in the moral dimensions of
restoration practice (Katz 2007a, 2007b, Throop and Purdom 2006). A new subfield of restoration
appears to be emerging in response to climate change. This subfield focuses on the necessity of
designing so-called novel ecosystems by constructing ecosystems in places where they have never
been before as a way of adapting to global climate change. The development of this field is sure to
spark further philosophical debate.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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