PhD Qualifying Exam: Area of Specialty (Question 6)

How might restoration endpoints be identified and what are the political implications for using different methods for identifying and choosing those endpoints?

The selection of restoration endpoints is inherently a political exercise. Some restoration ecologists resist this political interpretation (Packard), and instead argue that their selections are grounded in science. However our understanding of ecosystem fluctuation, evolution and non-equilibrium ecology, suggest that the selection of any particular reference condition is simply the outcome of some political process.

In the United States, restoration movements have sought to restore disturbed sites to their ecological conditions found prior to European settlement. A purely scientific approach to restoration uses apolitical tools from the natural sciences to reconstruct what ecosystems were like in the past. This reconstruction of ecosystems has been the specialty of the field of historical ecology (Eagan & Howell).

This selection of “pre-European settlement” as an endpoint obviates the impacts of native peoples on this continent, but more fundamentally, it ignores that ecosystems are in constant flux and change. The choice to restore a prairie to its conditions in 1800 have no greater scientific merit that the selection of the year 1700, 1500 or 500. Plus, this selection of a particular endpoint implies a desire to freeze time. As if the year in which humans began to modify the ecosystem, coincidentally, Nature had already found its ideal state.

Already, conservation biology is moving away from static ideas and instead framing their work context of evolution and change (Meffe). This more nuanced ecological understanding is common among scholars despite the simple messaging from environmental groups that reinforce static ecological pictures. “Save the rainforests” implies we aim to prevent any change at all. Similarly, the restoration of a habitat to its pre-European conditions suggests that we would have preferred that the ecosystem remained unchanged for 200 or 300 years.

Non-equilibrium ecology has also seriously challenged assumptions about equilibrium states (Neumann) and these ideas are being substituted with theories of sudden changes or punctuated equilibrium (Gould). These new ideas within the field of ecology further destabilize simplistic ideas about finding singular restoration endpoints because there is no stable equilibrium to which any system should return.

Recognizing that no scientifically defensible restoration endpoint exists, suddenly throws questions about restoration into the political realm. Science can still be used to weigh the advantages and disadvantages to different scenarios, but science will not reveal answers about what the ecosystem should look like in the future. Restoration science becomes descriptive, not normative. The normative decisions about what should be are devolved to the users and inhabitants of that ecosystem. No doubt this observation can be disturbing for ecologists since it places them in an unfamiliar position of not finding the “right” answer about what an ecosystem should look like. It may be even more troubling that the future of a place ecologists care about would be determined by the collective will of individuals that may include those who ‘do not care’ or at least have very different values with respect to an ecosystem’s future.

An openly political approach to identifying restoration endpoints dethrones the physical sciences, and elevates the social sciences. No doubt, historical ecology remains useful for informing decisions about restoration, but it is equally important to understand the environmental history of the site, since it is environmental history which explains how politics has shape resource use.

Environmental historians describe how landscape changes are the outcomes of historical struggles between competing resource users. Furthermore, the victors in these resource struggles often succeed in rewriting the ecological narrative of how a particular ecosystem operates or what has ‘always been’. This revisionist history gives existing resource users disproportionate power, especially if ecosystem managers rely on apolitical strategies to make restoration choices.

Environmental history can provide critical insight to help managers and the public make more informed decisions about what the ecosystems should look like in the future. For example, following the Mississippi floods of 1993, agricultural interests lobbied to rebuild levees and restore floodplain agricultural. In this context ‘restoration’ meant the farmers would re-appropriate agricultural rights on the floodplain. However a careful look into the environmental history of Mississippi River reveals that fishers had used the natural lakes along the floodplain long before levee agriculture. Furthermore, the fishing communities were violently removed from these lakes by agricultural interests who had stronger financial and political influences (Schneider). This case reveals how different restoration endpoints often are the reflection of political interests rather than an unbiased scientific truth. Other authors have similarly found that environmental narratives can dominate discourse and decisions about restoration. Cronon is well known for his description of wilderness in the American West and Spirn describes the competing narratives that argued for ‘restoring’ Olmstead’s Emerald Necklace in Boston, which was an a human constructed park built on narratives of its own. Given that particular stories about the past can dominate the public psyche, we should be suspect of assertions about restoration that claim to be objective or unbiased.

Adopting an apolitical or scientific approach for selecting restoration endpoints risks reinforcing existing patterns of resource use that probably benefit historical victors of resource struggle. Instead of relying on the scientific or apolitical approach, we should acknowledge that ecological restoration is fundamentally about human choices. Both natural science and social science should be used to inform our decisions. The inhabitants and neighbors of each site should decide what type of ecosystem they would like to co-exist with. Certainly, the science can help orient our decision making because some species probably will not survive in all climates. But fundamentally, it is a political decision.

Finally, understanding restoration as a political issue raises important questions about process and participation. This makes the work on participatory watershed management (Henne, Sabatier) even more critical for watershed managers, since the science alone will not reveal what watershed conditions should look like, rather these decisions should be the outcomes of democratic processes.