Introduction

How much is an alpine meadow worth? How about a temperate rainforest, or a wetland? These questions are challenging on many levels. On the one hand, there is an inherent problem in defining the value of a particular habitat—apart from simple economic real estate value, there is a suite of intangible aspects of value, including aesthetics and sense of place, which arguably might come into play. On the other hand, there is also the issue of who should decide the “worth” of these natural resources: Many such habitats are situated in areas that are designated as public lands and may be many things to many different people. And yet, resource managers, urban planners, and a whole host of others increasingly find themselves grappling with these difficult questions, overwhelmed by growing pressure to find and implement practical, concrete solutions in alarmingly short periods of time.

Conservation of natural resources (which includes habitats and their biotic and abiotic inhabitants), and the development of a “land ethic,” an effort pioneered by Aldo Leopold in his classic Sand County Almanac, are complex issues that incorporate biology, ecology, social justice, and economics in an especially challenging mix. As we become more aware of the natural “services” provided us by natural landscapes (e.g., wetlands act as buffers against flooding, depositories for stream and river sediments, filter-out pollutants from waterways, as well as providing important habitat for numerous species), we are also becoming more savvy about incorporating aesthetics, biology, and economics into important decisions about habitat use.

In recent decades, a new approach to managing natural resources has emerged and is fast becoming a pervasive environmental movement. This new movement, referred to as restoration ecology, involves reclaiming or restoring degraded landscapes to some former, usually more pristine, state. This new discipline finds its roots in an eclectic blend of ecology, conservation biology, plant and animal physiology, traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples, politics, and of course economics. As one might imagine, simply establishing the desired former state of a habitat can spawn rancorous debate among different interested parties, further exacerbated by the fact that, in many cases, little may be known about the historical state of a particular landscape. Further problems arise when we consider that landscapes and the species that live in them are continually subject to the forces of natural selection and community dynamics; restoration in most cases becomes an exercise in hitting a moving target.

Despite these and other complications, many resource managers and nonprofit environmental organizations are making valiant attempts to reverse the trend of increasing development and habitat loss and degradation in urban, suburban, and rural landscapes. In many of these cases, an increased dialogue and awareness of the differing values individuals designate to landscapes have generated remarkable support for restoration efforts.

History

In the 1980s, the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB), a group of academicians and resource managers dedicated to preserving and protecting rare and endangered species, was founded in the United States. In the ensuing two decades, the Society inspired a number of offshoots, including more specialized groups focused on molecular aspects of conservation as well as population dynamics and ecosystem ecology. In particular, increasing interest in restoring landscapes to historically more pristine conditions led to the formation of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) in 1987 and the publication of the first issue of the journal Restoration Ecology in 1993. The focus of this group of practitioners, researchers, and land managers was originally largely focused on restoring plants, although animal restoration is now receiving increasing attention. Although restoration ecologists are primarily motivated by applied problems, they rely heavily upon insights developed through the last few centuries in basic ecological theory and practice.

For this reason, restoration ecology is truly an interdisciplinary endeavor, involving participants with a wide range of backgrounds, including legal, artistic, political, and scientific training. As such, restoration ecology embodies the sort of cross-fertilization across disciplines that often leads to innovative solutions to difficult problems. At the same time, such a mixture of disparate factions can sometimes lead to major disagreements and the inability of formulate timely decisions and recommendations. Restoration ecology, in many ways, represents one of the most challenging, as well as one of the most rewarding, environments in which environmental scientists may work today.

Current Status

The industrial tide flats and the prairie ecosystems that compose large areas of the southern Puget Sound region in the Pacific Northwest provide good examples of the types of complicated dynamics involved in restoration efforts. The mudflats on which the Port of Tacoma was built, for instance, have been changed so dramatically over the past century that one can hardly imagine what sort of rich biological community must have been there in the estuary’s former pristine days. Northwestern prairies, meanwhile, have succumbed to the same development forces that plague the rest of the country—and especially the West, where sprawl rolls inexorably over natural landscapes on a daily basis. Only a very small percent of original prairie exists today, and housing subdivisions, recreational-use areas, and shopping malls increasingly encroach upon the little that remains. In many of these cases, preservation of pristine or near-pristine habitats is no longer an option, but restoration movements are attempting to reverse some of the environmental degradation visited upon these landscapes for centuries by restoring well-engineered mixes of native plants and animals. These projects involve Herculean amounts of planning and the application of scientific, engineering, political, and artistic skills. No details, from the tiniest soil microbes to the largest zoning restriction regulations, are left unexamined.

In most cases, the first step is to restore soils and hydrology to some functional level conducive to the reintroduction of higher order plants and animals. Underlying many of these efforts is the belief that if we can rebuild the conditions of the habitats to closely resemble what they were in the past, we can initiate a self-sustaining process whereby most or all of the plants and animals that formerly inhabited the area will once again thrive. In general, such plans involve the direct importation of plants and animals into the habitat. In many cases this is necessary, as there is little hope of these organisms actually colonizing the habitat on their own. At the same time, most restoration projects are plagued by the incessant threat of invasive species, many of which are extremely adept at colonizing disturbed or newly prepared but largely vacant habitats. The removal of weedy invaders such as canary reed grass (in wetlands), Japanese knotweed (in riparian areas), scotch broom, and St. John’s Wort (on prairies) is a primary concern for vigilant land managers engaged in restoration projects.

Finally, the idea of species succession, a major theme of community ecology, features prominently in the establishment and monitoring of restoration projects. In Northwest prairies, for instance, fire is instrumental in suppressing some early colonizing species; therefore, resource managers often employ controlled burns to manipulate species composition and abundance. These and many other details stemming from our knowledge about single-species and community ecology (e.g., appropriate levels of genetic diversity and locally adapted genotypes to ensure the survival of introduced plantings) are important to consider in the planning, implementation, and monitoring of restoration projects.

Pro and Con Arguments

Pro Arguments

1. Restoration ecology provides a way to reclaim degraded lands to a higher level of ecological functioning, benefiting both humans (by providing “nature’s services”) and wildlife.

2. Ecological restoration sites, especially those in otherwise urban landscapes, are often high-profile installations that may serve to increase public awareness of many environmental issues, including the merits of inherently valuing natural resources as well as reversing common trends in urban/suburban sprawl and unplanned development.

3. Ecological restoration provides an alternative to financial penalties through which private and public organizations that are responsible for environmental degradation may contribute to future environmental stewardship in a meaningful way.

Con Arguments

1. Restoration efforts, if done effectively, are often prohibitively expensive and many times fail to meet expectations in many cases, portions or entire communities fail to establish and thrive despite the best efforts of restorationists.

2. Ecological restoration, in some cases, is done largely for aesthetic reasons and does little to restore full ecological functioning to habitats in any real meaningful way. In many cases, overseers of restoration projects have little information about the original state of a habitat, thereby reducing management decisions to best guesses about what sort of conditions would be most appropriate.

3. Media miscommunications about successful restoration projects may serve to undermine support for other conservation efforts. Parties opposed to conservation efforts may argue that, as we become more knowledgeable about the science of restoration, any habitat may be restored to its former state, and hence it needn’t be of special concern. On a larger scale, the public may be less concerned about conservation if too much faith in the ability of scientists to prescribe a “magic bullet” for restoring full ecological functioning to any habitat becomes part of the public consciousness.

Regulations

The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 has long provided a legal framework for restoration work in the United States. Although this legislation was aimed at cleaning up habitats that had been heavily degraded by mining spoils (e.g., heavy metal tailings left after years of resource extraction), it applies as well to nonmining restoration endeavors.

Many urban areas around the United States have been designated as Superfund cleanup sites under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) passed by Congress in 1980. This act established a tax on chemical and petroleum companies in order to address releases or potential releases of hazardous materials that might threaten public health or the environment. In cases of landscape degradation, a group of trustees, monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), typically carries out a Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA), a process designed to establish how much damage has been done to the environment and what measures should be taken to address the damage.

In most cases, the NRDA trustees (often a consortium of federal, state, and Native American tribal representatives) see to it that offending agencies provide restitution by either paying large sums of money into an account earmarked for remediation, or by setting aside landscapes and working to restore them to some semblance of their former functioning habitat. While the NRDA trustees have jurisdiction over this process, in many cases they rely on the expertise of local nonprofit agencies and volunteers to make the best decisions regarding use of funds and actual restoration techniques and practices to be used. As one might imagine, the input of many different consultants across many habitats, although well intentioned, can result in debates over the best form and direction stewardship should take.

Current work is underway to generate more cohesive coordination efforts within regions; in Commencement Bay on south Puget Sound; for instance, nonprofit watchdog groups serve as clearinghouses for data collected from a wide variety of sources on restoration efforts. In this case, there is much interest in coordinating efforts to maximize the connectivity of wetlands in the estuarine habitats around developed areas south of Seattle, including the industrial port of Tacoma and the less developed areas around Olympia.

Connection to Environmental Science

The principal text resources for this topic are found in Chapters 4, 8, 10, and 11.

· Chapter 4 (Ecosystems: How They Change) describes ecosystems and the forces that govern them, including succession. A brief discussion of ecosystem management appears at the end of the chapter, with an emphasis on the use of fire to as a management tool. Section “Ecosystem Responses to Disturbance,” pages 104–114, focuses on the particulars of succession.

· Chapter 8 (Soil: Foundation for Land Ecosystems), section “Plants and Soil,” pages 209–216, describes the role that soil plays in sustaining plants and other life.

· Chapter 10 (Wild Species and Biodiversity), section “Value of Wild Species,” pages 262–267, discusses instrumental versus intrinsic values of biodiversity, concepts that often enter into debates regarding the merits of conducting restoration projects.

· Chapter 11 (Ecosystem Capital: Use and Restoration) sections “ Global Perspectives on Biological Systems,” pages 290–292, and “Conservation Preservation, Restoration” pages 292–299, describe some of the ways in which humans value natural resources as well as some notable restoration efforts. Section “Biomes and Ecosystems Under Pressure,” pages 299–312 focuses on nature’s services in particular.

Hyperlinks

Society for Ecological Restoration

This is the home page for the premier restoration society of the United States. It contains information on the workings of the society, upcoming meetings, and contents of the society’s professional journal, Restoration Ecology.

Wildlands Project

Home page for the Wildlands Project, supporting North American wildlands preservation/restoration.

UW Restoration Ecology Network

This is the home page for the University of Washington’s Restoration Ecology Network, one of several efforts across the West aimed at integrating community restoration planning and implementation with academic investigations and student research projects.

Natural Resource Damages

This page, part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund Website, contains a description of the role that the EPA plays in addressing and assessing natural resource damage. The site contains a list of current NRDA sites, as well as links to other sites including those of federal, state, and tribal NRDA trustees.

References

Boyd, R., ed. Indians, Fire and the Land in the Pacific. Corvallis, OR: Northwest Oregon State University Press, 1999.

Daily,G. D., ed. Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems. Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1997.

Higgs, E. Nature by Design: People, Natural Process, and Ecological Restoration. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

Jordan, W.R. III, M. E. Gilpin, and J. D. Aber, eds. Restoration Ecology: A Synthetic Approach to Ecological Research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Society for Ecological Restoration International Science & Policy Working Group. The SER Primer on Ecological Restoration. www.ser.org , 2002.

Urbanska, K. M., N. R. Webb, and P. J. Edwards, eds. Restoration Ecology and Sustainable Development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Whisenant, S. G. Repairing Damaged Wildlands: A Process-Orientated, Landscape-Scale Approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.