Evolving restoration principles in a changing world

Abstract

Three activities have recently prompted me to rethink the old question ‘What is restoration?’– and to wonder whether today's challenges are forcing new interpretations. The first has been a request from a colleague asking which were the very first ecological restoration projects in Australia. The second has been the process of reviewing (for this issue of Ecological Management & Restoration (EMR)) a recent textbook from the Society for Ecological Restoration International (SERI) –Ecological Restoration: Principles, Values, and Structure of an Emerging Profession by Andre Clewell and James Aronson. The third has been reading EMR's nomination forms for the search for the ‘Top 20’ ecological restoration projects in Australasia, a project which will be up and running in February on SERI's Global Restoration Network website. In undertaking all three activities, I have relied upon the definitions of restoration long published in the SERI Primer (see http://www.ser.org/content/ecological_restoration_primer.asp), which represents what has been an impressively consistent interpretation since the late 1980s of the concept of ecological restoration. To paraphrase SERI's philosophy, ecological restoration is the intentional practice of assisting ecosystems (that have been impaired by our various impacts) to recover their health, integrity and sustainability to the greatest practicable extent. But let us not overlook the fact that the idea of restoration has evolved from less articulate beginnings and continues to subtly evolve, with distinct changes emerging in the face of global overdevelopment and its consequences (1, 2). The first work day at Lumley Park in October 1935 – possibly the first ecological restoration project in Australia. (Photo courtesy Dorothy Crawford) Ambrose Crawford (1880–1980) pioneered, in 1935, the conservation and rehabilitation of rainforest at Lumley Park Alstonville. He worked at the site for 40 years until 1976, aged 96. (Photo courtesy Dorothy Crawford) Ecological restoration emerged in fits and starts in Australasia, as elsewhere. The two oldest Australian projects I know of are both from New South Wales – those of Ambrose Crawford at Alstonville (1935) and Albert Morris at Broken Hill (1936). In the slightly earlier case, Ambrose Crawford conserved and rehabilitated a small (1.7 ha) subtropical rainforest patch of the White Booyong (Heritiera trifoliolata) alliance at Lumley Park in Alstonville, New South Wales. This is an example of one of the main floristic sub-alliances of the former 75 000-ha ‘Big Scrub’, which was effectively cleared between the 1860s and the turn of the century. Crawford, a local dairy farmer, gained the help of a small group of friends who met regularly for working bees (Fig. 1). The ‘Scrub Reserve Committee's’ work continued for four decades until 1976, when (aged 96) Ambrose handed the project's active management back to local council. Ambrose Crawford's records and information from his daughter, Dorothy Crawford, made it clear that the original vision for the Lumley Park project was both to save the town of Alstonville's last patch of the Big Scrub from clearing and to manage it as an example of the type of rainforest that existed before European settlers came to the area. But there is a tension between these two goals, reflected in the fact that, although the original vegetation was saved and weed invasions controlled, substantial numbers of additional species were planted from other areas of the broader Big Scrub and north Queensland. Whether this additional planting (which implies more of a ‘botanic gardens’ approach than ecological restoration) was part of the original intention or was merely difficult for tree enthusiasts to resist, is hard to know for certain. For a group of pioneers without the luxury of today's conceptual framework of restoration, a composite of the two may have been the logical approach to adopt. Whatever the case, Ambrose kept meticulous records of species planted and sources of their propagules; and the site still looks like remnant revegetation. It is home to three threatened plant and two threatened animal species and appropriate management approaches have continued at the site with additional corridors of vegetation added by local landholders, advised by restorationists (3, 4). Albert Morris (1886–1939) amateur field naturalist and botanist, designed indigenous revegetation projects for the Zinc Corporation to counter desertification occurring in and around Broken Hill. (Photo courtesy Barrier Field Naturalists’ Club) Conditions around the town of Broken Hill in 1936, before an ambitious programme of fencing from stock and rabbits and largely depending on natural regeneration. (Photo A.J. Keast Collection) In the second case, field naturalist Albert Morris (Fig. 3) conducted what was probably the first ecological reconstruction project in Australia using a local ecosystem as a reference. In the regional mining town of Broken Hill, New South Wales in 1936, Morris designed the revegetation of a 9-ha area around a mine building that had desertified by overgrazing and subsequent wind erosion. His novel methods involved a fairly exemplary balance between planting and regeneration in that he planted a wide range of trees and shrubs that today's ecologists would not expect to colonize, but refrained from planting the wide diversity of more resilient sub-shrubs, forbs and grasses that he (correctly as it turned out) anticipated would come up naturally (Webber 1992). Morris went further in his next project, fencing the more extensive Broken Hill Regeneration Areas from stock and rabbits by 1938. This project was the realization of a long-held and often-preached dream to restore native vegetation in a desertified strip around the entire town of Broken Hill, relying principally on natural recovery processes he had observed occurring on his many excursions to observe desert flora (Fig. 4). Although ecologists of the day were quoted as advising, ‘if you enclose x square miles of sand with a rabbit-proof fence, you will have what you started with –x square miles of sand’, the success of the techniques were soon obvious to all and they appeared to have directly influenced subsequent minesite restoration projects in Australia (Webber 1992, p. 75). I get a sense from reading about the lives of the two men that the strong sentiment of restoration that is accepted today would have been considered extreme, even almost absurd in their era when most activity was directed towards clearing natural areas and harnessing their resources for human consumption. The notion that degradation has gone too far and a change of direction plus compensation is needed only evolved in Australian mainstream thinking in the 1970s or 1980s. But if restoration philosophy is still evolving, particularly in the face of accelerated global warming (see the paper by Walshe & Massenbauer and the four book reviews in this issue), it is fair to ask where might it be going in the future? The book by Clewell and Aronson (2008) and its appended SERI restoration guidelines specifically suggest that reference communities need to be adjusted to irreversible changes in conditions, including the need for species to be able to migrate in the face of global warming. Global warming is a significant challenge for restorationists to contend with and will naturally engender much debate regarding appropriate reference points. But I can't help but think that there is an even more primary implication of climate change that may affect our concept of how restoration is defined. In his guest editorial (this issue), for example, Andrew Bennett draws attention to the importance of preventing degradation in Australasia before it is too late. If restoration's first principles include that we need to repair the physical conditions on a site to the highest practicable extent, should not actions to slow and reverse global warming also be considered restoration actions? To emphasize this point, I can report that the finalists in EMR's search for the ‘Top 25 restoration projects in Australasia’ include the Great Barrier Reef restoration project, which is already showing great benefits in terms of recovery of reef fish, and projects to restore fish floodplain wetlands in the Murray River (see Alexander et al., Tonkin et al. and project summaries in this issue). But the pivotal problem for restoration is that there is every indication that Australia's Great Barrier Reef and the Murray River will experience such ongoing impacts from global warming that restoration may be impossible unless effective ameliorating actions are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So although the sentiment of restoration is no longer considered absurd by mainstream pundits, there is a sense in which the feasibility of the aspiration of restoration may be considered absurd unless much more is carried out at a much more substantial scale to reduce global warming. Clearly, many restoration sites whose goals are principally to reinstate plant and animal habitats will also contribute to carbon sequestration (see the second Saunders & Nicol short note in this issue). But there is arguably an even greater urgency for a wider range of actions at larger scales. This elevates the importance – even to restoration – of social–ecological projects that may not be able to achieve strict restoration for economic reasons but which may improve conditions for it through sequestering carbon in plant biomass and soils (see the feature by Ray Thompson in press). It is tempting therefore to suggest that the most important current restoration tasks across the globe include establishing bold greenhouse gas emission reduction targets and developing renewable energy technologies and economic models that reduce rather than ever-expand our industrial and urban footprints. Yes, Clewell and Aronson (2008) are probably technically correct in saying that these activities ‘help’ restoration but are not in themselves ‘holistic restoration’, as the book terms it. But, they are also correct in pointing out that although the technical side of restoration is critically important, there is a very real sense in which restoration is more than the technical and has a lot to do with finding a better balanced relationship with the rest of nature. Restorationists are not the sort of people to be content to engage in restoration whose effect is reduced by lack of bolder action; or to see it made ineffective in carbon trading schemes that merely ‘sell indulgences’ as the pre-Reformation church sold spiritual indulgences to the rich. So it stands to reason that some sort of twenty-first century ‘reformation’ attitude is needed whereby the more philosophical side of restoration could allow restoration action to be more widely defined as including social–ecological syntheses or ‘transformations’ that intentionally reduce emissions and find more sustainable ways to live on the planet. The case studies in Clewell and Aronson (2008) certainly indicate movement in this direction, widening the application to include holistic projects in the already damaged landscape that create a net gain, progressively optimizing their movement along the trajectories of restoration. This hints at how more partial approaches to restoration in an already damaged landscape can still co-exist with a tighter technical set of guidelines (for sites where full conservation and restoration is appropriate and possible), without threatening the value of those guidelines. That is, both efforts are integrated within a single aspirational philosophy for ‘greatest practical extent’ restoration where leniency in highly damaged systems does not trigger leniency in less damaged systems. So, in the face of the enormous environmental challenges that prompt us to question whether pre-existing ecosystems will be sufficiently resilient under changed climate conditions, we need to make intelligent adaptations where necessary, while remaining careful not to fall into the trap of abandoning the technical guidelines of restoration that have been so carefully thought through by restoration philosophers, building on the lessons learned by restorationists since the 1930s and even earlier. Contemporary guidelines have repeatedly stated that flux is part of ecosystems and that capacity to change is a primary attribute requiring restoration. So sticking to the high technical standards of supporting the pre-existing ecological communities, including their capacity to adapt spatially, is likely to allow our sites to be more resilient to anticipated changed conditions, not less so. But restorationists cannot afford the luxury of confining ourselves to healthy communities. Every effort is needed, as Andrew Bennett advises, to expand our area of influence to help reduce impacts before future ecosystems end up unrecognizable.