Postmodern Ecological Restoration: Choosing Appropriate Temporal and Spatial Scales

Abstract

This chapter explores a puzzle about ecological restoration. Many major disturbances are abnormal only relative to time and scale as well: On larger scales, forest fire is incorporated as part of the system; on smaller scales, it looks more like an external event. With disturbances incorporated on the right scales, even human disturbances can become part of the system. Analysis shows how disagreements about what state ecological restoration should aim at are tied to issues of scale, especially temporal scale: A long, macroevolutionary, rather than ecological or historical, time scale favors more radical sorts of restoration. Discussion argument is premised on the observation that time scales go with processes—macroevolution with the arising and extinction of species (millions of years), history with migrations, the rise and fall of countries, governments and civilizations (tens to hundreds or perhaps thousands of years), and ecology with succession, and disturbance and recovery processes (tens to hundreds of years). What's important to analysis is the fit between ecological process time scales and historical time scales. From a purely biological point of view, the historical time scale is arbitrary—but it matches, broadly, the time scale of ecological processes. The chapter advocates in favor of restorations that include the effects of typical behaviors of indigenous humans, who have been part of the ecosystems around the world for a long time (save in Antarctica), that exclude organisms that have not been part of the ecosystem in a region for some centuries even if their extinction was originally anthropogenic, and that are adaptive, responsive to experience and engaging humans in interaction with the ecology, rather than treating it as isolated. There should be something in it for everybody, as well as for the ecology.