Thursday, August 9, 2007 - 9:50 AMCOS 107-6: Assessing restoration goals amid climate change: Ethical guidlines for historical fidelity
William Throop, Green Mountain College
In some ecosystems the threat of climate change raises doubts about the wisdom using predisturbance conditions to fix restoration goals, as native communities may not flourish in a shifting climate. Eric Higgs (2003) has tried to address this issue by defending a broader restoration goal of fidelity to historical conditions, which may not involve reproducing these conditions. I argue that historical fidelity cannot be defined purely ecologically. It is a value-laden concept, whose application involves three distinct kinds of ethical considerations. What counts as historical fidelity depends in part on our understanding of the welfare of members of the disturbed ecosystem, our duties to future generations of humans and our conception of the virtues expressed through good restoration. I show how clarifying these considerations should help managers to identify appropriate restoration goals when the predisturbance ecosystem is no longer viable. I use examples of several restoration projects in northeastern United States to illustrate the ways in which both ecological and ethical considerations should shape our interpretation of historical fidelity.