Ecological restoration is becoming an increasingly important tool in humanity’s attempt to manage, conserve, and repair the world’s ecosystems in the face of growing human impacts and increasing legacy of environmental damage. Paradoxically, however, while the scale and complexity of humanity’s interactions with the environment are increasing, our degree of certainty about how things work has declined. Our understanding of the past is changing and rapid environmental change is making the future even less predictable. I explore these two trends with regards to what this means for ecological management and restoration.
Results/Conclusions
20th century ecology, along with other disciplines, aimed at increasing certainty about how nature works. A mid-century perspective can be caricatured as a general belief in the balance of nature and relatively stable environments, in the idea that pristine nature existed in areas untouched by humans, in the perception of humanity as separate from nature, in the view that nature is an objective reality. The goals for conservation and restoration were to minimize or take away human impacts on nature and it will recover and basically look after itself.
Now it appears as if all posts on which to hitch that certainty have been knocked away. We are faced with the prospect that ecological systems are more complex and less easy to understand and predict than we thought. The idea of the balance of nature has been replaced with the flux of nature, and ecosystems are thought to be mostly non-equilibrium, and their dynamics are not only complex but also dependent on the spatial context and the history of natural disturbance and human influence. There is increasing evidence that humans have had a much more pervasive influence on ecosystems around the world than previously thought. Nature is many things to many people and considered by some as more of a social construction than an objective reality. In other words, it seems almost as if all bets are off on how we view nature and our relationship to it.
This is the background against which we now consider ecological restoration. Increasing rates of change in climate, land use, pollution and numbers of invasive organisms are all leading us into uncharted territory, and the future has no analogues from the past which might guide us. This no-analogue future is where we have to try to manage the environment using new approaches based on our revised understanding of how nature works.
