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A few years ago, in an effort to become more aware of the ecological prob- lems facing humanity, I started a per- sonal list of threatened and degraded ecosystems around the world. The list produced more despair than enlightenment, and I gave it up. Paddy Woodworth’s Our Once and Future Planet offers a
belated but welcome counterweight to my
abandoned list. He focuses on the relatively
young field of restoration ecology, whose
practitioners include scientists, philosophers, engineers, civil servants, and citizen
volunteers undertaking nothing less than
the regeneration and restoration of those
same degraded ecosystems across the globe.
Woodworth, an Irish journalist whose
two previous books focused on Spanish
political struggles and Basque culture, has
produced a hybrid volume. He intersperses
a clear and thoughtful description of the
historical and theoretical underpinnings
of restoration ecology with detailed accounts of projects from around the world.
Highlights include country-wide efforts to
remove invasive trees in South Africa after
the end of apartheid, the transformation
of ill-fated farmland to native bush habitat
in Western Australia, and the conservation
and restoration of quickly disappearing bog
lands in Ireland. These case studies are well
chosen to illustrate the variety of challenges
and approaches facing restorationists in
their efforts to combat the loss of important
and diverse ecosystems.
With such a young field,
it is not surprising to find
numerous tensions among
practitioners. Through re-
flections on the primary lit-
erature and his interviews
of many of the major play-
ers, Woodworth skillfully
dissects the arguments sur-
rounding the purpose and
direction of ecological res-
toration. Most prominent is
the debate over whether we
should attempt to recreate
or model restored ecosys-
tems after “historical refer-
ences”—natural assemblages
of plants and animals that existed at some
point in the past. This approach has domi-
nated the field since its inception but has
been repeatedly challenged by ecologists
such as Roy Hobbs and even seen as “hope-
lessly nostalgic.” By their reckoning, climate
change will doom attempts to recreate his-
torical ecosystems to failure. Instead, res-
toration ecologists need to embrace “novel
ecosystems,” assemblages of flora and fauna
with no historical analogues. Whether such
novel ecosystems will satisfy many of the
goals of restoration ecology remains an open
question.
The debate around just what those
goals should be is almost as contentious
as debates over novel ecosystems. Should
restoration take into account “ecosystem
services” such as food production, water retention, and soil formation? Or should the
focus be on the restoration of nature for its
own sake, with, as philosopher Bill Jordan
puts it, “a studied disregard of human interests”? From this debate stem corollary
discussions about the necessity of removing
beneficial nonnative species and whether
local communities and governments are
Repairing ecosystems
ENVIRONMENT
The reviewer is at the Department
of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
80309–0334, USA. E-mail: william.
stutz@colorado.edu
By William E. Stutz
Our Once and Future Planet
Restoring the World in the
Climate Change Century
Paddy Woodworth
University of Chicago Press,
2013. 529 pp.
motivated more by aesthetic or economic
interests when deciding to spend money on
restoration.
Because the book encompasses his own
journey into the field, both literally and figuratively, Woodworth makes brief but effective use of narrative techniques to enhance
his presentation. His descriptions of the people he meets are often charming and revealing. Ecologist Dan Janzen memorably “sits
at his computer, totally focused, lean and
muscular body stripped to the waist, long
silver hair flowing like an Old Testament
prophet’s,” while his partner in restoration
Winnie Hallwachs’s “Quakerish dress and
diffident manner mask a powerful personality—a very useful gambit … for blending
smoothly into the gender-conservative Costa
Rican establishment.” Woodworth also extensively quotes the scientists, project managers, and citizens he interviewed, allowing
their conflicting views on restoration tactics
or theory to push the narrative along.
Despite Woodworth’s ambitious international itinerary, there is a conspicuous absence of restoration examples from some
fast-growing and conflict-ridden regions
such as South and East Asia and tropical
Africa. One wonders whether hard-fought
restorations in places like Costa Rica or
New Zealand are truly representative of
global efforts or simply islands of ecological progress on a planet of deteriorating
landscapes.
In addition, Woodworth’s account makes
it difficult not to see the success of large-scale
restoration projects as inextricably linked
to the tireless efforts and political skills of
their founders. As leaders such as Janzen,
Guy Preston, and Keith Bradby relinquish
their roles atop the organizations they have
long embodied, what will
become of the restorations
they initiated? More broadly,
what are the consequences
of depending so heavily on
extraordinary individuals to
get projects off the ground?
Despite these concerns,
I commend Woodworth for
immersing himself in the
field of restoration ecology
so completely over the eight-year period spent writing the
book. While not completely
reversing my initial pessimism about Earth’s ecological fate, Our Once and
Future Planet makes a convincing case that we have,
however hesitantly, begun a
journey toward “‘restoring
the future.’”
10.1126/science.1256060
Easy to misread. The seemingly ancient oak woodlands around the medieval monastic
churches of Glendalough, Ireland, cover slopes that were bare in the 19th century.
