9

Ecological Restoration: From Functional Descriptions to Normative

Prescriptions

Restoration ecology is the science and social practice aimed at re-creating ecosystems that
have been damaged or destroyed by anthropogenic or nonanthropogenic causes. Ecologi-
cal restorationists have attempted to re-create a wide variety of ecosystems including tall-
grass prairies, oak savannahs, wetlands, forests, streams, rivers, and even coral reefs. Also
included in restoration is the reintroduction of species. These projects can range from
small-scale urban park reclamations, such as the ongoing restorations in urban parks in
cities like New York and Chicago, to huge wetland mitigation projects encompassing
hundreds of thousands of acres, such as the current US$8 billion project to restore Florida’s
everglades ecosystem.
As a scientifi c practice, restoration ecology is governed primarily by academic disci-
plines such as fi eld botany, conservation biology, landscape ecology, and adaptive ecosys-
tem management. As an exercise in environmental design practice, most restoration in the
fi eld is orchestrated by landscape architects and environmental engineers. But a range of
other academic disciplines has been attracted to restoration both as an object of study and
as an opportunity to apply one’s ideas on the ground. Environmental anthropologists and
sociologists have written extensively on the social dimensions of restoration and how they
help or hinder the development of human communities and the relationships among those
communities and the animals and ecosystems around them (see, e.g., the essays in Gobster
and Hull 2000). Environmental historians have actively shaped the ends of restoration by
asking pressing questions concerning why we choose to go back to a certain temporal
landmark when we restore rather than to another (see, for example, Reece [2006] on the
work of T. Allen Comp).
Philosophers too have been attracted to restoration initially focusing on the issue of
whether a restored ecosystem was really a part of nature or rather some kind of technologi-
cal artifact. Indeed the most infl uential work by environmental philosophers on this topic,
surely that of Robert Elliot and Eric Katz, have largely consisted in arguments that eco-
logical restoration does not result in a restoration of nature, given their defi nitions of what
nature is, and that further they may even harm naturally evolved systems considered as a
subject worthy of moral consideration (Elliot 1982, 1997; Katz 1996, 1997, 2002).

Andrew Light