Advocates of ecological restoration argue that there is a slim but real chance of using science to reverse the devastation of our planet , writes Paddy Woodworth.
'Ecological restoration is the reframed environmental movement," declares Keith Bowers, chairman of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) International. "We are perfectly poised to lead this movement. We can restore faith in a better tomorrow."
These are very big claims, and sound messianic out of context. And in the current climate of ever worsening environmental news - from the Asian tsunami to Hurricane Katrina - they can sound like wishful thinking.
However, the World Conference on Ecological Restoration, which took place in the northern Spanish city of Zaragoza last month, provided a wealth of evidence to demonstrate that we have a slim but real chance of using science to reverse the devastation of our planet. Provided, of course, we can find the political will to do what needs to be done.
Many of the 850 participants at the conference agreed that environmentalists need to make their case in a much more positive manner in order to reach politicians and impact on public opinion with this message.
"Ecological demands are often presented as a sacrifice," environmental economist Robert Costanza tells The Irish Times. "The truth is the reverse. The environment is not a luxury. It produces absolutely essential services to our well-being, which are not currently factored into market economics. Nor does the market tell us the hidden costs of our current production system in terms of ecological damage. People will be better off, not worse off, on a restored Earth."
However, Costanza is decidedly vague as to how the world's markets can be persuaded to listen to this message - a blind spot that is characteristic of many conference speakers.
Driving the restoration movement is the belief that damage done to the environment can be, in many cases, at least partially reversed. If a wetland can be drained, it can also be re-flooded. If the damage is recent, restoration can happen surprisingly quickly. And this is already happening around the world, on a scale that may surprise those who keep reciting the sorrowful litany that the whole planet is going down the tubes.
William J Mitsch of Ohio State University gives the example of the great Mesopotamian marshes on the Tigris river. He says that it is no coincidence that a wetland area should have been one of the cradles of human civilisation - many great cultures have learned to live in harmony with water, in sharp contrast to our current obsession with drainage. "The Garden of Eden," he says, "was a wetland."
In more recent times, however, the marshes have become a desiccated hell-hole for their human inhabitants. The Marsh Arabs who rose against Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf war were hard to flush out of their maze of waterways, so the Iraqi dictator built dams and dykes upriver. Within 10 years, 90 per cent of one of the world's largest wetland, with its extremely high biodiversity, was converted into semi-desert.
But once Saddam was removed from power, the surviving Marsh Arabs began to breach the dykes and dams. Within two years, 40 per cent of the wetlands were flourishing again, Mitsch says. "It was like adding water to Japanese paper flowers," he says.
Such comments tend to make some traditional environmentalists deeply suspicious of restoration. They fear it is a false promise, held out by corporations and governments who want to calm public fears by claiming that today's environmental pillage can be mitigated by tomorrow's ecological repairs.
This suspicion can have perverse effects. The conference heard a great deal about the threat of global warming. But it also heard how reforestation - a form of ecological restoration - can slow the accumulation of greenhouse gases. There is a double benefit here: new forests absorb more carbon, and they can be used to produce biomass energy in the future, substituting for fossil fuels.
Yet some environmental groups have argued against the inclusion of reforestation in climate agreements, because they suspect it will take the pressure off governments and businesses to reduce carbon emissions and stop deforestation.
In fact, restoration ecologists argue for the two-pronged approach of protecting as much existing biodiversity as possible and restoring what we can of the damage already done. And Mitsch himself knows well that the answer is never as simple as "just add water". "There is no way back to the past in a wetland, because nothing in a wetland is constant," he says. The point is rather to allow the interplay of natural forces a much greater part in determining the future.
Hurricane Katrina has made Mitsch more sharply aware that delays in restoration can cause devastation on a terrible scale. He has been one of the strongest advocates for an ambitious and very complex project to restore the coastal wetlands of Louisiana, costed at $14 billion (€11.6 billion).
Just a few months ago, the first tranch of funding came through. But it was much too late to save New Orleans. "We were predicting for years that New Orleans would take a direct hit from a hurricane, unless the natural barriers provided by the wetlands were restored. We told the authorities there would be an unmitigated disaster. They should have known, but they were totally unprepared."
Now thousands of people have died, and the US government is faced with a bill many times higher than the cost of restoring the wetlands. And Mitsch fears this huge new expenditure will all be in vain unless the city's surrounding environment is repaired before rebuilding begins.
"It's vital that they do not put the city back the way it was. Building bigger and bigger dykes just sets us up for bigger and bigger disasters," he says. "As sure as I'm standing here, new dykes will be breached again." The Mississippi must be given time to recover at least some of its estuary structure. The natural sandbanks that would develop from that process could absorb much of the shock of an incoming storm before it reached the city.
Mitsch is aware that his voice is unlikely to be heard, and that the Bush administration will probably concentrate on "rebuilding the superdome as soon as possible". But he takes some heart from the large-scale ecological restoration projects already under way in the US, such as the plan to return large sections of Florida's Everglades to something approaching their original condition.
A note of caution on the limits of restoration science is sounded by Richard Hobbs, of Murdoch University in Australia. "Prediction is very difficult," he says, quoting the physicist Neil Bohrs wry comment, "especially if it is about the future."
He stresses that even relatively small ecosystems contain vast numbers of variables. How these variables will interact is never totally predictable. They cannot be subjected to the kind of controls used in laboratory experiments, nor will they behave like computer models. This means that the only certainty in this field is that the restoration of a degraded environment will not achieve the precise result the restorers seek.
"Under these conditions," he says, "it's amazing we do as well as we do." He insists that restoration projects cannot guarantee a return to a "desired state", some supposedly ideal point in the past of a degraded or disturbed ecosystem. But then, he adds, such projects can - and do - produce changes that may actually be better for biodiversity than the desired state itself would have produced.
Hobbs says we live in an era of "post-normal science", where "facts are uncertain, and values are in dispute".
He recognises the difficulties such uncertainties create in trying to attract funding and public opinion to restoration. "Simple messages are good and effective in terms of PR. But science keeps telling us that the message is more and more complex."
Despite these cautions, he finds ecological restoration an invigorating area to work in. "I'm in this because it's not all negative. After their first few weeks, my students often come up to me and say, 'Most of the news in the world is so bad, it's great to be doing something where things can actually get better'. Restoration is a magnet for getting many people involved at a local level. Ecologists too often think of people - human beings - as if they were a problem. That's not the whole truth. People are part of the solution." And many people have volunteered to be part of this movement since the University of Madison-Wisconsin initiated restoration projects in the 1930s.
While much ecological restoration requires high-end technology - and there are plenty of case studies involving that at the conference - much of the work also requires people with shovels, pens and other commonplace instruments to get a job done.
Perhaps what is most attractive about ecological restoration is precisely that it recognises that human beings are an essential part of the environment, and not an alien intrusion on some supposedly pure natural paradise. As Richard Foreman, professor of landscape ecology at Harvard, puts it: "We must learn to mould the land so that nature and people can both thrive."
Visit www.ecologicalrestoration.net/ costanza.htm for Robert Costanza's keynote conference address