As ever-fewer pockets of true wilderness remain in many parts of the world, scientists and activists are beginning to shift their attention from conserving “real” nature to restoring or improving degraded ecosystems. Scientists have gotten better at artificially balancing the needs of different flora and fauna. And activists are less ideologically pure about preserving nature in the wild. Some environmentalists fear that a focus on restoration will distract from efforts to stave off the destruction of wilderness and species. “But in some countries there’s so little left to protect that you first have to restore something so you can protect it,” says Norbert Hölzel, a restoration biologist at Germany’s Giessen University.
The approach allows environmentalists to address badly damaged areas. On the island of Borneo, the Worldwide Fund for Nature has partnered with Malaysia’s Boh Plantations to restore an orangutan habitat, as logging continues to decimate the endangered primate’s numbers. In India, Wetlands International is helping replant coastal mangroves, which are not only crucial to local fish populations but also a natural bulwark against tides and tsunamis. In America, countless wetlands and rivers have been cleaned up and renaturalized in recent decades, and the 30-year, $8 billion Everglades Restoration Plan could plausibly claim to be the world’s most ambitious such project ever.
In other places, restoration ecology is a way of restoring biodiversity while allowing humans to use the land. In California, the Old Growth Again project is restoring a sustainable, ecologically rich redwood forest that organizers say will end up providing a higher return (from older, more valuable trees) than destructive clear-cutting methods. In northeastern Germany, an experiment is underway to reflood a vast area of drained and denatured peat bogs–recreating a biodiversity hot spot–while still harvesting peat moss at a commercially viable rate. Restoration may not be a substitute for protecting rainforests or saving the frogs, but it’s certainly turning into a more powerful weapon in the environmental arsenal.
