Outlining what actions are essential to the survival of life on earth

Our Once and Future Planet, Paddy Woodworth, University of Chicago Press, €36.50

The lasting image of this book occurs close to the start. It is that of a pilot in an ultra light aircraft leading a formation of whooping cranes, all of whom believe the aircraft to be their mother, on a migratory journey from the US Midwest to Florida.

The aim is to restore a species absent from the eastern half of North America for over a century. The imagery of advanced technology being used to recreate a lost ecosystem is powerful and conjures up an optimism that, as the title suggests, the natural functions of our once and future planet can be reconciled. But such a superficial conclusion conceals a myriad and complex set of confounding issues. Restoration of what, to what period, for whom, and how?

To address these questions, Paddy Woodworth supplies an incisive analysis of the ethics and philosophy behind restoration ventures around the world in a comprehensively researched and eloquently written work.

Environmental management has always been characterised by a dichotomy in approach. On one side lie what might be termed the ecocentrics who seek to recover a lost world before the ravages of the Industrial Revolution destroyed essential human links with nature on which our future sustainability depends. On the other side are the utopians who believe that a pragmatic approach is all that is possible in today’s damaged world and that a romantic view of the past must be subservient to making the best out of what is there at the present.

Paddy Woodworth explores these themes in a series of case studies ranging from the prairies of the US to the fynbos of South Africa, along the way examining restoration efforts in urban Chicago, the tourist trail of Cinque Terra in Italy, the wetlands of Western Australia, the forests of Central America and the radical solutions to controlling invasive predators being tried in New Zealand.

The thorny issue of how to handle invasive species is central to the discussion. In some areas the battle to eradicate them may be already lost. In New Zealand the 2,400 species of introduced plants are accompanied by large numbers of introduced birds such as starlings, sparrows, blackbirds and finches, designed to make the immigrants from Europe feel more at home. By contrast, the native forest songbird, the kokado, had only eight individuals left in the 1990s. Drastic steps are now necessary to hold on to native biodiversity.

Here, as elsewhere, the fight to preserve refugia and take a long term view of restoration is well justified, but seldom a priority for a society and their political leaders guided by short term considerations.

Species restoration, especially of ‘cuddly’ animals or ‘trophy’ birds of prey, tugs at the heartstrings and can gain public support and finance. But habitat restoration is a much more difficult task to finance from the public purse. Woodworth’s experience confirms the complexity of the latter and reveals just how much of a knowledge gap exists for effective restoration. Ecological succession is a dynamic process, constantly being pushed by environmental changes to what sometimes seems, end points, illustrating the validity of chaos theory.

The case studies examined all confirm the uncertainty involved in intervention, while stressing its ultimate necessity. In particular the spectre of climate change increasingly looms large over all such efforts.

Two chapters are devoted to Ireland where small scale woodland and bogland restoration projects are examined. The tragedy of seeking to restore our unique bogland habitat while acquiescing in its continuing destruction is well explored, though perhaps commercial exploitation is given an easier ride than it merits. However, the closing sentence of the relevant chapter is worth repeating: “[restoration and rehabilitation] offers a last ditch opportunity to avoid a corporate and national disgrace: the extinction of unique European ecosystems in an advanced country in the 21st century”.

What emerges from the author’s extensive global experience, both of place and restoration strategies, is the conclusion that restoration in the absence of local human partnership is doomed to fail. Good communication with the local community is a prerequisite, though not a guarantee, of successful intervention. Only then can the bigger questions of restoration of what, to when, for whom, be addressed.

The author tackles the question of restoration to a historical datum (such as 1491 in the case of North America), when the Classical view almost always ignore the fact that pre-existing human impact was more deeply ingrained than might have been anticipated. Indeed some human activities, such as grazing, may even be necessary to avoid a landscape being ‘preserved to death’. Nostalgia for a vanished past should also not blind us to the need to maximise ecosystem goods and services for an uncertain future.

The past as an analogue is no longer valid — the dynamic of climate change will constantly make the achievement of a restoration target elusive. Perhaps as Woodworth suggests, the best prospect we have in getting society to buy into restoration is to inculcate a recognition of the value of natural capital in our globalised cultural and economic systems. Forests, wetlands, bogs and even agro-ecosystems have values not currently quantified. Monetising the environment may seem anathema to many, but without incorporating some form of valuation, short term economics trumps nature to the detriment of humankind.

At 515 pages, the text is too long (though over 70 pages of this comprises an excellent Glossary, Notes, Bibliography and Index). Inevitably, therefore, some of the issues are revisited both directly and indirectly in a way which makes for laborious reading in places. The author is an accomplished writer and journalist and sometimes the reporter in him produces a narrative and personality-based account where the kernel of the arguments may be obscured.

Perhaps, though, it is an effort at putting a human touch into the issues explored, and certainly an important objective of the author is that he seeks to understand the psyche of the leading actors in a way in which a cold academic approach would not succeed. Written over a period of 10 years, the book is partly a cathartic experience for the author, but much more than this it offers great insight into an emergent and essential dimension of environmental management.