In this chapter, the adjective “societal” is used to refer to all work addressing the social, political, and economic issues involved in river restoration.2 2 According to the IPBES (2020), ecosystem services are “the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. In the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, ecosystem services can be divided into supporting, regulating, provisioning and cultural. This classification, however, is superseded in IPBES assessments by the system used under ‘nature’s contributions to people’. This is because IPBES recognises that many services fit into more than one of the four categories. For example, food is both a provisioning service and also, emphatically, a cultural service, in many cultures.”
2 Ethics of River Restoration: The Imitationist Paradigm
Henry Dicks
Faculté de Philosophie, Université Jean Moulin Lyon, Lyon, France
2.1 Introduction
Restoration ecology is sometimes considered a science (Bradshaw 1993; Palmer et al. 1997). As Higgs (1994, p. 134) notes, this promotes a problematic view of restoration ecology as “austere,” “disengaged,” and thus essentially independent of ethics. Further, even the very briefest examination of the academic literature on the subject shows that ethical considerations are of central importance to restoration ecology. In particular, the literature abounds with radical uncertainties as to the basic goal or goals of restoration. Should we be restoring past ecosystems and, if so, what precise moment in the past should we take as our reference point (Diamond 1987)? Given the essentially dynamic nature of ecosystems and the high likelihood of significant anthropogenic climate change in the near future, would it not make more sense to make restoration “forward‐looking” (Rolston 2000; Hobbs and Harris 2001)? Or should restorations be modeled rather on intact ecosystems of the present that share similar traits to the destroyed or degraded pre‐disturbance ecosystem we are looking to restore (Rheinhardt et al. 1999)? Further, once we have decided on our model ecosystem, what are the salient features on which restoration should concentrate: functions, species composition, structure, or perhaps all of these (Light and Higgs 1996; Palmer et al. 1997)? And what about our basic reasons for undertaking restoration in the first place? Should we be focusing on the human benefits of restoration, including an increase in our scientific understanding of ecology (Jordan et al. 1987) – in which case one is likely to see significant departure from the initial model – or should our aim be rather that of fidelity to whatever natural model we have selected (Light and Higgs 1996; Egan 2006)?
In the literature on restoration ecology, these and other fundamental questions are often treated in one of two ways. The first, progressive, approach consists in placing them in the category of future research (Palmer et al. 1997), a view which tends to suppose that the science of restoration ecology is still in its “infancy” (Palmer et al. 1997, p. 191), but could, as it matures, provide answers to these questions. The second, Kuhnian, approach sees restoration ecology in terms of successive paradigms, such that, to take a well‐known example, a new forward‐looking paradigm may be said to have replaced the old backward‐looking one (Choi 2004, 2007). But whether one sees restoration ecology as a young science capable of making cumulative progress or in terms of a succession of different paradigms, the common view of restoration ecology as a science runs the significant risk of implying that fundamental philosophical questions – including those about values and ethics – are extraneous to that science. Following existing arguments against this position put forward by others (Higgs 1994, 1997; Davis and Slobodkin 2004), I argue in this chapter that ethics is not something secondary and external to restoration ecology; to practice ecological restoration is not only to do applied science but also to do applied ethics.
That branch of philosophy that deals with our ethical relationship to nature is called “environmental ethics” (Palmer et al. 2014). Within environmental ethics, ecological restoration has been the subject of intense debate ever since the publication of a famous article on the subject by Elliott (1982) entitled “Faking Nature.” Elliott’s basic argument was that one cannot ever fully restore an ecosystem, not because it is a technical impossibility (though it may also be a technical impossibility) but rather because an important value associated with the original ecosystem – the value of naturalness itself, where naturalness is understood in terms of having a genesis independent of human action – is necessarily lost. For Elliott, even when the restoration produces an ecosystem that is so successful that a trained eye would struggle to distinguish it from the original, the result is analogous to a fake work of art, whose value – despite the deceptive precision of the reproduction – is necessarily less than the original.
Elliott’s critique of ecological restoration was later followed up by Katz, who in a number of articles argued that the assumption – taken as characteristic of restoration ecology in general – that humans can destroy and recreate ecosystems at will is a simple continuation of the traditional anthropocentric goal of dominating and controlling nature (Katz 1996, 1997). Moreover, there are various concrete restoration scenarios that do seem to support Katz’s criticism. One of these is the case on which Elliott’s argument is based: a mining company seeking to use the claim that no value would be lost in the case of a perfect restoration in order to justify the temporary destruction of the obstructing ecosystem in the present – an argument that Elliott (1982, p. 81) calls the “restoration thesis.” Another example is the project of transporting the Zurich Airport wetland by cutting it up into a number of pieces and reassembling them in a different location (Loucks 1994). Similarly, it is not uncommon for streams and rivers to be destroyed and reconstructed elsewhere so as to better fit in with development objectives (Prager and McPhillips 2012). Nature, in all these cases, appears as almost infinitely malleable, as something that can be destroyed to make way for human economic activity, while also being reproduced and even moved around at will.
A wide range of responses have been put forward within environmental ethics to Elliott and Katz’s critiques of ecological restoration. Rolston (2000), for example, has put forward the eminently sensible argument that a better analogy for most ecological restorations is not with faking a work of art but rather with restoring a work of art. And Light (2000, p. 98) has argued in favor of distinguishing “malicious restorations,” in which the possibility of future restoration is used as an argument to justify an ecosystem’s destruction in the present, from “benevolent restorations,” which, far from exemplifying the anthropocentric goal of dominating or controlling nature, instead foster a harmonious and cooperative relation between humans and nature. Yet another criticism, advanced by Hourdequin and Havlick (2013), is that Elliott and Katz’s basic assumption about what restoration is – the attempt to recreate a clearly delimited portion of wild nature – does not, in the context of increasingly hybrid (i.e. natural and cultural) landscapes, well describe most restoration activities. This criticism ties in with increased recognition that the identification of nature with wilderness characteristic of much North American environmental philosophy is ill suited to a European context characterized by significant long‐term interactions between humans and nature (Eden 2006). Drawing above all on this third response to the arguments of Light and Katz, this contribution will seek to answer two key research questions about the ethics of river restoration.
1 What are the ethically significant challenges of river restoration?
2 Is it possible to put forward an ethics of river restoration capable of responding appropriately to these challenges?
In responding to these questions,
