River Restoration. Группа авторов

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be carried out in isolation but must instead be integrated as one component within a broader approach, the central concept of which is “imitating nature,” or biomimicry. In short, I argue that river restoration is one form of biomimicry among many and must be articulated with other instances of biomimicry if it is to be genuinely successful. This in turn implies a need to go beyond both the preservationist and restorationist paradigms in environmental philosophy and to integrate ecological restoration within a new “imitationist” paradigm, which, I further argue, requires the development of a new approach to environmental ethics.

      As noted in Section 2.1, the case discussed by Elliott (1982) at the outset of “Faking Nature” is that of a mining company using the argument that a perfect or near‐perfect reconstruction of an ecosystem is possible to justify the almost total destruction of the ecosystem in the present. In this case, it seems reasonable to say that the restored ecosystem will in many respects be a human artefact, for it will have been designed and put together by human beings on a now barren landscape, albeit on the basis of a model provided by nature. But not all ecological restorations fit this pattern. In the case where restoration consists only of reintroducing a lost species, for example, it is far less clear that the resulting ecosystem counts as an artefact. Likewise, there are forms of restoration in which human intervention is conceived and practiced as merely complementing or accelerating natural processes of self‐regeneration, in which case it is again far from clear that the resulting ecosystem is an artefact (Palmer et al. 1997). In response to objections such as these, Katz (2012) argues that ecological restorations always sit somewhere on a continuum. In some cases, where human intervention is maximal, as in the case of restoration after strip‐mining or the displacement and reconstruction of a river section, the resulting ecosystem is largely artificial. In other cases, where human intervention is minimal, as is the case when volunteers remove garbage from a local stream, the resulting ecosystem remains largely natural. In every case, however, Katz insists that the act of restoration introduces an element of artificiality and a corresponding loss of naturalness, and therewith also of value.

      2.2.1 Challenge 1: the connectedness of rivers

      2.2.2 Challenge 2: human habitation

      A second challenge of river restoration concerns human habitation. In the examples discussed by Elliott and Katz, it is supposed that what is to be restored is an isolated fragment of wilderness. In the case of mining operations, this will often be the case, for valuable mineral deposits are often located far from human civilization in areas of more or less untouched wilderness. Similarly, the two islands of Elliott’s thought experiment are clearly desert islands. In most cases, however, river restorations will not be of wild rivers that have been temporarily destroyed or degraded but could in theory be fully restored to their wild state, for permanent human settlement – in the form of agriculture, industry, cities, and so on – will typically have established itself along the banks and in the surrounding catchment area, a situation that significantly affects restoration projects on such rivers as the Cole, the Brent, and the Alt in the United Kingdom (Eden et al. 2000; Eden 2006). When combined with the first key attribute of rivers – their connectedness to the surrounding watershed – this will typically make the idea of restoring them to a wild state completely out of the question (Eden et al. 2000; Eden 2006).

      2.2.3 Challenge 3: multiple stakeholders

      This brings us to a third important challenge: rivers often constitute focal points for human activity, such that their use and degradation – and potentially also their restoration – involves a multiplicity of different actors. So, whereas in other cases – especially the paradigmatic instances of “malicious restorations” criticized by Light (2000, p. 98) – the destruction or degradation of the original ecosystem is the result of one party, acting for one purpose, over one specific period of time, in the case of rivers there will often be a multiplicity of parties using and degrading the river in a large number of ways, for a large number of reasons, and over extended and ill‐defined periods of time, as is perhaps most obviously the case regarding such large and historically important rivers as the Ganges in India or the Yangtze in China. With this in mind, it is also instructive to consider the defense put forward by Light and Higgs (1996, p. 236) of restoration as having an “inherent democratic potential,” for it allows humans collectively to participate in nature. While this may not be true in all cases – it is surely not unreasonable, for example, to expect a company whose strip mine has destroyed a wild ecosystem to undertake the restoration efforts itself rather than expecting local volunteers to do it – in the case of river restorations it is clear that there will usually be significant potential for something like the sort of participative democratic restoration advocated by Light and Higgs. Of course, this is not necessarily to say that the restoration will always – or even usually – be able to embody the sort of democratic equality between participants one finds when members of a local community all muck in to clean up a local stream (Light 2001). Particularly when we factor in the first two challenges discussed above, it is clear that river restoration will often require the involvement of a large number of stakeholders, contributing in a wide number of different ways, including potentially complex engineering work necessarily carried out by specialists (dam removal, re‐meandering, etc.), but it is nevertheless true that river restoration has the potential to act as a focal point for a wide number of stakeholders to act together toward a common goal.

      Given

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