River Restoration. Группа авторов

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rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_53ad5b83-f0a0-57d5-9469-71b60e7e3776">Section 2.2, what sort of ethic is appropriate to river restoration? With a view to answering this question, let us briefly consider the long‐running debate in environmental ethics between preservationism and restorationism (Hettinger 2012). To most people, preservation and restoration are simply different types of environmentally benign activity. It is also possible, however, to elevate each of these activities to the status of what Jordan (1994, p. 17) calls an “environmental paradigm,” understood as a specific way of relating to the environment that involves strong philosophical and ethical suppositions, hence the presence of the suffix “‐ism.” According to preservationists, like Elliott and Katz, the basic objective of environmental ethics should be to preserve nature, for restorations, as the deliberate result of human agency, simply add more artefacts to an increasingly unnatural and therefore less valuable planet. Restorationists, like Jordan (1994) and Turner (1994), see a variety of problems with this position, of which four are particularly noteworthy:

       The first problem is the assumption that humans always have a negative impact on nature (for even when restoring nature they diminish the value of naturalness).

       The second problem is the radical separation between humans and nature that underlies this claim, and entails that deliberate human actions can only ever have nonnatural results.

       The third problem is that preservation only allows for a very limited number of ways of interacting with nature; to preserve nature we typically do little more than designate it as out of bounds for development and then restrict human use to, at most, recreational and scientific activities.

       The fourth problem is that relatively little wilderness now remains, in which case there is relatively little genuine preservation work left to be done.

      According to its advocates, the paradigm of restorationism, which holds that restoration is the “central challenge” of ecology (Jordan et al. 1987, p. 15), makes it possible to overcome these four problems. In restoration, human impact on nature is positive; it overcomes the separateness from nature presupposed by preservationists; it allows us to interact with nature in complex and meaningful ways, thereby also deepening our ecological understanding (Jordan et al. 1987); and it provides much more scope than preservation for future environmental activity.

      There are, however, also major limitations to restorationism. For a start, the positive human impact on nature is limited to restoration work. Other activities, such as how we produce the goods and services that sustain our own existence, many of which depend directly on rivers or take place within their watersheds, are overlooked. The result is a continued separation between humans and nature, with preserved or restored nature on one side of the divide and human culture – agriculture, industry, cities, etc. – on the other. This in turn limits the possible scope for meaningful interactions with nature. How we produce the food, goods, buildings, and infrastructure we require would appear to have little or nothing to do with nature. Lastly, while there is no doubt much scope for restoring degraded ecosystems no longer exploited by humans, increasing swathes of the planet are in direct human use, in which case there is clearly much more environmental work to be done transforming this use than there is in restoring portions of degraded nature to something like their wild state. This is not, of course, to deny the possibility of restoring a site that is and will remain in use. The restoration of grazing meadowlands in the United Kingdom is an obvious example. But it is also true that, if such restoration projects are to be sustainable, they must also be accompanied by a transformation in the way the site is used, for otherwise there will be nothing to stop degradation reoccurring.

      Given all these limitations, it is instructive to consider a powerful criticism of the “traditional project of environmentalism” put forward by Mathews (2011, p. 364). According to Mathews, environmentalism has traditionally focused on the objective of protecting nature from negative human impacts. In opposition to this, she argues that the emerging concept of biomimicry, which she sees as a “turning point in Western thinking” (Mathews 2011, p. 368), represents a radically different form of environmentalism. So what is biomimicry? Biomimicry is often defined in terms of the transfer of function from biology to engineering, a famous example of which is Velcro, which was modeled on the fastening mechanism used by the Arctium lappa thistle to propagate its seeds. According to Marshall and Loveza (2009, p. 2), however, biomimicry is better understood not as a novel method for design but rather as an “organizing concept” capable of bringing together a variety of different fields of design and innovation, including obviously related fields like bionics, biomimetics, or bio‐inspiration, but extending also to such areas as permaculture, analogue forestry, ecological engineering, ecological design, industrial ecology, and thus as including also the imitation of ecosystems (ecomimicry or ecosystem biomimicry) (Dicks 2017a).

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