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VILLAGEApril/May
P
ADDY Woodworth is an eco-upstart:
an expert on the Basque country,
about which he has always written
incisively, he has written a book on biodi-
versity restoration, the “counterintuitive
world where you burn a prairie to make it
flourish, slaughter cute and furry mammals
to save indigenous birds, and poison healthy
trees to bring back native forests”. Normally
this would be good, environmentalists are
often politically naïve or soft-minded;
unless he had a tunnel vision and, after
years of studying, off and on, one promising
but –in an era of accelerating man-led cli-
mate change and biodiversity devestation
– peripheral (even if Science magazine
in did say “our planet’s future may
depend on the maturation of ecological
restoration”).
Woodworth considers that “the environ-
mental movement is plagued by pessimism.
And that’s not unreasonable…But that paints
an unbalanced – and overly disheartening
– picture of what’s going on with environ-
mental stewardship today”. You could stop
after this, the encapsulation of the sort of
baseless optimism that brought the twenty-
first century the word “positivity”. Or at the
uncountered vision of one “Arctic ecologist”
who sees climate change as “an opportunity
rather than a problem”. You wouldn’t even
need to have looked at the book’s waspish
title derived flabbily and without relevance
from the inscription on King Arthur’s tomb,
‘Our Once and Future Planet’, with its insin-
cere invocation of the issue of our time to
which he actually makes no relevant refer-
ence. You wouldn’t even need to have seen
that, unusually for a serious campaigning
environmental book, it is funded by Bord
na Móna (about whom Woodworth has
broadcast implausibly favourably, though
his chapter on bogs is unimpeachable) and
Coillte (on one occasion he notes that US pol-
icy has led to monoculture forestry but he
is notably discreet about this in Ireland) as
well as other worthy quangos.
Woodworth unconventionally takes us
with him to a large number of restoration
symposiums, conferences, a prairie weekend
and an International Crane Foundation staff
birthday party where we meet the protago-
nists and are invited to share Woodworth’s
exhilaration, rather than hearing only the
distilled resultant theories.
Woodworth cites many projects but their
serial iteration adds little to the sense of
imperative.
He looks at revival burning of that prai-
rie, in Rochester County, Kentucky – the
book is part written for an American audi-
ence, Zambezi migratory crane conservation
which led to delta flooding, aircraft-chaper-
oned enforced extension of crane migration
as far as Florida, creating fire breaks in the
Russian Far East and Mississippi
wetlands, improving New York’s
water supply by restoring its
Catskill watershed, rolling back
the spread of invasive species
and the threat of overgrazing
from South Africa’s native fynbos
flora and removing invasive spe-
cies from the North Branch of the
Chicago River). He looks at sav-
ing crumbling terraces in Cinque
Terre, Italy, and a model project
restoring clear-felled Coillte land
to deciduous forest in Mayo and
elsewhere in Ireland. He consid-
ers the restoration of woodland
in Gondwana, Australia, after
bauxite mining, the restoration
of tropical forest after mahog-
any felling in Santa Rosa, Costa
Rica, and in Mexico. He looks
at killing possums and stoats in
New Zealand to facilitate kiwis and native
song-birds. Finally, he looks at blocking bog
drains with the aim of “assisting recovery to
a peat-forming condition” for Atlantic blan-
ket bog in Ireland.
In Ireland Woodworth’s sympathies for
the pastoralist seem to come with a provin-
cial caveat. He notes “An explicit espousal of
environmentalist values can raise hackles in
Irish rural communities. ‘Greens’ are often
regarded, sometimes with some justice, as
ignorant, interfering townies or gentry insu-
lated by wealth and who know nothing and
care even less about the struggle to make a
Restoration hyperbole
A gushing paean oversells the evolving chimera of restorationism as a solution
to the earth’s complex environmental problem. By Michael Smith
Our Once and Future Planet
Paddy Woodworth
University of Chicago Press
2013
ENVIRONMENT
BOOK REVIEW
The counter-
intuitive world
where you
burn a prairie
to make it
flourish or
slaughter cute
and furry
mammals
to save
indigenous
birds
“
April/May VILLAGE
living from the land”.
Aparently unbeknown to Woodworth,
a living is far from what is made on most
farms in Ireland: % of the income of dry
cattle farmers derives from the CAP. Only
EU subsidies make this method of farming
viable. It would surely serve all our inter-
ests to decrease this country’s greenhouse
gas emissions – over % of which emanate
from livestock production – by scaling back
livestock and restoring forestry which could
offer a sustainable living, alongside other
forms of environmentally-friendly farming,
with continued state support.
Moreover, his critical faculties dissi-
pate when considering his own country.
Woodworth excuses the inconsistencies of
one Kerry livestock farmer who has restored
some forestry simply because “he gets a lot
more done than many right-on environmen-
talists endowed with ideological purity but
often hopelessly ignorant about their native
places”. The author chooses to criticise
straw-man environmentalists rather than
a livestock farmer, whose allegedly age-old
methods only emerged in the wake of land
clearances after the Famine.
The other chapter of particular interest
to an Irish reader concerns our native bog-
lands which have been reduced particularly
in recent years by a combination of over-
grazing and over-extraction. He laments
a “corporate and national disgrace: the
extinction of unique European ecosystems
in an advanced country in the twenty-first
century”, and explores conservation and
restoration methods.
The book is infused with a “heady” wide-
eyedness when it comes to restorationism.
He concedes he was left “a little bit starry-
eyed” after becoming “rather world-weary
after many years of reporting” on the
bitter Basque conflict. Propounders of res-
torationism are nearly all “thoughtful”,
“charismatic”, “infectiously charming” or
“tireless and imaginative” and Woodworth
feels lucky to be in their aura. A lot of the
author’s experience is conveyed with
present-tense breathlessness.
An outsider gets immersed in a hippish (at
least for environmentalists) form of “shame-
driven” eco-activism, fails to give it a context
and then, because temperamentally an opti-
mist and self-exceptionaliser spends pages
and pages adumbrating why this is the
future. Even though it is too obscure, and
the problems too big, for it to be anything
more than a sideshow, even if the assump-
tion that ‘restoration’ is good, holds true.
But even of that even Woodworth is not even
convinced. And that is a lot of evens.
Woodworth accepts that restoration
ecology is “like a lively adolescent, buzzing
with energy – and with vibrant contradic-
tions…”. The very notion of restoration
seems confused. ‘Where do Camels Belong’
by Ken Thomson which actually post-dates
Woodworth’s book undermines the notion
of anything “belonging” or being “native”
or indeed “alien” anywhere – the camel first
evolved in North America million years
ago, is most diverse in South America and
is only found wild in Australia. Woodworth
refers approvingly to an iterative defini-
tion of restorationism which includes to
‘restore.. natural forests and lands…, as
nearly as may be, in [sic] their natural state
and condition”.
The following are some of the issues with
restorationism: ) should we aim to restore
species or whole habitats? ) how do we
know the effects of restoration since subtle
variations in action can result in dramati-
cally different results – nature has multiple
determinants and is unpredictable? ) to
what do we aim to restore – to the way some-
thing was before humans damaged it or to,
for example, what it would have been like
now if humans had not damaged it – what
is the benchmark? ) the damning real-
ity that “failure to achieve project targets
was much more common than success in
restoration, though restoration literature
has often given the opposite impression”?
) What weight goes to the social and eco-
nomic imperatives versus environmental
ones? ) What happens if the classic ecosys-
tem was economically obsolete? ) How do
you factor in species that have no economic
value? ) How do you weigh beauty? ) What
are the ethics of removing existing species,
especially attractive or carbon-capturing
ones? ) How do you restore when climate
change will destroy what you would like to
restore?
The book’s jacket plaudits come from the
leaders of the Botanical Garden movement
which is fine but the environmental agenda
is not the Botanical Garden agenda, whole-
some as it may be.
Often it is clear he is in above the rising
tide. For example on page he quotes with
approval a statement that “the relation-
ship between conservation and poverty
alleviation is the most important debate
in environmentalism right now”. You have
to be more careful with words. The most
important debate is between equity and
environmentalism but it should not be so
hard, in the hands of progressives to rec-
oncile them.
Woodworth simply claims too much
for restorationism: “Through restoration
we might escape from our locked dichot-
omy between the twin roles of destroyers
and preservers and find a more rewarding
middle way as facilitators of – and partic-
ipants in – natural processes”. Well, the
destroyer/preserver dichotomy is not that
easily resolved.
Clearly keen to distance him-
self from radicals he notes that
“Restorationists say they have
found a synthesis which can
resolve a familiar dialogue of the
deaf between: those who see the
environment only as a resource to
be managed, developed and con-
sumed, and those who see human
intervention in the environment
only as desecration and damage”.
A detached observer or futurol-
ogist would hardly see those
who see “only desecration and
damage” from humans as deaf.
Lacking – at the edges – in ana-
lytical stringency perhaps.
Some things are just plain dis-
turbing. Restorationism is overall
largely human-orientated: it
sees ecosystems as ‘natural cap-
ital’. Woodworth describes Aldo
Leopold whose work is “prescient and pain-
fully relevant.. anchored in the sure hands of
one who knows how to dig the soil and how
to shoot a deer [sic]” as offering “imaginative
insights’ which “have as sharp and signifi-
cant a focus as scientific analysis”. Sorry No.
Focus is not analysis. Science not imagina-
tion is the discipline of environmentalism.
And in the climate change century it invokes
largely pessimism. •
Whooping
cranes
return to
Florida
Greens in
Ireland
are often
regarded,
sometimes
with some
justice, as
ignorant,
interfering
townies
or gentry
insulated by
wealth
“
