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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
“