Abstract
In this chapter, Paul Knights argues that there are reasons for a critical reassessment of two current movements in UK conservation – ‘creative conservation’ and ‘rewilding’ – that emerge from an examination of the ontological, axiological and ethical status of restored cultural ecosystems. He first argues that the famous criticism advanced by Robert Elliot against the ontological status of restored natural ecosystems results in unreasonable demands regarding the properties that must be restored to cultural ecosystems, and argues that where they do meet the more demanding conception of authenticity, they seem to have greater value as items of cultural heritage. Lastly, he bases a novel ethical justification upon an often overlooked type of value for the restoration of cultural ecosystems, which is grounded in the obligations we bear to our predecessors to understand and appreciate their values.
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Notes
- 1.
As the SER points out, much restoration activity will be directed toward “the reintegration of fragmented ecosystems and landscapes, rather than focusing on just a single ecosystem” (Society for Ecological Restoration 2004, 5). I will, however, continue to refer to “cultural ecosystem restoration” in the singular for the sake of simplicity and clarity. This is to be understood, where appropriate, as implicitly encompassing the (almost certainly more common practice of the) restoration of multiple cultural ecosystems or the restoration of a cultural landscape (i.e. a mosaic of cultural ecosystems).
- 2.
- 3.
See for example Natural England, “Environmental Stewardship,” <http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/ourwork/farming/funding/es/default.aspx> (accessed January 7, 2012).
- 4.
Examples of natural ecosystems restored in the U.S. are rivers (e.g. the Kissimmee River Restoration Project), wetlands (e.g. the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan) and tallgrass prairie (e.g. the work of the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance). There is, of course, increasing evidence that the ecosystems and landscapes that are characterised as natural in the U.S. (namely, those that European settlers encountered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) had in fact been the subject of long and significant human disturbance (see Callicott 2002). It may therefore be the case that the ecosystems that are restored by ecological restorationists in the U.S. are not natural in the sense that many have believed they are.
- 5.
After developing the typology in Elliot 1997, 97–111, Elliot justifies his continuing use of the phrase “faked nature” on p. 132, and employs it again on p. 143.
- 6.
Recent research suggests that the Black Death could have been responsible for Europe’s “Little Ice Age” due to the post-pandemic forest regeneration acting as a terrestrial carbon sink (see Van Hoof et al. 2006).
- 7.
It might be objected that the return of communities affected by the Black Death to reclaim formerly cultivated cultural ecosystems should not be classified as – and considered alongside – the modern practice of ecological restoration. I acknowledge that it is anachronistic to claim that fourteenth century peasants were carrying out ecological restoration (just as it is anachronistic to claim that they were restoring cultural ecosystems), but I think that it is entirely plausible to claim – and all that needs to be the case for my purposes – that they were engaging in restoration. As Jordan (2000, 23) observes, restoration is an idea stretching back to biblical times in the fallowing of land.
- 8.
If it had taken the local population longer to return to the heathland and it had fully succeeded into woodland such that it would no longer be appropriate to say that it is the same cultural ecosystem as existed before its abandonment then only “type-restoration” would be possible.
- 9.
It should be noted that Elliot argues that restored (natural) ecosystems necessarily possess less value than original ecosystems since, on his account, not only are there two non-relational properties that cannot in principle be restored (continuity with the distant past and being the product of natural processes), but these very properties are value intensifying properties, acting “in concert with other properties to produce an overall value well in excess of the sum of the value of those properties, and, for that matter, the value [intensifying] property itself” (Elliot 1997, 81). Restored ecosystems, therefore, will always of necessity be compromised with regard to the value they possess in relation to the original natural ecosystem.
- 10.
Ecosystem service value is, like each of the values I am considering here, attributed to natural as well as cultural ecosystems.
- 11.
It is true that for each of these values it is not necessarily the case that degraded ecosystems that warrant restoration will no longer possess them. For example, abandoned pastoral landscapes may exhibit a certain aesthetic charm residing in their deserted and forsaken appearance; unhealthy ecosystems can provide many ecosystem services, albeit perhaps for a limited time, as Ronald Sandler (2003) argues; and there is much scientific interest in the study of, say, the process of succession in neglected cultural ecosystems. But Elliot’s point is regarding full value restoration, and so it is not merely any kind of aesthetic, ecosystem service or scientific value that is to be restored, but the very kind – based on the very same value adding properties – possessed by the pre-degradation ecosystems that must be restored.
- 12.
As John O’Neill (1997, 25) argues, “one major problem with the heritage industry is the way it often attempts to freeze historical development… The object becomes a mere spectacle taken outside of history.” This removal from history may take the form of refusing to allow people the opportunity to engage with an item of heritage, even if only in a limited way.
- 13.
For example, if research demonstrated that restoring a degraded coppice woodland by instigating a 20-year felling cycle instead of the traditional 8–15 is ideal for the (rare) common dormouse (Muscardinus avellanarius), then the restoration of biodiversity value would come into conflict with the restoration of cultural heritage value.
- 14.
Low population mobility, strong filial ties and, up to the Middle Ages, a feudal system which bound peasants to particular estates, mean that most cultural ecosystems will have been worked by the same families and communities for many generations. Even though the vast majority of our predecessors would not have owned any portion of the cultural ecosystems in which they worked and resided, it seems likely that they would nonetheless have valued them as their inheritance from their predecessors and as a legacy to their successors.
- 15.
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- 17.
This assumption – that our predecessors had inadvertently, despite it forming no part of their motivations and, indeed, in many cases being inimical to their interests, discovered just how to manage ecosystems in a way that maximised their biodiversity value – may have seemed reasonable to the founders of the conservation movement in the early to mid-twentieth century. They had inherited the rapture with which eighteenth and nineteenth century natural historians had described the very cultural ecosystems which were rapidly being lost to the depauperate landscapes of intensive, mechanised agriculture. Creative conservation is the result of the recognition that since traditional management was “[d]esigned to exploit rather than conserve” it may well be the case that many “species…[have] survived despite, rather than because of, such practices” (Sheail et al. 1997, 231). See also Hambler and Speight (1995), and Jarman (1995).
- 18.
- 19.
This recent recognition of the importance of top-down regulation has led to a reassessment of the orthodox view that top predators are relatively unimportant elements of natural systems (see Foreman 2004, 119–124).
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Knights, P. (2014). Cultural Landscapes, Ecological Restoration and the Intergenerational Narrative. In: Drenthen, M., Keulartz, J. (eds) Old World and New World Perspectives in Environmental Philosophy. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07683-6_6
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