Ecological Restoration and Environmental Change: Renewing Damaged Ecosystems by Stuart K. Allison (review)

Restoration science, like all applied sciences, includes a significant social component in its study and practice. What individual or societal choices in the past led to a need for intervention? Which habitats, of the myriad in need of attention, are targets for restoration efforts? And what goals do practitioners choose in order to guide their choice of techniques? These are all, to some extent, active human decisions—by individuals, citizen groups, nonprofits, governments, or society as a whole—that strongly influence the restoration process.

Stuart Allison, in his book Ecological Restoration and Environmental Change, examines the past and present, and offers recommendations for the future, of restoration science with a strong eye toward the place of human decisions in the practice of restoration. He examines how differences in backgrounds or training can lead to different approaches to ecological restoration. He argues that restoration science will continue to be vital for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem function in a world where human activities increasingly dominate. But he also argues that it will be most effective if it directly accounts for, and also takes advantage of the ways that the public connects with nature.

Organized into eight chapters, this text is a mix of topical reviews with considerations of the role that individuals’ perspectives play in their decision making. A key thread throughout the book is the question “why do we restore?” Allison considers this question from the perspective of both environmental ethics and personal motivation. He freely considers his own motivations and biases—indeed, his own personal reflections on how his upbringing and where he works and teaches has influenced his own views (e.g., Chapters 1, 3) are a strength of the book. For example, he describes his own internal conflict between managing the tallgrass prairie preserve he oversees as an “historical artifact” versus as a shifting “novel ecosystem” that must incorporate the realities of invasive species and climate change (Chapter 5). Scientists and practitioners all over the world are having similar discussions, and the outcomes of those discussions will determine, to a significant extent, how restoration is practiced in the coming decades.

Of course, attitudes and approaches toward restoration differ among professional practitioners, and Allison argues that these differences are, to an extent, a product of where someone is from (Chapter 6). He observes that practitioners from North America and Australia have been, until recently, more likely to emphasize returning ecosystems to historical conditions than their European counterparts. By contrast, practitioners from Europe are more likely to be motivated to promote and preserve biodiversity and to maintain ecosystem function with less fidelity to historical conditions. Allison uses a survey of the published restoration literature from 2006–2010 and a small web-based survey of restoration practitioners to support his observation, though he also acknowledges that the goals of North American and Australian practitioners are increasingly coming to resemble their European counterparts. Allison hypothesizes that the existence, in the relatively recent history, of a wild landscape in North America and Australia relative to the much longer cultural history of European landscapes has generated these differences in attitudes among restoration scientists. It is a valuable point to make—that how a professional applies restoration science can be shaped by one’s cultural history and sense of nature.

Allison’s emphasis on how people view nature anchors his vision of the future, namely that we should acknowledge and even build on social-natural connections in an era of a “renewed restoration” (Chapter 7). What this means, practically speaking, is that some projects should accept, or even embrace the legacies of past activities that may have contributed to the need for restoration in the first place. For example, ecological functioning and biodiversity can coexist in mixed-use projects for the benefit of both nature and society—particularly in urban areas or industrial sites. It also justifies the maintenance and restoration of highly human-influenced landscapes such as European grasslands. When past and present...