Although humans have probably tried to repair ecological damage and improve their local environment for as long as we have recognized the effects of careless use of our natural resources, restoration ecology is a relatively new field that attempts to combine practical knowledge of land management with the scientific insights of academic disciplines such as ecology, wildlife management, landscape architecture and horticulture. A pioneer in this field was the noted author and wildlife ecologist, Aldo Leopold, whose Sand County Almanac presents his ethical code for land stewardship together with practical experiments in restoring worn out, sandy farmland in central Wisconsin. The farm was far from a pristine wilderness, nor were the Leopold family merely spectators on it. They regarded themselves as active participants and citizens of the land community, seeking to restore the land to ecological health and beauty. "Conservation," Leopold wrote, "is the positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence or caution."
Modern restoration ecologists seek to extend Leopold's principles of practical land husbandry with new understandings of ecological processes to repair or reconstruct ecosystems damaged by humans or natural forces. Recent laws requiring no net loss of wetlands and reclamation of toxic waste or surface mining sites have provided both incentive and finances to support this rapidly growing discipline. Restoration generally means to bring something back to a former condition. Ecological restoration involves active manipulation of nature to re-create species composition and ecosystem processes as close as possible to the state that existed before human disturbance. Rehabilitation refers to attempts to rebuild elements of structure or function in an ecological system without necessarily achieving complete recovery of its original condition. Often rehabilitation means to bring an area back to a useful state for human purposes rather than to a truly pristine state.
Remediation usually means the cleaning of polluted areas by physical or biological methods. Incineration, for instance, often is a good method of detoxifying oil-soaked soils. Living organisms are highly effective cleaning agents for many contaminants. Many plant species absorb toxic elements such as selenium or mercury from polluted water or soil. Microorganisms (bacteria and fungi) can be found in nature or engineered in the laboratory to destroy many dangerous chemicals. Reclamation is used to describe chemical or physical treatments of severely degraded areas such as open-pit mines. The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, for example, requires mine operators to restore land surfaces to original contours and to replant vegetation. Many cities have old industrial sites known as brownfields with abandoned buildings and badly contaminated soils that prevent redevelopment. Reclaiming these sites is an important step in revitalizing inner city neighborhoods.
Re-creation attempts to construct a new biological community on a site so severely disturbed that there is virtually nothing left to restore. The new community may be modeled on what we think was there before human disturbance or it may be something that never existed on that site but that we think suits current conditions. Often developers are required to mitigate adverse effects of their projects by recreating a new ecosystem to replace one they have destroyed. A wetland destroyed by highway construction, for example, may have to be replaced by a newly constructed one in a new location. Environmentalists often oppose these policies. An artificially constructed ecosystem rarely has the complexity or diversity of a natural community. The purpose of restoration ecology, they claim, should be to repair previous damage, not to legitimize further destruction.
This is the complete article, containing 575 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
