Читать книгу River Restoration - Группа авторов - Страница 47

Given the three challenges outlined in Section 2.2, what sort of ethic is appropriate to river restoration? With a view to answering this question, let us briefly consider the long‐running debate in environmental ethics between preservationism and restorationism (Hettinger 2012). To most people, preservation and restoration are simply different types of environmentally benign activity. It is also possible, however, to elevate each of these activities to the status of what Jordan (1994, p. 17) calls an “environmental paradigm,” understood as a specific way of relating to the environment that involves strong philosophical and ethical suppositions, hence the presence of the suffix “‐ism.” According to preservationists, like Elliott and Katz, the basic objective of environmental ethics should be to preserve nature, for restorations, as the deliberate result of human agency, simply add more artefacts to an increasingly unnatural and therefore less valuable planet. Restorationists, like Jordan (1994) and Turner (1994), see a variety of problems with this position, of which four are particularly noteworthy:

 The first problem is the assumption that humans always have a negative impact on nature (for even when restoring nature they diminish the value of naturalness).

 The second problem is the radical separation between humans and nature that underlies this claim, and entails that deliberate human actions can only ever have nonnatural results.

 The third problem is that preservation only allows for a very limited number of ways of interacting with nature; to preserve nature we typically do little more than designate it as out of bounds for development and then restrict human use to, at most, recreational and scientific activities.

 The fourth problem is that relatively little wilderness now remains, in which case there is relatively little genuine preservation work left to be done.

According to its advocates, the paradigm of restorationism, which holds that restoration is the “central challenge” of ecology (Jordan et al. 1987, p. 15), makes it possible to overcome these four problems. In restoration, human impact on nature is positive; it overcomes the separateness from nature presupposed by preservationists; it allows us to interact with nature in complex and meaningful ways, thereby also deepening our ecological understanding (Jordan et al. 1987); and it provides much more scope than preservation for future environmental activity.

There are, however, also major limitations to restorationism. For a start, the positive human impact on nature is limited to restoration work. Other activities, such as how we produce the goods and services that sustain our own existence, many of which depend directly on rivers or take place within their watersheds, are overlooked. The result is a continued separation between humans and nature, with preserved or restored nature on one side of the divide and human culture – agriculture, industry, cities, etc. – on the other. This in turn limits the possible scope for meaningful interactions with nature. How we produce the food, goods, buildings, and infrastructure we require would appear to have little or nothing to do with nature. Lastly, while there is no doubt much scope for restoring degraded ecosystems no longer exploited by humans, increasing swathes of the planet are in direct human use, in which case there is clearly much more environmental work to be done transforming this use than there is in restoring portions of degraded nature to something like their wild state. This is not, of course, to deny the possibility of restoring a site that is and will remain in use. The restoration of grazing meadowlands in the United Kingdom is an obvious example. But it is also true that, if such restoration projects are to be sustainable, they must also be accompanied by a transformation in the way the site is used, for otherwise there will be nothing to stop degradation reoccurring.

These limitations of restoration as an activity, and restorationism as an environmental paradigm, are particularly apparent in the case of river restoration. As noted in Section 2.2.1 and 2.2.2, rivers are not isolatable from their surrounding ecosystems and their catchment area is often a site of extensive and permanent human settlement and use. In many cases, this means that it will be insufficient simply to restore the river and its banks, let alone just a mere stretch of the river, for human settlement and use of the catchment area will, at least as long as it persists in its current form, continue to have a strong negative impact on the river (Palmer et al. 2005). To some extent river restorationists have acknowledged these problems and have thus tried to expand the scope of river restoration to the level of the watershed (Bohn and Kershner 2002). But, given extensive and permanent human settlement and land use, it will in many cases not be possible to restore the surrounding watershed to anything like its predevelopment state (Eden et al. 2000; Palmer et al. 2005). When a river is negatively impacted by a dense city of several million people straddling its banks and surrounded by thousands of acres of farmland and industry, the restoration of its watershed – where restoration is seen as a return to the predevelopment state – will at best be limited to restoring the “gaps” in the landscape not directly exploited by humans, typically in the form of “buffer zones” and “corridors linking established fragments” of undeveloped land (Hobbs and Norton 1996, p. 104). Moreover, even when one extends the conceptual framework of restoration to the landscape level (Naveh 1994) – an approach which typically extends the scope of restoration ecology to productive land (Hobbs and Norton 1996) – the resulting restoration will not necessarily put an end to the negative impact that future exploitation of the landscape will have on the river. To restore the soils of degraded farmland, for example, will not in itself stop renewed agricultural activity impacting negatively on the river and it could even increase that negative impact (e.g. by making possible continued applications of pesticides and fertilizers).

Given all these limitations, it is instructive to consider a powerful criticism of the “traditional project of environmentalism” put forward by Mathews (2011, p. 364). According to Mathews, environmentalism has traditionally focused on the objective of protecting nature from negative human impacts. In opposition to this, she argues that the emerging concept of biomimicry, which she sees as a “turning point in Western thinking” (Mathews 2011, p. 368), represents a radically different form of environmentalism. So what is biomimicry? Biomimicry is often defined in terms of the transfer of function from biology to engineering, a famous example of which is Velcro, which was modeled on the fastening mechanism used by the Arctium lappa thistle to propagate its seeds. According to Marshall and Loveza (2009, p. 2), however, biomimicry is better understood not as a novel method for design but rather as an “organizing concept” capable of bringing together a variety of different fields of design and innovation, including obviously related fields like bionics, biomimetics, or bio‐inspiration, but extending also to such areas as permaculture, analogue forestry, ecological engineering, ecological design, industrial ecology, and thus as including also the imitation of ecosystems (ecomimicry or ecosystem biomimicry) (Dicks 2017a).

There is, I believe, another important sense in which biomimicry may be seen as an organizing concept. This second sense concerns biomimicry’s own internal organization, which is structured according to four distinct principles, each of which corresponds to a different branch of philosophical inquiry (Dicks 2016). This framework may be represented as in Figure 2.1.

The first principle, nature as model, consists in taking nature as model for human designs. The second principle, nature as measure, holds that there are ecological standards against which the “rightness” of these designs should be evaluated. And the third principle, nature as mentor, holds that nature is not so much something about which we should learn as something from which we should learn. Lastly, the principle of nature as physis consists in the interpretation of nature as self‐producing, that is to say as applying to beings that bring themselves into and maintain themselves in existence, including, at least in some cases, by repairing or healing themselves (Dicks 2016). Biomimicry, it follows, is also an organizing concept in the sense that these four principles may be applied to any given applied field of biomimicry – industrial production, industrial systems, agriculture, architecture, urbanism, and so on – thus structuring the basic theoretical framework of that field.

Figure 2.1 The philosophical framework of biomimicry.

Source: Based on Dicks, H. (2016). The philosophy of biomimicry. Philosophy & Technology 29(3): 223–243.

It is not hard to see that ecological restoration may be understood as a type of biomimicry (Merchant 1986). Restoration ecology has almost always assumed that some sort of model ecosystem is required and that the restored ecosystem will ultimately be an imitation of this model (Jordan 1985; Turner 1987, 1994; Jordan et al. 1988). Moreover, just as in biomimicry, ecological standards have been put forward as criteria against which biomimetic designs and innovations are to be evaluated, so the same is very often true in ecological restoration (Ewel 1987; Brinson and Rheinhardt 1996), river restoration included (Giller 2005; Palmer et al. 2005). Likewise, just as biomimicry sees nature not as an object of human knowledge, something about which we may learn things, but as a source of knowledge, from which we may learn important lessons about how to do things, so the same is often also the case in restoration ecology. In observing the process of ecological succession in nature, for example, we may learn not just certain facts about how ecosystems regenerate themselves but also how we might go about restoring them (Dobson et al. 1997). River restorationists, for example, may learn how to emulate processes of natural succession in their choice of the vegetation planted on riverbanks, with fast‐growing pioneer species used initially to stabilize the soil and slower‐growing but more ecologically enriching species used later on (Wilke 1994).² Lastly, the question of what nature is, including the question of what ecosystems are and what rivers are, is also of fundamental importance to restoration ecology. If, for example, we see nature in terms of self‐production (physis) then this will likely underpin a view of restoration efforts in terms of helping degraded ecosystems repair and maintain themselves, in which case the role of the restorationist will be analogous not to that of a craftsman or builder but rather to that of a doctor, enabling a patient to heal themselves and thus regain their former autonomy.

Seeing ecological restoration as just one field encompassed by the broader organizing concept of biomimicry provides a coherent response to many of the problems posed by restorationism in general, and river restoration in particular. We noted earlier that restorationism claims to go beyond preservationism in that it considers the human impact on nature to be potentially positive, in that it overcomes the traditional separation between humans and nature, in that it makes for a wider range of possible human interactions with nature, and in that it provides greater scope for future environmental activity. All of this is true a fortiori of biomimicry. In biomimicry, it is not just restoration efforts that may have a positive impact on nature but other fields of human activity as well, from agriculture and industry to architecture and urbanism. As Mathews points out, the aim of biomimicry “is not so much to reduce our impact as to make that impact generative for nature” (Mathews 2011, pp. 366–367). This in turn may give rise to a world that is much less segregated even than the one implied by restorationism, which, in its advocacy of restoring degraded nature, has little to say about how it is that we should go about conducting the basic activities by and through which human civilization sustains itself. Further, in taking nature as model, measure, and mentor not just for restoration activities but also for farming, industry, architecture, urbanism, and so on, the scope for meaningful interactions with nature increases significantly. And finally, precisely because so much of the earth is now taken up with these activities, their transformation in accordance with the biomimetic principles of nature as model, measure, and mentor provides much greater scope for environmental activity than does restoration alone.

Seeing restoration as but one type of biomimicry also allows one to address the three challenges of river restoration outlined in Section 2.2. In particular, by seeing such human activities as farming, industrial production, and urbanization as modeled on nature, many of the problems faced by river restorationists could also be addressed, for the generalization of natural models would completely transform – in a manner highly complementary to the work of dedicated river restorationists – the workings of those parts of the catchment area that are settled and used by humans. Taking nature as model for a city, for example, could lead to the generalization of permeable soils which allow water to infiltrate directly, as opposed to being channeled through a sewer system (Chocat 2013). And taking nature as model for agriculture, as is the case in the pioneering experiments of Jackson (2011), could involve much higher levels of nutrient cycling and soil retention, as well as the replacement of synthetic pesticides by bio‐inspired alternatives (natural predators, genetic diversity, etc.), thus allowing much higher‐quality water to flow from the farm to the river. In all these cases, however, human activity goes far beyond the limited scope of restoration work, at least as usually conceived. Taking a forest as model for a city, for example, could involve designing or retrofitting buildings such that they play similar ecological and hydrological roles to trees, including facilitating stormwater infiltration, evapotranspiration, and soil stabilization. The result would not, however, be a restored forest, but rather a “city like a forest” (Braungart and McDonough 2009), which, precisely because of its similarity to a forest, could potentially play a beneficial role in the overall hydrological regime of the river basin to which it belongs.³ Further, the availability of a new environmental paradigm – imitationism – applicable not just to restoration work but also to other fields of human activity, including agriculture, industry, and urbanism, could potentially help produce the shared beliefs and values necessary for multiple stakeholders to work together in a coherent and complementary manner. If civil engineers, designers, planners, and so on, also take imitating nature as a starting point then their values and objectives would likely dovetail much more easily with those of river restorationists than would otherwise be the case.

Adopting imitationism as a new environmental paradigm would in turn involve the adoption of a new ethical principle: nature as measure. As I argue elsewhere (Dicks 2017b), the key feature of this principle is the idea that, unlike in traditional environmental ethics, nature is not seen as an object of ethics, something toward which human subjects have duties and obligations, as is the case when ecological restoration is seen as a form of “restitution” (Taylor 1986; Basl 2010), righting past wrongs committed toward nature, but rather as a source of ethics, something whose inner workings may be translated into a set of normative, ethical constraints on how we humans should carry out our various activities. From this perspective, the attempt to locate standards in nature for judging the success of restoration projects is already to adopt a specific approach within environmental ethics, and, in our case, a specific restoration ethic, for it is to make the assumption that the restoration efforts should be evaluated against nature’s ecological standards. This approach may in turn be integrated into broader biomimicry objectives, as is the case regarding the proposal of Pedersen Zari (2017) for the transformation of the city of Wellington in New Zealand according to ecological standards derived from the predevelopment ecosystem, and which, as she points out, would involve significant restoration work.

Another important feature of the ethical principle of biomimicry is that it avoids an important problem in approaches to ecological restoration grounded in Latour’s actor network theory (ANT). According to Eden et al. (2000), a major advantage of ANT is that is does not suppose a radical ontological separation between humans and nature. The problem with ANT, however, is that seeing humans and nonhumans as imbricated in a hybrid network provides no evaluative or ethical criteria that allow us to distinguish bad imbrications from good ones (Eden et al. 2000). Like ANT, biomimicry accepts the inevitable imbrication of humans and nature, and, in keeping with this, it does not seek to preserve or restore a pristine nature free from all human interference. Where it differs from ANT, however, is in the provision of evaluative criteria to judge successful imbrications. This does, interestingly, involve a certain work of purification, for it requires us to consider how nature does things independently of us. Applied to a river basin, this involves asking how nature would do things were we not there, a question which may be answered in various different ways: by considering the general configuration of the river basin before we arrived, by inspecting parcels of more or less wild nature within the basin and extrapolating to other parts, or by developing computer models of the basin based on various input data (geomorphological, climatic, ecological, etc.) and potentially capable of predicting future changes and developments. But this purification does not serve the aim of keeping nature pure or of returning it to a state of purity but rather of enabling humans to learn from the models and measures nature is able to provide, and thus of integrating into our products and our systems those traits of nature that are eminently desirable, especially its effectiveness, appropriateness, and sustainability (Benyus 1997). This does not, of course, imply that all of our ethics may be derived from nature in this way; the ecological standards nature provides give rise to an ecological ethics, an ethic governing our relation to nature, but not an ethic governing interhuman relations. In this respect, biomimicry leaves a significant space open for humans to introduce other ethical criteria and aspirational objectives both into dedicated restoration work and into other complementary biomimetic activities.

Finally, it is also significant that the imitationist paradigm I am proposing lends itself to articulation with certain non‐Western philosophical frameworks, especially Daoism (Mathews 2016). A concrete example of this in relation to rivers is the Dujiangyang irrigation scheme, developed along the Min River in 256 BCE, which, instead of damming the river, as is very often the case in contemporary China, took natural flood patterns as a model for a network of irrigation channels that “harmlessly and productively dispersed the flood waters across the flood plain” and whose sustainability is manifest in the fact that it is still in use today, over 2000 years later (Mathews 2019, p. 35). Here, then, we have an example of a river that, precisely because of the ecologically benign but economically and socially productive way its watershed was developed in the first place, is not even in need of restoration.