TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101491/1014330.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.2 KB | 208 lines

                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 62

Learning How To Revive the Wilds of Eden


In the quest to mend shattered landscapes, ecologists discover
that human hands can heal nature as well as destroy it

By J. MADELEINE NASH/CHICAGO -- With reporting by Andrea
Dorfman/Washington, with other bureaus


    Gone are the vast Highland forests of Scotland. Gone are
the oceans of grass that graced the North American plains. Gone
too are the lush Bahamian jungles that greeted Christopher
Columbus and his sea-weary men. Today these lost landscapes,
like vanished civilizations, exist only as mirages that dance
in the mind's eye. And until recently, any notion that such
priceless heirlooms might be reclaimed would have been dismissed
as hopelessly quixotic.

    Now, however, some daring naturalists are starting to
suggest that just as a smashed vase can be pieced back together
and a war-torn cathedral reconstructed stone by stone, so too
the battered remnants of natural masterpieces -- bogs and fens,
forests and prairies, deserts and coral reefs -- may eventually
be restored to some semblance of former glory. In at least a few
spots around the globe, the dreamers say, humanity may be able
to go back to Eden.

    Even as chain saws rip through the equatorial rain forests
and overgrazing threatens to turn the African plains to dust,
an unlikely coalition of university scientists and civil
engineers, public officials and environmental activists has
embarked on dozens, perhaps hundreds, of experimental projects
aimed at repairing environmental damage. They call themselves
restoration ecologists, and they are re-creating destroyed
habitats from Britain to Costa Rica and from Israel to the
American Midwest. With bulldozers and dredges, they are removing
the dirt and garbage that have been dumped on wetlands. With
hacksaws and herbicides, they are attacking exotic interlopers
that have displaced native vegetation. With shovels and rakes,
they are replanting original species of trees and grasses,
returning to weed and water fragile seedlings a hectare at a
time.

    Although few restoration projects are more than a decade
old, many have already begun to generate encouraging results.
In Costa Rica, University of Pennsylvania biologist Daniel
Janzen is helping rebuild a nearly extinct tropical dry forest
in the 110,000-hectare (272,000-acre) Guanacaste Conservation
Area, which until five years ago had been overrun by cattle and
torched annually by ranchers and hunters. In California, at the
Nature Conservancy's Coachella Valley Preserve, a few dozen
volunteers felled thousands of salt cedar trees that had sucked
this small desert area nearly dry, clearing the way for the
reappearance of palm trees, willows and migratory waterfowl. Off
the coast of Scotland, Bernard Plante rose, a warden with the
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and his wife Emma
have planted 20,000 slender saplings -- downy birch, rowan, oak
and Scotch pine -- to bring back the forest on tiny, windswept
Isle Martin. And at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
near Chicago, ground crews and volunteers have returned some 280
hectares (700 acres) of former cornfields to a rustling expanse
of big bluestem and Indian grass.

    Buoyed by such successes, government agencies and
environmental groups have begun to launch restoration projects
of unprecedented scale. The Countryside Commission for England
and Wales has pledged to reforest 390 sq km (150 sq. mi.) of the
industrialized Midlands with 30 million trees. The state of
Maine has announced its intention to restore salmon and sturgeon
to the Kennebec River by acquiring and breaching a 154-year-old
dam. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has drawn up plans to
regenerate wetlands killed off by flood-control projects. And
in partnership with the Cook County Forest Preserve District,
the Illinois Nature Conservancy has begun to resurrect thousands
of hectares of prairie and woodlands. "We can be part of nature
without wrecking it," asserts Steve Packard, the Illinois
Conservancy's chief ecologist. "All we need is discipline,
humility and knowledge."

    If restoration at times resembles gardening, it draws
inspiration from a very different philosophy. Gardeners seek to
improve on nature and tame its excesses. Restorationists,
however, strive to return to the landscape the very things
people find hostile, including fires, floods and all the noisome
critters that help keep each ecosystem in healthy kilter. "The
restorationist is a servant of nature, not of his or her
personal whims or tastes," reflects William Jordan III, of the
four-year-old Society for Ecological Restoration in Madison,
Wis. "A prairie, for instance, is not altogether a pleasant
place to be. Some people would not like the grasshoppers and
mosquitoes and little burry things that stick to their clothes.
Marshes? They make your feet wet, and there may be snakes."

    Restoring an ecosystem is somewhat like restoring a house
or piece of antique furniture. "Before you begin," observes
Holly Richter, a consultant with the Nature Conservancy in
Boulder, "you need to know what the original looked like."
Historical records can provide valuable insights. Passages from
the Old Testament, for instance, have helped Israeli
restorationists re-create biblical landscapes at Neot Kedumim,
a 220-hectare (545-acre) nature reserve in the Judean hills. In
similar fashion, the diaries of a 19th century doctor have
provided Illinois ecologists with a list of plants that once
flourished under the light shade of bur oak trees.

    Where no written records exist, restorationists turn to
the geological record. Pollen preserved in layers of mud, for
example, enabled a University of Arizona scientist to determine
that a thousand years ago, the Nature Conservancy's Hassayampa
River Preserve near Phoenix was covered by a marshy grassland
unique to the Southwest. But the presence of corn pollen
indicated that 500 years ago, Native Americans had farmed the
site. "So do we restore this area to the way it was before the
Native Americans disturbed it?" wonders the Nature Conservancy's
Richter. "If it's not natural now, then when was it?"

    Even when restorationists have some notion of how to
begin, they face a daunting enterprise. "You can destroy a
prairie in two hours," observes Robert Betz, a Northeastern
Illinois University biology professor. "But to rebuild it might
take half a century or more." Essential to the task is
identifying the dynamic process that shaped each ecosystem and,
if need be, putting it back into play. Prairies and bur oak
woodlands, for instance, were both created by fire. Without
fire, their bright flowers and luxuriant grasses are shaded out
by invading brush. Where in centuries past roving bands of
Plains Indians set fire to the prairies to flush out game, today
preserve managers and teams of volunteers set restored
grasslands ablaze.

    Restorationists make use of the annual floods that
stimulate the growth of riverine forests, flush out wetlands and
rejuvenate them with fertile silt. Deprived of high-water
surges, wetlands quickly die. In the 1960s, for example,
flood-control canals transformed South Florida's wild Kissimmee
River from a sinuous network of oxbows and tributaries into a
stagnant ditch. The disastrous result: nearly 18,200 hectares
(45,000 acres) of prime wetlands disappeared. Waterfowl and fish
populations plummeted. Last year, in a startling about-face, the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water
Management District proposed to unleash the Kissimmee by filling
in 47 km (29 miles) of canal and removing three flow-control
systems. The projected cost: at least $422 million.

    Not only is wetland restoration expensive, but the
vitality of restored wetlands also frequently proves
disappointing. Initially, a new wetland created in south San
Diego Bay seemed to do well -- until it became infested with
tiny plant-sucking insects. Then scientists learned, to their
dismay, that grasses in the artificial marsh did not grow high
enough to provide the beetle predators of these pests with
waterproof living quarters. Today, five years after its
construction, this underachieving wetland continues to struggle
along. Its grasses are stunted, its food web impoverished.
Biologist Joy Zedler, director of San Diego State University's
Pacific Estuarine Research Laboratory, awards the restoration
effort a barely passing grade. "I doubt we'll ever produce A+
wetlands," she bleakly concludes.

    Increasingly, restorationists have begun their own version
of battlefield triage, focusing efforts on natural areas that
are sick but not yet mortally wounded. In New Zealand, for
instance, they have deemed efforts to restore destroyed habitats
on the main islands a lost cause. Instead they are concentrating
on saving relatively pristine areas such as the Mercury
Islands, one of the last strongholds of the rare milk-tree
forest.

    If the quest at times seems impossibly romantic,
restorationists display a refreshing pragmatism. Rather than
demanding that all hydroelectric dams be dynamited, river
restorationists insist that power generators install fish
ladders and adjust water flows to help salmon and trout reach
upstream spawning grounds. Al Steuter, manager of the Nature
Conservancy's 20,800-hectare (51,400-acre) Niobrara Valley
Preserve in Nebraska, hopes to demonstrate how ranchers can run
cattle on restored prairies without destroying them. After all,
he asks, "what's the point of restoration if we have to station
guards to protect the landscape?"

    By embracing humans as an integral part of nature,
restorationists are bringing a fresh perspective to the
increasingly bitter contest between those who would exploit wild
areas and those who would preserve them. Even more important,
in their heroic, often desperate struggle to recover what has
nearly been lost, they have grasped a truth many of us only
dimly comprehend: if the fate of humans depends on nature, the
fate of nature, irrevocably and irretrievably, rests in human
hands.