Beth Pearson
The imagination of conservationists, ecologists and landowners is increasingly wild. Native mammals including elk, moose, beaver and wild horse could be reintroduced under proposals to replace around 800,000 hectares of British farmland with wilderness nature reserves. Animals would freely roam between large conservation areas – from Essex marshes to the remote Knoydart peninsula in Scotland – linked by ecological corridors.
This comes after the Scottish Executive considered and rejected a Scottish Natural Heritage-backed pilot scheme to reintroduce beavers, while a private landowner at Allandale in the north of Scotland is poised to go ahead with his plans to introduce tagged wolves, lynx and other native animals within electrified fencing.
The re-wilding movement is gathering pace, in part prompted by an EU habitats directive which requires member states to consider the reintroduction of native species that have become extinct as a result of human actions. Emotional associations with wilderness and the opportunity to revert to a landscape of the past, when wild horses would stampede, elk charge and beavers dam, have also played their part.
However, this Eden-like vision that simultaneously rights past human wrongs doesn't have everyone beguiled.
Dale Jamieson is professor of environmental studies and philosophy at New York University. “My main question is, what the hell do people think they're doing?” he says. “It's one thing to regret and mourn the loss of wild nature. It's another to think we can get something back through [restoration] programmes. There tend to be two things that drive them. One is nostalgia. Nostalgia is a good reason to play old Beatles records; it is not a good reason for bothering animals and changing the ecological landscape.
“The other thing is a kind of natural teleology: that what we're doing is restoring the landscape to what it ought to be. The biggest practical question about this is that given the Earth is an inherently dynamic planet, at what point were things the way they were ‘supposed' to be?”
Indeed, polar bear remains have been found in a cave in northwest Scotland, but there has – so far – been no call to reintroduce them.
Avner de-Shalit, senior lecturer in the department of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and associate fellow of the Oxford Centre for Philosophy and the Environment, agrees that projects designed to improve ecosystems assume there is an ecological ideal, and that this is a problematic concept.
“Generally speaking, there are two such ideals and they imply different policies,” says de-Shalit. “One is that an ecosystem is a community and the other is that an ecosystem is a system. The ideal of a community – just like a human community – is something that is alive, changes and develops without necessarily having a stage of ‘balance', whereas the ideal of a system is something that remains stable and is at risk once out of balance.”
It is ironic that creating an ‘ideal' ecosystem tends to involve destroying that which is already thriving. With the introduction of large mammals, for instance, the existing food chain is dramatically altered. Jamieson believes that any intervention is harmful because even if it increases biodiversity, it disrupts a fundamental ecological process.
“Much more important than the pattern of particular organisms at any given time is the process of speciation,” he says. “That's really a more legitimate target of concern. The way organisms speciate typically requires large amounts of time in isolation, and globalisation means there just isn't that kind of isolation.”
Honouring a retrospective moral duty to a past ecosystem by restoration, then, tends to conflict with any duty we may have to present or future ecosystems. Some believe that our duty to present ecosystems outweighs that to past ones. Indeed, the question of what is the correct moral attitude to ecosystems is an unresolved one and, de-Shalit believes, hangs on a fundamental distinction about humans and the environment.
“It's very difficult to answer that question without first answering another question, namely whether human beings are part of nature just like any other species,” he says. “If they are then we might see what they do ‘to' the environment as what they do ‘in' the environment, just like any other species, and therefore not necessarily as something wrong. In such cases we need not try to improve anything. If however humans are not like any other species, because, for example, they transform nature, then we might need to protect the environment from human beings.”
Restoration programmes, implicitly at least, adhere to the latter interpretation in a way that appears to combine the moral duties of humans and the moral value of the environment. In terms of the history of environmental philosophy, this is a rather modern thing to do.
“Before environmental ethics emerged as a legitimate field in philosophy, ethics was dominated by anthropocentrism,” says de-Shalit. “The antithesis emerged, with radical biocentrism and claims about liberalism, humanism and the Enlightenment being responsible for the demolition of the environment. The synthesis is an ethics for protecting the environment which acknowledges the achievements of liberalism, humanism and the Enlightenment alongside acknowledging that side by side with our moral duties to the environment we have other obligations to human beings.”
However, Jamieson thinks restoration programmes are fundamentally anthropocentric and as such reverse any progress made in environmental ethics. “There's a kind of unreflective naïveté people have about these things,” he says. “Among environmentalists and ecologists there's this Messianic enthusiasm for ecological restoration that there was a century ago when people wanted to make the deserts bloom. The problem is the Promethean ambition that we have the capacity to be the agents for making the world the way it ‘ought' to be. It's a little like saying the problem with Communism and fascism was the ideals and not the wholesale attempts to remake society. We should worry about attempts to remake society. We can't restore, at the macro level, the nature we've lost any more than we can return North America to the days when native American cultures thrived before white contact. There's a lesson here for the need for modesty.”
De-Shalit believes a similarly moderate position can be reached if we accept that our duties to fellow humans can outweigh our duty to the environment. “Suppose that in order to create a coal mine in south Wales we damaged an ecosystem there,” he says. “However, we managed to find work for a community of 10,000 people. Surely we cannot say that there was nothing that justified damaging this ecosystem. The obligation is not past-orientated because what we did was prima facie not necessarily wrong.
“It seems to me, prima facie, that if we have nature in mind – if we want to correct ourselves and be eco- rather than anthropocentric – we should not restore the ecosystem but let the current one flourish. However, I do acknowledge that we do have an obligation to restore particular species, even regardless of our nostalgia, for nature's sake.”
For Jamieson, only one species gets through the chink in his unsentimental armour. “I'd rather use the word passionate than sentimental,” he says. “But I have a straight sentimental attachment to elephants. Part of that is because they're the world's largest vegetarians. I'm one of the smaller ones.”
Beth Pearson is a feature writer and columnist for the Herald
