Learning How To Revive the Wilds of Eden

By J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago

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 Planterose, 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.

With reporting by Andrea Dorfman/Washington, with other bureaus