Ecological restoration

Ecological restoration (ER) is based on using ecological knowledge to understand how ecosystems work and to use that understanding to recover ecosystem conditions that maintain their structure and function. A mainstream concept intertwining social and scientific roles that reflect modern scientific and public views how valuable nature is and the need for her to sustains us.

Here is an alternative definition. ER aims to recover ecosystem condition and to reflect common values and beliefs. Let’s inspire restoration in the twenty‐first century. ER is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed. (David M. Martin)

So what do we need to do to restore the environment? Let’s look at through the quadrants (integral theory Ken wilber):

• Change our feeling about the problem, our experience of it. Every individual has to get the importance of it.
• Change our behavior about it, what would make us take it serious? It has to be enforced at the beginning by laws, regulations and fines.
• Change how our culture looks at the problem of restoring the environment. We need to start shifting our values towards the direction of this cause. We are masters of marketing, surely we can sell such a noble cause 😉
• Change how the system is addressing this problem. We must put in plate the right institutions and people with adequate knowledge to lead the way.

The good part of it is that research by Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Science shows ecosystems are quiet resilient and can rebound from pollution and environmental degradation (Article). When we help nature and clean our shit up it takes much less tame than one would thing for an ecosystem to recover. It can take place within a single lifetime, even forests that take the longest need less than 50 years and the flora and fauna is recovered.

The sad truth is that most ecosystems take longer to recover from human-induced disturbances than from natural events, such as hurricanes. (Treehugger)

An interesting insight was that it appears that the rate at which an ecosystem recovers may be independent of its degraded condition: Aquatic systems may recover more quickly than, say, a forest, because the species and organisms that live in that ecosystem turn over more rapidly than in the forest. To say it simple the turnover is quicker in some environment, all of them need a few ”generations” to get back on their feet, but some generations are muck shorter that others.

Afroz Shah – check him out, he is a force of inspiration