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What can be done to restore the Everglades? Part of the answer is that if a dependable flow of relatively clean water is once again made available, damage can be slowed or halted in the central part of the remaining Everglades, and natural recovery will be given a chance. The State of Florida has already spent a vast amount of money to achieve this, with preliminary success, and the federal government has promised to spend more. But it would be foolish to expect that the existing phosphate and mercury will have no lingering effects, the exotic animals and plants will all be controlled, that human population on the park’s eastern border will cause no further changes, or even that the rapidly rising sea level can somehow be completely contained.
It is harder to achieve environmental restoration in some places than in others. In the remaining intact areas of the peatlands of Canada and northern Europe and the rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo, and Australia, preservation is still an option but extensive restoration is not likely in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, restoration is thriving in urban areas, with the replacement of brownfields and concrete deserts by parks and gardens. Wetland and prairie restoration is an exciting new science with many success stories. Some endangered species – the peregrine falcon, the wolf, and the Costa Rican nesting population of green sea turtles – have responded dramatically to restoration efforts. The mixed deciduous forests of New England recover most of their species and much of their beauty a mere 50-75 years after cutting, with minimal management on our part. Even in New England, however, new diseases and pests introduced by human activity – gypsy moths, sudden oak decline, beech bark disease, emerald ash borers, hemlock wooly adelgids – may make restoration to the “original” forest impossible.
Environmental restoration is vitally necessary, and it deserves a far greater commitment of resources and effort than it is getting. But we have to guard against unrealistic assumptions about what it is possible for a restoration to do. In any particular restoration, everyone should decide at the outset what an acceptable end result will be – not necessarily a carbon copy of what was once there. Restoring processes, such as proper water flow in the Everglades, is likely to be easier and faster to achieve than restoration of the original species composition and ecosystem structure. Given enough time, an acceptable plant and animal community will follow the repair of ecosystem processes, but there is a good chance that it will not be exactly like the original one. Appreciate it for what it is. |
