To conserve or restore?

With its roots in the 17th century and John Evelyn's book Sylva (ultimately concerned with ever depleting natural timber resources), to the formation of the RSPB in 1889, the National Trust in 1895, and the establishment of the Nature Conservancy in 1949 that would lead to both National Nature Reserves and the designation of SSSIs, the UK has been at the centre of the modern conservation movement since the start. I myself worked in conservation for many years.  

But we have to acknowledge that ultimately we have failed. Not that we have caused the ecological free fall that we find ourselves in, but that we have been unable to prevent it. Whilst many conservation success stories, protecting species and landscapes punctuate an otherwise relentlessly receding tide of declining biological diversity, abundance, and complexity, it would appear that to 'conserve' alone won't cut it.

 Our efforts may have been impeded as a result of shifting baseline syndrome causing us to preserve habitats and ecosystems already denuded to the point of being non-functioning, by a human or societal habit to predict and control, leading to overly simplistic outcomes and a lack of complexity, or perhaps it's just that scale of the ecological crisis is too large and the size of the snowball rolling down the hill has just been growing too quickly to stop.

Enter restoration…. I sometimes feel that the value and power of an intent to restore as apposed to conserve has been hiding in plain sight. It has only been in the last few years as I have been more emersed in natural process and ecosystem restoration that I have really started to focus on the nuanced difference.

 If conservation is to freeze a snapshot in time, to restore is to regenerate and rejuvenate, an aim to return something to its former glory. This is an ambition that feels more urgent now than ever. To successfully restore fully functioning ecosystems, gloriously complex, self-sustaining, and connected has to be our aim. For the benefit of food production, our changing climate, our own health and wellbeing, for pretty much everything that we depend on to survive, it really has to be our aim.

Perhaps one of the fundamental differences between the two approaches is how financeable they are, for years conservation efforts have been cost centres, the cost of earnestly protecting something important not matched by a monetary return. Restoration presents a real financeable opportunity. To transition a landscape or ecosystem from denuded and non-functioning to healthy and sustainable will deliver a range of saleable ecosystem services that can serve to incentivise the sort of scale and momentum of response that our current situation demands.

The answer to the title question is of course that we must do them both! To deploy a varied range of approaches and specialisms to deliver the meaningful change so desperately needed. Conservation is playing a critical role in landscape restoration across the world and the two approaches overlap and interlink a great deal.

Much like arguments between tree planting and natural regeneration, or food production versus nature recovery. There is no argument. Both must exist, both are important, both must be mindfully considered and delivered where appropriate and where possible.

 Note. This is an article intended to unite rather than divide.