Our Once and Future Planet by Paddy Woodworth;

Author:Paddy Woodworth; [Woodworth, Paddy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226081465
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

22. At home in nature, nature at home. Winnie Hallwachs with Espinita, a prehensile-tailed porcupine she and Dan Janzen adopted and reared after they found it orphaned in 1995. The couple also keeps open house for bats, a boa constrictor, and tarantulas, none of them adopted, in their home in the restored dry tropical forest of the Área de Conservación Guanacaste in Costa Rica (Photograph courtesy of Erick Greene.)

A friend has advised me to bring the gift of a large watermelon. I almost discounted his counsel, because it seems like bringing snow to Eskimos in this land of endless fruit stalls. But it is received by both of them with pleasure and laughter, and becomes the ceremonial centerpiece for a sunset picnic deep in the park a couple of days later. And then, without further ado, we are down to brass tacks:

What’s the problem, I ask, with the word “restoration”?

“You don’t set out to restore,” he tells me. “You set out saying, ‘I’m going to conserve the things that still live here, keep them alive and on the table.’ And in the act of doing so, because you are no longer burning or cutting or shooting or hunting, then they themselves go to work and reconstruct some sort of wild area, which maybe, if there were no climate change, a thousand years ago from now might look pretty similar to what was here before the Europeans arrived. Now you can label that ‘restoration,’ and I probably have, on many occasions in the past, because whoever was paying the bill, whether a government or private donor, wanted to label it that way, because it was the fashionable catchword that came on . . . but the goal was conservation in the first place.”

I still find it hard to pin down the precise source of Janzen’s reluctance to accept the restoration label today, at least as a subset of conservation.17 But it may have its roots in two related aspects of his long experience in Costa Rica. One is the hostility to restoration he experienced from conservationists and conservation funders in the 1980s; the other is the resilience and recuperative capacity of dry tropical forest, the ecosystem that has been, at least until quite recently, the focus of his work, and which, in the special conditions of Santa Rosa, made restoration seem like little more than natural succession. Both aspects shed some light on key restoration issues.

Janzen experienced the once-widespread hostility to restoration when he made an early funding pitch at a conference in Washington in the mid-1980s: “In all innocence, I went in and said that we want to buy all this trashed forest and nearly dead ecosystem, and we can grow it back. I expected general agreement and happiness, and I got dead silence and a lot of glum-looking people. I had no idea what I had stepped into. I was at right angles to their mantra. The mantra of organizations like The Nature Conservancy at the time was: ‘what is cut down is lost and gone forever, so you had better give us the money to preserve it now.

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