Mendelson et al.
"Carving up the Woods: Savannah Restoration in NE Illinois"
(a critique of Steve Packard's Cap Sauers restoration project)
- Cap Sauers Rock image
- About Cap Sauers
- WHAT IS HAPPENING IN CAP SAUERS?
- Restorationists are using fire, saws, herbicide to remove understory of
native and exotic species to increase oak reproduction so as to have a
savannah (prairie with some trees)
- History of Cap Sauers area (p. 141)
- Area settled and cut 1840
- Fire suppression began
- Tall canopy trees (mainly oaks) started growing from 1840 to
1880/1900
- Today they are 100-165years old
- Grazing began around 1900 and ended around 1940
- So few trees grew during that period and so few 105-65 year
old trees today
- Since 1940, understory trees have grown (maple, young oaks,
hawthorns) due to recovery from grazing
- MENDELSON ET AL.'S OBJECTIONS:
- One: This is the wrong place for savannah restoration
- Region probably not oak savannah before European settlement
(Packard disagrees?)
- Trying to put a savannah in a woodland setting: Soil, topography,
moisture suits it for woods, not savannah
- Restorationists/managers shoving land in direction it does not
tend toward, but one they want there
- Two: What restorationists are destroying is more natural than what they are
creating
- The understory (shrub-sapling layer, including native species like
basswood, black cherry, hawthorn, maple) is a healthy recovery from
grazing, not unnatural growth that must be removed
- Mature canopy trees (oaks) not product of savannah, but of human
cutting and fire suppression
- Three: Techniques restorationists are using are unnatural (as is the
consequence--see below)
- Intensity and frequency of burns is unnatural
- Use of toxic chemicals unnatural (one should never use them in a
natural area?)
- Eradicating natives, not just human-introduced exotics
- Four: Product of this restoration effort is a human-constructed artificial
landscape
- One that reflects the values of restorers
- Resembles no natural community they are familiar with
- A museum piece; trying to freeze frame nature
- Mendelson et al. view nature as a process of becoming, as creative, and not
requiring any particular product in the area (e.g., savannah)
- Conclusions
- Frequently better to let nature regenerate on its own rather than impose our
ideas on nature
- Especially in places where vast majority of species are native and
ecosystem processes are intact
- Because of great human influence, what nature produces in an area may not
reflect what would have been there absent human influence; but this still
can be natural
- Although the "natural pattern" isn't there, what is there is a product
of natural processes and so it is natural in that sense
- QUESTIONS:
- Must restoration return to a former ecosystem state at that location?
- (If so, what time period? Remember Jared Diamond's worries.)
- Does restoration fail unless one returns the ecosystem to its pre-damaged
state or does one restore if one rehabilitates the ecosystem enough so it is
thriving again, that is, it is healthy (or biodiverse, or autonomous from
humanity)?
- Is the goal to restore the ecosystem or return it to a healthy and/or
biodiverse ecosystem of any sort?
- If one insists that restoration involves returning to a historically antecedent
state of the ecosystem
- What if no location where such an ecosystem was historically present
is suitable for restoration?
- Isn't it important to have that type of ecosystem represented
someplace (even if not in the place it originally was?)
- What about introducing a species to a place it has never been before
to preserve that species? Is this restoration? Is this a permissible
conservation strategy?
- Cherry Creek Montana restoration of Westslope Cutthroat Trout