Despite the measures put in place to try to safeguard Europe’s natural ecosystems, biodiversity is still declining. Based on this evidence, the European Parliament decided to go one step further and last July passed a regulation obliging Member States to act in favour of nature restoration.
However, as the authors of this article point out, this notion of « restoration » or the approaches it implies have not been specified. And yet it is crucial! What state should we go back to? Initial, or at least previous? Taking into account which animal or plant species? According to whether they have suffered more or less from human actions? What criteria should be taken into account to qualify the restoration as a success or failure? Let’s also think about the limits of restoration: depending on the role played by humans and their activities in the natural environment, should we return to a state where humans are totally excluded?
There are a number of questions that suggest that restoration may be idealistic in certain types of environment that have been heavily impacted (mining, marshes, etc.) and that what is needed is « ecological remediation », which is less idealistic about a past that may not have been any better. By providing a response to weakened ecosystems, this concept invites us to create new ecological mediations and to consider what is important to conserve and what is not. It allows us to question ourselves, to take into account the degraded situation as a starting point, and not an ideal situation as a point of arrival. For example, planting trees on soil that has been eroded and made sterile by farming is certainly a restoration operation, but its inefficiency has already been demonstrated.
This debate is not just about semantics, but also about reconsidering our relationship with nature. Restoration, in the sense of controlling a backward slide to the past, to an initial situation from which we could continue to produce and exploit. Or remediation, in the sense of healing and repairing, by reinventing the links between human activities and ecosystems.