The Broken Promise of Ecological Restoration

Fake herons stand by the concrete-lined Los Angeles River–a candidate for restoration to its natural state. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Not long ago in the New Jersey Meadowlands, a private company took a 235-acre chunk out of an existing 587-acre protected area and turned it into a “mitigation bank.” The company running the deal paid $6 million for a lease and $25 million for restoration work, altogether about $132,000 an acre. The work involved removing tall, dense stands of phragmites (an invasive grass), knocking down berms along the Hackensack River, cleaning up contaminated soil, and replanting with native species. The idea was to create a bank of mitigation credits for sale at a profit to developers wanting to fill wetlands elsewhere.

The project did not create a single new acre of wetlands. While it did restore stands of spartina grass and other native species, says Erik Kiviat, an ecologist with the conservation nonprofit Hudsonia Ltd., the restoration effort also turned the habitat of a rare plant into an equipment parking lot, killed the last remnant of bluejoint grass wet meadow in the region, and destroyed what had been the state’s only known habitat for a globally rare invertebrate, Mattox’s clam shrimp. Moreover, the mitigation credits for this work require the company to monitor the restored acreage for just 15 years. After that, almost anything can happen. But the wetlands being filled thanks to mitigation credits will remain filled forever.

In the public imagination, there’s always been something tantalizing about the idea that we can restore trashed ecosystems, or—as Joni Mitchell never put it—take a parking lot and put up paradise. But the reality is that too often, ecological restoration projects

Turns Out Wolves Really Do Change Rivers, After All

UPDATE FRIDAY MARCH 30: At the suggestion of a reader, I’m changing the title of this item–formerly “Maybe Wolves Don’t Change Rivers, After All” to reflect the consensus of scientific research noted in my updates before and after this article.

UPDATE MONDAY FEBRUARY 19 2018, new study supports the hypothesis that wolves have changed the character of stream-side vegetation at Yellowstone.

UPDATE SATURDAY MARCH 25 2016: PLEASE NOTE THAT ARTHUR MIDDLETON (below) and all other ecological researchers agree that reintroducing wolves to their former home range across the American West is a major benefit to wildlife and healthy habitats. It is also essential.  All this article says is that the results are not as quick or simple as some environmentalists want to believe:

The story of how wolves transformed the Yellowstone National Park landscape, beginning in the 1990s, has become a favorite lesson about the natural world.  A video recounting (above) has gone viral lately, with British writer George Monbiot re-telling the story in his best breathy David Attenborough.

The only problem,  according to field biologist Arthur Middleton, writing in today’s New York Times, is that it isn’t true.

I don’t like the NYT headline “Is the Wolf A Real American Hero?” which seems to fault the wolf for our myth making.  But otherwise, this op-ed is a good reminder that nature is almost always more complex than the stories we tell about it :

FOR a field biologist stuck in the city, the wildlife dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History are among New York’s best offerings. One recent Saturday, I paused by the display for elk, an animal I study. Like all the dioramas, this one is a great tribute. I have observed elk behavior until my face froze and stared at the data results until my eyes stung, but this scene brought back to me the graceful beauty of a tawny elk cow, grazing the autumn grasses.

As I lingered, I noticed a mother reading an interpretive panel to her daughter. It recounted how the reintroduction of wolves in the mid-1990s returned the Yellowstone ecosystem to health by limiting the grazing of elk, which are sometimes known as “wapiti” by Native Americans. “With wolves hunting and scaring wapiti from aspen groves, trees were able to grow tall enough to escape wapiti damage. And tree seedlings actually had a chance.” The songbirds came back, and so did the beavers. “Got it?” the mother asked. The enchanted little girl nodded, and they wandered on.

This story — that wolves fixed a broken Yellowstone by killing and frightening elk — is one of ecology’s most famous. It’s the classic example of what’s called a “trophic cascade,” and has appeared in textbooks, on National Geographic centerfolds and in this newspaper. Americans may know this story better than any other from ecology, and its grip on our imagination is one of the field’s proudest contributions to wildlife conservation. But there is a problem with the story: It’s not true.

We now know that elk are tougher, and Yellowstone more complex, than we gave them credit for. By retelling the same old story about Yellowstone wolves, we