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Appleseed — restoration and resonance

2024; Elsevier BV; Volume: 34; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.cub.2024.04.011

1879-0445

Florian Maderspacher,

Plant Ecology and Soil Science

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."— Václav Havel One of my childhood heroes was an avuncular man by the impeccably Germanic name of Hoimar von Ditfurth. A staple of 1970s and 1980s TV, he was a prolific popularizer of science, a kind of German Carl Sagan (minus the looks and charm). In 1985, von Ditfurth authored a somber litany of the existential threats faced by humanity — from nuclear annihilation to environmental destruction — and assessed our species' inability to avert these threats. His conclusion: we are doomed. Entitled "So lasst uns denn ein Apfelbäumchen pflanzen. Es ist soweit." (so let us then plant a little apple tree, the time has come), the book was a bestseller — German Angst in paperback. The title nods to an alleged quote by Renaissance religious reformer Martin Luther, which translates as: "If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant an apple tree today." A defiant, hopeful message, for sure, but only there to make clear the apocalypse is nigh. Four decades on, the world has not ended — something anti-environment trolls never tire to point out — but, boy, what progress we've made! In 1985, atmospheric CO2 was 20% lower than today's record highs: one in three human-released CO2 molecules have entered the atmosphere since then. As a consequence, temperature curves are off the charts, in air as they are in water. Over the past year, global sea surface temperatures set a record every single day. The hyper-energized atmosphere and ocean are fueling floods, fires and droughts that threaten human livelihood everywhere. Meanwhile, fossil fuel extraction, the root cause of this mess, is at an all-time high — a fact celebrated by a supposedly pro-environment government in the US. Global ecocide, intensified by climate change, is devastating ecosystems of systemic importance to the biosphere and to human survival, like tropical forests or coral reefs. All of this plays out against the backdrop of increasingly fractured societies, an international order succumbing to the 'right of the stronger', raging wars, and rising right-wing populist movements that dismiss environmental catastrophe as a hoax, a conspiracy — and in reality embrace it as a welcome tool for their politics of cruelty and dehumanization. This, then, is a time for hope. Hope in the sense of the above quote by Václav Havel, of doing something because it makes sense in itself, no matter the outcome. For our global ecological crisis, that hope is restoration whose placement on the political agenda and implementation at scale is the objective of the twenties being designated the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. The science of restoration — its ecological underpinnings as well as its different objectives and real-world settings — is the theme of the reviews, essays and primers in this special issue of Current Biology. Finding hope amidst all the doom can be daunting, not least because its incarnations can be hard to recognize. Hope can sometimes look messy, like the mesh of sticks, the half-gnawed trees and pointy stumps that now dot the edges of many streams I used to fish in as a kid; wood chips on the ground evoke the village woodcarving workshops I used to haunt. This is the work of beavers, whose forceful comeback — in my Bavarian homeland (see photos), as elsewhere in Europe and the US — is a restoration success story. Beavers are paradoxical beasts: their work appears destructive, mimicking our penchant for tree-felling, yet it benefits the wider ecosystem, far transcending their immediate range of action. This is because their ecosystem-engineering changes the flow of water through landscapes. Freshwater ecosystems are in dire need of restoration, especially in densely populated and polluted parts of the world, like Central Europe, where heavy intake of chemicals and nutrients from industry and agriculture harms water health. Streams were contained and dammed for flood mitigation or hydropower, transforming flow regimes. With so few natural streams remaining, our perceptive baselines have shifted, making signs of decay — like those of hope — hard to decipher. As their effects resonate through the ecosystem, beavers are effective agents of restoration. By damming streams, they slow flows, reducing erosion and sediment run-off, as well as dampening the effects of flash floods, bound to be more common in a changed climate. Damming raises the water table in adjacent forests or meadows, boosting plant growth and drought resistance. Wetter woodlands are less likely to burn, and wetter wetlands can store more carbon. More plant growth means more habitat and more species: more perches and hideouts, more fish and insects, more food for birds and other predators. Beaver-enriched ecosystems, with more diverse structures and components, tend to function better and are more resilient. Because water is so vital, the changes wrought by beavers inevitably impinge on the human economic and cultural ecosystem: trees of aesthetic value may get destroyed, paths flooded and wetter fields harder to farm. Such problems often get more airtime in public discourse on beavers than their ecosystem benefits. It is not uncommon to see beaver dams being vandalized and beavers even killed. How we deal with beavers is liable to expose weaknesses in the fabric of our human ecosystem. Our efficiency-focused and heavily mechanized farming is less able to cope with beaver disruption. Farmers, incentivized by immediate profits, fail to account for the ecosystem-scale benefits and emphasize conflict. The messy operations of beavers may run counter to cultural preferences for a neat and tidy, park-like version of nature, challenging perceived human dominion over nature. Instead of perpetuating conflict about beavers along the same old lines — as between farmers and environmentalists — we need to take an ecosystem-wide view, aligning our incentive systems around the realization that as we share the benefits of beavers, we need to share the costs as well. Outsourcing restoration to a natural restorer — however efficient — is not enough though: the human ecosystem needs to co-adapt. Curiously, Martin Luther never actually said anything about planting an apple tree on the day before the end of the world, but the sentiment behind it nonetheless captures the spirit of restoration. With its prefix 're-', restoration is often misinterpreted as facing backward, reverting to a lost state, but that is not at all the spirit of restoration properly conceived. Restoration differs from approaches like conservation or sustainability, which have their own merits but aim to preserve or accommodate things as they are, instead of actively shaping ecosystems for the future. Restoration also differs from the lofty ambitions of eco-modernism or techno-optimism by being grounded in the realities of ecosystem science. Planting — of apple trees or otherwise — is the quintessential act of restoration and a common element of virtually all its incarnations. Biologically, this makes perfect sense, as plants are the ultimate foundation species. They are the entry point of energy into ecosystems. Providing food and habitat, they form the scaffold for other species to build on and thrive. They are adaptable and self-sustaining. And when they die, they decompose into nourishing soil. Planting has become so synonymous with restoration that many see it as a kind of panacea to all our problems, not least because it is easy to do and scale up. The proverbial apple tree reminds us that we depend on nature and that its cultivation benefits nature and humans without destruction. Planting requires planters, agents of restoration, who are themselves affected by their restorative acts. This human feedback has the potential to make restoration a more transformative and wholesome approach to the environmental crisis. Planting is powerful, because it imparts a sense of agency and empowerment, with impacts that may outlive the planters. Restoration has the potential to engage humans at all levels, in planning and decision-making, but also as hands-on agents of restoration, as stewards and care-takers. Active human engagement sets restoration apart from classic conservation approaches, many of which operate under the belief that nature thrives best when humans stay out. While certainly apt in many settings, this runs the danger of deepening the divide between humans and nature. Many restorative approaches, by contrast, build on the notion that human stewardship can be beneficial for ecosystem health. Examples of such effects are plentiful — from agroforestry that supports biodiversity to human-made clam gardens that structure and support coastal ecosystems. In my Bavarian home, for instance, alpine meadows created historically for hay-making support a higher diversity of rare plants and insects than uncultivated woodlands. In this human dimension may lie the greatest potential and power of restoration — not only restoring natural ecosystems and their vital functions, but also restoring our connection to nature and ultimately our human social ecosystems. As we knew about the existential threats of environmental destruction in 1985, why haven't we done better? This question rings deeply personal, as my generation grew up fully aware of the impending crisis — thanks to the likes of Sagan or von Ditfurth — yet we failed to avert it. The reasons are complex, ranging from the psychological to the political: human inertia and the collective action problem, disinformation from the fossil-fuel industrial complex, abetted by corrupt and greedy politicians doing its bidding, and the neoliberal ideology of free markets fixing everything that was force-fed to Western societies. A more profound reason for our failure may be the experience of a lack of individual agency, the sense that our actions have few, if any, impact on the complex maze of global problems. In the context of the wicked problem of climate change, for instance, it is virtually impossible to pinpoint whether a flight not taken or a steak not eaten have any measurable effect. Such actions only matter when taken by many others, whose behavior is likewise beyond our control. Even if we act successfully, the best possible outcome is a future disaster never materializing. All this limits incentive and reward for individual action. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa coined the concept of 'resonance' for the rewarding feeling that our actions have tangible, real-world consequences. According to Rosa, resonance is one of the key existential motivators of human culture. Active participation in restoration — say, helping replant an abandoned industrial yard — may offer that kind of resonance. Not only are the fruits of one's labor immediately visible, they may persist for years to come and create a longer local bond as the project matures. This human resonance — the reward of doing something that "makes sense" — is an added benefit to the ecological aims of restoration. While leaving the individual frustratingly powerless, world-wide Western capitalist culture has created a social, economic and cultural ecosystem that is wreaking havoc on the biosphere we all depend on. The term 'ecosystem' may apply to the human sphere beyond mere metaphor. Much like energy and nutrients flow through biological networks of interactions between species, human ecosystems can be described as flows of power, agency, wealth or information. Money is transferred between economic actors, or agency from an employee to their employer, just as energy and nutrients are transferred from prey to predator. Much like natural ecosystems, socio-cultural ecosystems support many different functions: ensuring safety and material stability, creating cultural cohesion and a sense of purpose for human life. Despite full awareness of its extent, we have been unable to move the needle on our existential environmental crisis in any meaningful way. This suggests that the current human ecosystem is malfunctioning and uncoupled from natural ecosystems. Much like their natural counterparts, human ecosystems have become deformed and degraded: deformed by being increasingly tailored to a single purpose, the generation of wealth, and degraded by an extractive and destructive economy that needs us primarily as consumers but otherwise disempowers us. The cooperative nature of many traditional human communities has given way to rugged individualism. The distribution of economic and political power has become ever less equitable. The flow of information through our ecosystem has been equally degraded, evident by rampant disinformation and a wide-spread erosion of trust — trust in public institutions, in science and, most devastatingly, in the humanity and good intention of other humans, especially outside one's own particular socio-ecological guild. Our socio-cultural ecosystems are as much in need of restoration as our degraded natural ecosystems. Two restoration objectives stand out: equality and diversity. In addition to ethical concerns, the rising economic inequality in many societies also affects the functioning of the human ecosystem. Economic inequality all too often translates into an exclusion from agency and power, thus reducing the number of actively participating components in the human ecosystem. From ecology, however, we know that systems with fewer components are less adaptable and more sensitive to disruption. Diversity entails the realization that there are many different ways of organizing a human society, ways much more diverse than our prevailing capitalist monoculture suggests. Indigenous people, whose knowledge and practices are increasingly recognized in restorative approaches, have a lot to teach us in this regard. Indigenous cultures — past and present — reveal that diverse and flexible forms of human social organization are possible, beyond our societies that view themselves as the quasi-natural be-all and end-all of human civilization. We can only save the ecosystems we depend on for our survival, if our economic, social and cultural ecosystems change and evolve. If restoration is our last and best hope, where, then, should we plant the proverbial appleseed of restoration? Restoration can start as simply and as immediately as stripping out the lawn in your own yard (or a public 'green' space in need of restoration). Lawns embody much of what is wrong with our perspective on nature. Borne out of the aesthetic of the archetypical English country landscape of meadows dotted with trees and woods, they are a bonsai-version of nature that can be rolled out almost anywhere (not unlike the colonial fabric of the British Empire). Lawns are controlled, sterile and clean, an antithesis to nature's wild productivity, creating a verdant illusion, greenwashing spaces that are essentially dead. Ironically, natural grasslands are among the most threatened biomes, not least by the spread of residential development. Individual lawns may seem insignificant, but combined they cover two percent of the continental US, nearly the size of all national parks in the lower 48 states. Lawns are gigantic guzzlers of water, fertilizers, herbicides and fossil fuels. Noisy lawn maintenance crews are the soundtrack of suburban summers, contributing 5% of nationwide air pollution. Lawns are ecological dead zones, monocultures of a handful of species of grass, many of which are ill-adapted to their site of deployment. There is no plant or animal diversity to speak of, nothing to see, hear or smell, no movement and no change. Lawns create a false sense of permanence. So, much like with the beaver's work, restoration begins with disruption. Replanting lawn space with structured communities of native grasses, wildflowers and shrubs brings benefits to biology and beyond. Wild meadows attract important pollinators and support beneficial predators. Structured plantings provide habitat and can absorb rainwater better. They may provide heat mitigation and even aid in the conservation of endangered plants. As plants become established and self-propagate, maintenance costs drop significantly. But most essential are probably the benefits such restored habitats can have for human ecology. Designing and implementing a restorative planting involves learning about the local habitat and its suitable native plants. It involves creativity, combining plants of different shapes, bloom times and colors. A wild urban planting creates a place of interest: instead of a monotonous green carpet, different flowers, blooming at different times, attract a diversity of showy insects, like bumblebees or butterflies, often with striking behaviors. Observing the newly sprung wilderness may spark curiosity and conversation. With the seasons, the restored urban landscapes change dramatically, betraying the impermanence of life itself. Planning, implementing and caring for a restorative planting can nucleate a local community and inspire a greater sense of belonging and agency, as well as a different perspective on nature — not as the stuff of TV documentaries, but as living reality right at your doorstep. It is important that such projects not just benefit those already privileged, but instead spread particularly into economically underprivileged areas whose inhabitants already feel the impacts of urban ecological degradation much harder. Much like the beavers damming, restoration, even when as simple as replacing lawn with native plants, can have wide-ranging effects that resonate through biological and human ecosystems alike. Effects, not only on plants and pollinators, but also on the restorers, their understanding of nature, their connection to it and to each other, re-empowering a sense of agency, or resonance: that our actions can and do matter, if only on a few square feet of Earth. The confidence that something can grow. The certainty that something makes sense. Let us plant! Es ist soweit.