Environmental Activists Shifting From Preservation to Restoration

Ever since the beginnings of the modern environmental movement, activists have focused their attention on preserving what remained of America’s untouched wilderness and regulating activities that may pose further threats.

Through the leadership of figures such as John Muir, David Brower and Rachel Carson, preserving the majesty of the Sierra, saving the Grand Canyon from dam builders and regulating the use of pesticides became not only popular causes, but helped to fix an environmental ethic in the law.

Now, after a national conference that attracted 800 participants and ended here Saturday, many of the nation’s leading environmentalists as well as a smattering of academicians, scientists, labor leaders and corporate officials said they believe that the beginning of a new phase in environmental activism is at hand--one that moves beyond protecting remaining pristine areas to reclaiming those that have been lost.

The four-day “Restoring the Earth” conference at the University of California represented what organizers said was the first time that restoration has been viewed so comprehensively.

“We have a movement here, not just isolated, unrelated activity. An epochal development has begun,” said John J. Berger, author and the chief organizer of the conference.

‘Ecological Health’

“For the first time in human history, masses of people now realize not only that we can and must stop abusing the Earth, but that we also must restore it to ecological health. . . . The same intelligence and energy and ingenuity with which humanity subdued the Earth is needed now to heal it,” the author of the 1985 book “Restoring the Earth” and executive director of the nonprofit Restoring the Earth organization here told the conference.

If the call to action takes hold, the fledgling restoration movement could portend a reordering of the environmental agenda. Participants said they expect calls not only for increased government spending to restore nature’s heritage where possible, but stepped-up challenges to practices and industrial processes that pollute.

Participants noted that clean air cannot be restored until emissions of pollutants are stopped. Land cannot be reclaimed so long as toxics continue to be dumped.

“As the movement matures, we’ll get to stopping the causes that require the restoration,” said Meca Wawona, director of New Growth Forestry, a forest workers cooperative in Ukiah.

Perhaps nowhere are the efforts of restorationists more apparent than the years-long battle to restore the Tijuana River estuary near the Mexican border.

Described as the largest in Southern California, the 600-acre estuary was being degraded by raw sewage from Mexico, and with it the habitat for thousands of birds, including the endangered Light Footed Clapper. Over the years, the Southwest Wetlands Interpretive Assn. persuaded the federal government to declare the estuary a national research reserve. Today, wildlife continues to thrive.

To be sure, there have long been restoration efforts. Land trusts and organizations such as the Nature Conservancy, the California Coastal Conservancy and Save the Redwoods League have raised public and private funds to buy and restore land with unrivaled beauty and ecological importance.

Isolated Events

But conferees said that such projects have often been isolated events. Most often, they were undertaken for aesthetic reasons. At times they did not take into account the larger biosystem or even help it.

For four days, participants attended dozens of work shops and examined 150 scientific papers aimed at better understanding natural processes and ecosystems. Such knowledge, they said, is essential before a successful restoration plan could be advanced and win political and financial support.

“For the environmental movement this kind of knowledge is necessary to build any kind of political movement,” observed Carl Pope, deputy conservation director of the Sierra Club. “We’re a very data-driven movement and the whole restoration concept, which in the abstract has enormous political and moral power for people, hasn’t had much impact in the world because it didn’t have much data behind it.”

‘Important Conceptual Work’

William R. Jordan III of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum called the conference “the first Olympiad of the restoration movement.”

“I think it’s (restoration) the most important conceptual work being done right now for the environmental movement,” said Steve Rauh of the Earth Island Institute and editor of a Sierra Club publication. “If John Muir were around, this would be it for him.”

Not all environmentalists are prepared to make a sweeping assessment of the immediate impact of restorative politics. Several, including Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Fischer, pointedly reminded conferees that saving pristine areas must come before restoration of the 90% of the environment that participants said has been lost or degraded.

Brower, one of the early leaders of the Sierra Club and perhaps the best-known environmentalist present, added: “You cannot restore lost species. We cannot restore the wilderness. We can only preserve it.”

‘License to Kill’

Others feared restoration could become “a license to kill” for industrial polluters who would justify degrading the environment by promising restoration later. And Al Lannon, president of Local 6 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, said building politically influential coalitions to wrest significant commitments and money from government would be difficult.

Another formidable challenge involves raising the funds for large and small ecosystem restorations. For example, the federal Superfund program calls for spending $8.5 billion to clean up toxic waste sites during the next five years. The cost of tearing down the O’Shaughnessy Dam, completed in 1923, and draining Yosemite’s flooded Hetch Hetchy Valley, as suggested by Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel, has been estimated as high as $6 billion.

Others warned that restorations can take decades, even a century or more, to be successful. They asked if environmentalists and others had the staying power to follow through.

Nonetheless, Fischer, Brower and leaders of the Environmental Policy Institute, Earth First!, Earth Island Institute, the Environmental Defense Fund and such conference keynoters as former Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall said restoration was coming of age.

‘Thousands of Small Things’

“This is the narrow end of the wedge that has to become quite large before the end of the century,” Fischer said.

If the restoration movement catches on, emphasis will be placed on smaller projects. “We won’t do the few big things as we did in the 1960s. We’ll do thousands of small things,” Udall said in an interview.

Such small restoration projects would be given priority depending on how they related to the larger ecosystem.

“Think globally and act locally,” said Marion Stoddart, founder of the Nashua River Watershed Assn. in Massachusetts.

Some, such as Tom Graff, senior attorney of the Environmental Defense Fund, said a restoration movement could be a membership boon to environmental organizations. “I do think there’s an energy to being involved in building something.”

Upsurge in Restoration

Berger cited environmental problems of “unprecedented scope and severity” for what he sees as an upsurge in restoration.

“In a twinkling, through extinctions and habitat loss, the results of millions of years of evolution are being wiped out,” he said.

He said carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are being raised by the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of tropical rain forests and other plant life that absorb the gas. In only a few decades, he said, global temperatures may rise several degrees, precipitating the melting of polar ice caps, coastal flooding and disrupting agriculture.

Behind the restoration movement, conferees said, is a litany of environmental horror stories: One-fifth of all species on Earth are threatened by the cutting of tropical forests. In Africa, the desert is expanding and hunger rampant. The protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere that shields humans from ultraviolet rays that can cause skin cancer and cataracts is under assault from man-made chemicals. In the spring, the ozone hole over Antarctica is the size of a continent. There are more than 20,000 toxic waste dumps in the United States, many contaminating ground water, while traces of pesticides are found in human breast milk and body fat.

Impassioned Exhortation

In what was clearly the most impassioned exhortation of the conference, Dave Foreman, co-founder of the radical Earth First! organization, which has engaged in civil disobedience to block lumber operations, called for restoring the wild--but not because humans need recreation or appreciate beauty.

“It’s a question of survival. Not survival for human beings, merely. But survival for evolution, for the whole globe, for process. It’s madness we’re in right now. We’ve got to confront that. . . .

“We are in an unimaginable crisis. It’s a crisis that in our natural lifetimes we are going to see unthinkable things. We have already seen unthinkable things. . . . The destruction of 60 million bison, the destruction of several billion passenger pigeons, the destruction of the jaguar, the grizzly in California. . . .

“It’s not enough to save the remaining 10% of wilderness that remains. . . . It’s time to restore it, to take back.”