Between the
21: st and 23: rd of April the Conservation and Restoration research group at
the department of Plant Ecology at Warsaw University hosted the Society for
Ecological Restorations workshop on fen restoration. Many prominent experts on
peatland vegetation and peatland restoration were key-note speakers at the work-shop.
There were
many interesting talks, but I am here going to focus on two debates that occurred:
·
Does
resilience have any value for peatland restoration?
·
Should
scientists actively engage in influencing policy, or just present the facts?
Resilience
thinking has had a profound influence on ecology during the last years. For restoration,
restoring for resilience would mean that we perform a restoration action that
creates a resilient system that does not need any further funding in terms of maintenance.
For fen restoration the problem is that the restored system is in most cases
not resilient, but in a state that is somewhere between the degraded state and
the natural state. Left alone it will often revert back to a more degraded
state.
On the
contrary a heavily degraded fen is often very resilient (which is the very
reason why fen restoration is so hard).
Richard
Hobbs has stated that resilience brings ”conceptual muddling”. Personally I am
not sure it is so unclear what is referred to, but it´s questionable how useful
resilience is in terms of fen restoration. There are definitely natural peatlands
that are resilient. Bogs are resilient, whereas a fen can easily switch into a
bog once Sphagnum starts to drive the rich fen-poor fen-bog transformation. If a
resilient system was the aim, you may very well end up arguing that a species
poor bog is better than a rich fen.
The debate
about whether or not scientists should use their knowledge to influence policy
even if it means compromising surprised me. For me it is very clear that
scientists have a moral duty to the tax payers who fund them, and to future
generations, to make the scientific knowledge clear to policy makers, and yes
we will have to accept that sometimes compromises are necessary. One speaker at
the work-shop was however very much against this idea and stated ”Our job as
scientist is to tell the truth, not to explain things to idiots”. There are indeed plenty of stupid politicians,
and it is understandable that some scientists would rather do research and
teach students than engage in year-long struggles to make the scientific
knowledge useful for the society at large.
Where would
we be if it wasn´t for scientists who never gave up “explaining things to
idiots”?
If it
wasn´t for James Hansen´s long work with making the scientific findings of
climate-science reach further than the readers of a journal, we would still be
at the state were knowledge about global warming would be very limited among
the public.
If it
wasn´t for peatland scientists in Poland and other Europeans nations who fought
for more than 10 years to save the Rospuda valley, many of them spending nights
sleeping in the trees to prevent the destruction, the Rospuda valleys fens
would not have been saved. Instead of a large fen in a natural state, there
would be a highway cutting through the fen, with pillars driven through the
several meter thick waterlogged peat, running the risk of severe drainage with
subsequent biodiversity loss and massive release of stored carbon.
These two
examples illustrate painful struggles that in the end have reached important
victories, giving tax payers the best value for the research that they have
funded. In the real world, the rule “no pain – no gain” is often a rule we have
to accept.
