goal of dominating or controlling nature, instead foster a harmonious and cooperative relation between humans and nature. Yet another criticism, advanced by Hourdequin and Havlick (2013), is that Elliott and Katz’s basic assumption about what restoration is – the attempt to recreate a clearly delimited portion of wild nature – does not, in the context of increasingly hybrid (i.e. natural and cultural) landscapes, well describe most restoration activities. This criticism ties in with increased recognition that the identification of nature with wilderness characteristic of much North American environmental philosophy is ill suited to a European context characterized by significant long‐term interactions between humans and nature (Eden 2006). Drawing above all on this third response to the arguments of Light and Katz, this contribution will seek to answer two key research questions about the ethics of river restoration.
1 What are the ethically significant challenges of river restoration?
2 Is it possible to put forward an ethics of river restoration capable of responding appropriately to these challenges?
In responding to these questions, I argue that the challenges of river restoration are such that it cannot be carried out in isolation but must instead be integrated as one component within a broader approach, the central concept of which is “imitating nature,” or biomimicry. In short, I argue that river restoration is one form of biomimicry among many and must be articulated with other instances of biomimicry if it is to be genuinely successful. This in turn implies a need to go beyond both the preservationist and restorationist paradigms in environmental philosophy and to integrate ecological restoration within a new “imitationist” paradigm, which, I further argue, requires the development of a new approach to environmental ethics.
2.2 Three challenges of river restoration
As noted in Section 2.1, the case discussed by Elliott (1982) at the outset of “Faking Nature” is that of a mining company using the argument that a perfect or near‐perfect reconstruction of an ecosystem is possible to justify the almost total destruction of the ecosystem in the present. In this case, it seems reasonable to say that the restored ecosystem will in many respects be a human artefact, for it will have been designed and put together by human beings on a now barren landscape, albeit on the basis of a model provided by nature. But not all ecological restorations fit this pattern. In the case where restoration consists only of reintroducing a lost species, for example, it is far less clear that the resulting ecosystem counts as an artefact. Likewise, there are forms of restoration in which human intervention is conceived and practiced as merely complementing or accelerating natural processes of self‐regeneration, in which case it is again far from clear that the resulting ecosystem is an artefact (Palmer et al. 1997). In response to objections such as these, Katz (2012) argues that ecological restorations always sit somewhere on a continuum. In some cases, where human intervention is maximal, as in the case of restoration after strip‐mining or the displacement and reconstruction of a river section, the resulting ecosystem is largely artificial. In other cases, where human intervention is minimal, as is the case when volunteers remove garbage from a local stream, the resulting ecosystem remains largely natural. In every case, however, Katz insists that the act of restoration introduces an element of artificiality and a corresponding loss of naturalness, and therewith also of value.
But even if one accepts the idea of a continuum of more or less natural restorations, Elliott and Katz’s basic assumption about what restoration is – the attempt to reconstruct a clearly delimited portion of wild nature – does not fit well with typical cases of river restoration. Indeed, there are three key attributes of river restoration that set it apart from the paradigmatic cases discussed by Elliott and Katz and which together give rise to what I consider the three most ethically significant challenges of river restoration.
2.2.1 Challenge 1: the connectedness of rivers
The first challenge pertains to the fact that rivers are not easy to isolate from the ecosystems that surround them. Of course, one can easily identify the channel of the river, as well as the banks, but it is in the nature of rivers to flow from their source to the sea, while at the same time receiving water from other channels. The river, in other words, cannot be easily separated either from its watershed or from the receiving body of water into which it flows. This in turn has huge significance for restoration projects. If a river is polluted or subject to problematic flooding as a result of agricultural, industrial, or urban runoff, then focusing only on restoring the main channel may prove ineffective (Bernhardt and Palmer 2007). In this respect, the situation would appear to be quite different from the restoration of a portion of wild forest following an isolated mining operation. Moreover, it is interesting in this context to consider a thought experiment suggested by Elliott (1997), in which we are asked to imagine two apparently identical islands, the first of which is natural, and the second of which has been constructed by environmental engineers. Elliott’s claim is that the value of the former exceeds that of the latter, for the latter is a fake. Whatever one may think of this argument, it is clear that a basic presupposition of the thought experiment is that the thing being restored is radically cut off from the rest of nature, like a painting whose frame demarcates it from the rest of the world. But the static island – cut off and framed by the surrounding ocean – is in this respect almost the exact opposite of the fluid river, intricately connected to its surrounding ecosystems.1
2.2.2 Challenge 2: human habitation
A second challenge of river restoration concerns human habitation. In the examples discussed by Elliott and Katz, it is supposed that what is to be restored is an isolated fragment of wilderness. In the case of mining operations, this will often be the case, for valuable mineral deposits are often located far from human civilization in areas of more or less untouched wilderness. Similarly, the two islands of Elliott’s thought experiment are clearly desert islands. In most cases, however, river restorations will not be of wild rivers that have been temporarily destroyed or degraded but could in theory be fully restored to their wild state, for permanent human settlement – in the form of agriculture, industry, cities, and so on – will typically have established itself along the banks and in the surrounding catchment area, a situation that significantly affects restoration projects on such rivers as the Cole, the Brent, and the Alt in the United Kingdom (Eden et al. 2000; Eden 2006). When combined with the first key attribute of rivers – their connectedness to the surrounding watershed – this will typically make the idea of restoring them to a wild state completely out of the question (Eden et al. 2000; Eden 2006).
2.2.3 Challenge 3: multiple stakeholders
This brings us to a third important challenge: rivers often constitute focal points for human activity, such that their use and degradation – and potentially also their restoration – involves a multiplicity of different actors. So, whereas in other cases – especially the paradigmatic instances of “malicious restorations” criticized by Light (2000, p. 98) – the destruction or degradation of the original ecosystem is the result of one party, acting for one purpose, over one specific period of time, in the case of rivers there will often be a multiplicity of parties using and degrading the river in a large number of ways, for a large number of reasons, and over extended and ill‐defined periods of time, as is perhaps most obviously the case regarding such large and historically important rivers as the Ganges in India or the Yangtze in China. With this in mind, it is also instructive to consider the defense put forward by Light and Higgs (1996, p. 236) of restoration as having an “inherent democratic potential,” for it allows humans collectively to participate in nature. While this may not be true in all cases – it is surely not unreasonable, for example, to expect a company whose strip mine has destroyed a wild ecosystem to undertake the restoration