the case of river restorations it is clear that there will usually be significant potential for something like the sort of participative democratic restoration advocated by Light and Higgs. Of course, this is not necessarily to say that the restoration will always – or even usually – be able to embody the sort of democratic equality between participants one finds when members of a local community all muck in to clean up a local stream (Light 2001). Particularly when we factor in the first two challenges discussed above, it is clear that river restoration will often require the involvement of a large number of stakeholders, contributing in a wide number of different ways, including potentially complex engineering work necessarily carried out by specialists (dam removal, re‐meandering, etc.), but it is nevertheless true that river restoration has the potential to act as a focal point for a wide number of stakeholders to act together toward a common goal.
2.3 Restoration ecology as a type of biomimicry
Given the three challenges outlined in Section 2.2, what sort of ethic is appropriate to river restoration? With a view to answering this question, let us briefly consider the long‐running debate in environmental ethics between preservationism and restorationism (Hettinger 2012). To most people, preservation and restoration are simply different types of environmentally benign activity. It is also possible, however, to elevate each of these activities to the status of what Jordan (1994, p. 17) calls an “environmental paradigm,” understood as a specific way of relating to the environment that involves strong philosophical and ethical suppositions, hence the presence of the suffix “‐ism.” According to preservationists, like Elliott and Katz, the basic objective of environmental ethics should be to preserve nature, for restorations, as the deliberate result of human agency, simply add more artefacts to an increasingly unnatural and therefore less valuable planet. Restorationists, like Jordan (1994) and Turner (1994), see a variety of problems with this position, of which four are particularly noteworthy:
The first problem is the assumption that humans always have a negative impact on nature (for even when restoring nature they diminish the value of naturalness).
The second problem is the radical separation between humans and nature that underlies this claim, and entails that deliberate human actions can only ever have nonnatural results.
The third problem is that preservation only allows for a very limited number of ways of interacting with nature; to preserve nature we typically do little more than designate it as out of bounds for development and then restrict human use to, at most, recreational and scientific activities.
The fourth problem is that relatively little wilderness now remains, in which case there is relatively little genuine preservation work left to be done.
According to its advocates, the paradigm of restorationism, which holds that restoration is the “central challenge” of ecology (Jordan et al. 1987, p. 15), makes it possible to overcome these four problems. In restoration, human impact on nature is positive; it overcomes the separateness from nature presupposed by preservationists; it allows us to interact with nature in complex and meaningful ways, thereby also deepening our ecological understanding (Jordan et al. 1987); and it provides much more scope than preservation for future environmental activity.
There are, however, also major limitations to restorationism. For a start, the positive human impact on nature is limited to restoration work. Other activities, such as how we produce the goods and services that sustain our own existence, many of which depend directly on rivers or take place within their watersheds, are overlooked. The result is a continued separation between humans and nature, with preserved or restored nature on one side of the divide and human culture – agriculture, industry, cities, etc. – on the other. This in turn limits the possible scope for meaningful interactions with nature. How we produce the food, goods, buildings, and infrastructure we require would appear to have little or nothing to do with nature. Lastly, while there is no doubt much scope for restoring degraded ecosystems no longer exploited by humans, increasing swathes of the planet are in direct human use, in which case there is clearly much more environmental work to be done transforming this use than there is in restoring portions of degraded nature to something like their wild state. This is not, of course, to deny the possibility of restoring a site that is and will remain in use. The restoration of grazing meadowlands in the United Kingdom is an obvious example. But it is also true that, if such restoration projects are to be sustainable, they must also be accompanied by a transformation in the way the site is used, for otherwise there will be nothing to stop degradation reoccurring.
These limitations of restoration as an activity, and restorationism as an environmental paradigm, are particularly apparent in the case of river restoration. As noted in Section 2.2.1 and 2.2.2, rivers are not isolatable from their surrounding ecosystems and their catchment area is often a site of extensive and permanent human settlement and use. In many cases, this means that it will be insufficient simply to restore the river and its banks, let alone just a mere stretch of the river, for human settlement and use of the catchment area will, at least as long as it persists in its current form, continue to have a strong negative impact on the river (Palmer et al. 2005). To some extent river restorationists have acknowledged these problems and have thus tried to expand the scope of river restoration to the level of the watershed (Bohn and Kershner 2002). But, given extensive and permanent human settlement and land use, it will in many cases not be possible to restore the surrounding watershed to anything like its predevelopment state (Eden et al. 2000; Palmer et al. 2005). When a river is negatively impacted by a dense city of several million people straddling its banks and surrounded by thousands of acres of farmland and industry, the restoration of its watershed – where restoration is seen as a return to the predevelopment state – will at best be limited to restoring the “gaps” in the landscape not directly exploited by humans, typically in the form of “buffer zones” and “corridors linking established fragments” of undeveloped land (Hobbs and Norton 1996, p. 104). Moreover, even when one extends the conceptual framework of restoration to the landscape level (Naveh 1994) – an approach which typically extends the scope of restoration ecology to productive land (Hobbs and Norton 1996) – the resulting restoration will not necessarily put an end to the negative impact that future exploitation of the landscape will have on the river. To restore the soils of degraded farmland, for example, will not in itself stop renewed agricultural activity impacting negatively on the river and it could even increase that negative impact (e.g. by making possible continued applications of pesticides and fertilizers).
Given all these limitations, it is instructive to consider a powerful criticism of the “traditional project of environmentalism” put forward by Mathews (2011, p. 364). According to Mathews, environmentalism has traditionally focused on the objective of protecting nature from negative human impacts. In opposition to this, she argues that the emerging concept of biomimicry, which she sees as a “turning point in Western thinking” (Mathews 2011, p. 368), represents a radically different form of environmentalism. So what is biomimicry? Biomimicry is often defined in terms of the transfer of function from biology to engineering, a famous example of which is Velcro, which was modeled on the fastening mechanism used by the Arctium lappa thistle to propagate its seeds. According to Marshall and Loveza (2009, p. 2), however, biomimicry is better understood not as a novel method for design but rather as an “organizing concept” capable of bringing together a variety of different fields of design and innovation, including obviously related fields like bionics, biomimetics, or bio‐inspiration, but extending also to such areas as permaculture, analogue forestry, ecological engineering, ecological design, industrial ecology, and thus as including also the imitation of ecosystems (ecomimicry or ecosystem biomimicry) (Dicks 2017a).
There is, I believe, another important sense in which biomimicry may be seen as an organizing concept. This second sense concerns biomimicry’s own internal organization, which is structured according to four distinct principles, each of which corresponds to a different branch of philosophical inquiry (Dicks 2016). This framework may be represented as in