Is genuine restoration of our wetlands possible?

Vice-chair, Angeles Chapter Conservation Committee and Chair, Ballona Wetlands Restoration Committee

We hear lots of talk today about restoring the Los Angeles River, restoring the Ballona Wetlands, restoring Bolsa Chica Wetlands. What does restoration really mean?

Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, defines restoration as: restored, or being restored; specifically, a) reinstatement in a former position, b) restitution for loss, damage, etc., c) a putting or bringing back into a former, normal, or unimpaired state or condition.

This meaning of restoration is what most activists are thinking of when they become involved in commenting on or providing input to various restoration projects being sponsored by government or even private entities. However, it is not always what these government and private entities have in mind.

Sierra Club wrote an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court in 2000, in part, because its leadership did not believe that building a freshwater marsh in a location where former, rare coastal salt marsh once thrived, was genuine restoration.

Jan Chatten-Brown, one of Los Angeles' finest environmental attorneys, representing Sierra Club and other environmental groups at a Superior Court hearing in San Francisco, explained to the judge that what the city of Los Angeles had planned for the Grand Canal Lagoon near Marina del Rey was 'not genuine restoration,' but a rehabilitation and beautification project. Since the California Coastal Act requires that the only circumstance under which a wetland in the coastal zone can be disturbed is for the 'least environmentally damaging alternative,' the environmental groups won the lawsuit, the possible merits of a 'rehabilitation and beautification project' notwithstanding.

The Urban Wildlands Group, led by Catherine Rich and Dr. Travis Longcore, were recently successful at convincing the California Coastal Commission that they needed to require Los Angeles World Airports to remove a row of non-native palm trees from the edge of the El Segundo Sand Dunes, just west of Los Angeles International Airport. Another 'beautification' project, the trees were entirely inappropriate to important restoration efforts that many had undertaken in the dune areas. Past restoration efforts were designed to protect important habitat for the endangered El Segundo blue butterfly, a small butterfly once thought extinct, and preferring ivory- and rust-colored buckwheat plants to palm trees.

We humans are so good at inventing things, and this may be the problem with our difficulties in remaining true to genuine restoration.

Nature's own ideas are better than our own, in terms of natural processes, but it seems we always want to improve on these ways.

Landscaping, for instance, is a wonderful thing, bringing order and year-round beauty to a front yard. However, landscaping has also wreaked havoc on our natural world in Southern California, with many exotic and toxic species invading the landscape and causing unforeseen problems. Landscape architecture is leading the way in many of the restoration projects planned in Southern California. However, while more drought tolerant plants are being used, often the particular biogeography is ignored.

For example, often in California Coastal Commission permits, applicants are required to use 'native plants,' but these native plants can be specified in the permit to be from a list of those for the 'Santa Monica Mountains' or 'California Native Plants.' California native plants include redwood trees, and redwoods are out of their bioregion here in Southern California. Additionally, plants that would be naturally found in the Santa Monica Mountains are not necessarily appropriate for streamside planting along the Los Angeles River or the El Segundo Sand Dunes.

When activists voice concern over these things, often we are called 'purists' or sometimes 'plant nazis.' However, if we are to remain true to the dictionary definition of restoration and be committed to genuine restoration, then we must attempt to re-create the historical record of what plants and animals were once present in the bioregional ecosystem being considered for restoration and work to re-create that ecology as close as possible to what Mother Nature would have created.

Otherwise, we might as well call it gardening, engineering, or landscaping, but not genuine restoration.