The restorer's toolkit

Stand over a wrecked paddock, or a gully choked with lantana, and the temptation is to fix it by doing everything: planting every tree, pulling every weed, bolting the finished ecosystem back together like furniture. Ecological restoration, a discipline this coast has helped build over the last half-century, has quietly discovered that this is very nearly the wrong instinct. Three humbler principles do far better, and each turns a lesson from the ecology of this coast into a method.

The first is to work with the system rather than replace it. A mature rainforest holds hundreds of species arranged in tiers no planting crew could ever assemble by hand; try to build one tree by tree and you will be at it for lifetimes. So restorers don’t. They plant a modest framework of fast-growing natives and set those to two jobs at once: shading out the grass and weeds, and hanging out the fruit and shelter that call back the seed-dispersing birds and the flying-foxes. Those couriers arrive on their own schedule and fly in the seed of everything else, and the forest re-sows itself from the canopy down. You do not rebuild the forest; you rebuild the conditions and step back. Tired paddocks across the region have thickened into young, diversifying rainforest on that principle (Goosem & Tucker 1995).

The second is patience, and weeding from strength. Faced with a weed-infested block, the instinct is to hit the worst of it first, the great smothering thickets, and feel you have made progress. The Bradley method, now the backbone of bush regeneration across the country, insists on the opposite. You start in the healthiest, least-disturbed bush and work outward toward the worst, taking the weeds a little at a time and letting native seedlings recolonise the cleared ground themselves. The discipline is entirely in what you resist doing. Strip a patch bare all at once and you have opened a sunlit vacuum, and the weeds — faster and hungrier and already seeded through the soil — will seize it before the natives get a look in. It is slow, unglamorous work that trusts an ecosystem to heal from its own intact edges. It is also, written across thousands of volunteer weekends of lantana- and camphor-laurel-pulling, most of the labour of caring for this coast (Bradley 1988).

The third, and deepest, is to mend a relationship. When the Richmond birdwing, one of Australia’s largest and most spectacular butterflies, was brought back from the edge, nobody bred butterflies in cages to release. The birdwing had vanished because clearing the scrub took its principal larval food plant, a native rainforest vine (Pararistolochia praevenosa) its caterpillars must have and has effectively nothing else to eat in this region in place of. So that is what the recovery replanted: the vine, garden by garden and creek line by creek line, stitching the broken thread back across a fragmented landscape until the butterfly could once again move and breed on its own. Schoolchildren and backyard gardeners did much of it, one vine at a time (Sands 2008).

Set side by side, the three are the same idea wearing different clothes: mend the conditions, not the thing. It asks a certain humility, an admission that the living world is far better at rebuilding itself than we will ever be at rebuilding it. And it pays that humility back in full. A cleared paddock thickens into forest; a creek line weeded from its healthy heart outward closes over; a butterfly returns along its replanted vine.