Guest Editorial Discovering the Future, Creating the Past: Some Reflections on Restoration by Don Falk Biological "restoration" is not really about re-creating the past, except as a reference point. Therein lies its chief difference from restoring paintings, original manuscripts, or architectural treasures. In such cases the restorer seeks literally to halt, and even to reverse change, like Seraut in Barry Lopez’s story "Restoration. ’’1 If Michelangelo’s David, Gutenberg’s Bible, and Notre Dame could be pre- served for ten thousand years without fading, tearing, or crumbling, we would judge that their curators had done their job well. Not so with biological restoration. In this case, we seek not to "preserve" a static entity but to protect and nurture its capacity for change. In the world of living things and systems, only the dead stop changing. And even they change, as we know; no sooner has a fly dropped from the ceiling, or an elephant to the ground, than the recyclers of the living world are fast at work disassembling one life form and, without intention, creating new substance and new life. Change is the dominant characteristic of all living things, and all levels of biological organization. Individ- ual organisms come and go, reproducing and dying, and populations fluctuate in size constantly. Gene frequencies shift from generation to generation, responding to both stochastic and selective forces. Populations also migrate across the landscape, responding to changing environ- mental conditions and the effects of competition. In some cases these populations develop into distinct ecotypes, representing localized adaptations to an ever-changing environment. Species are also in constant flux, emerging by a variety of processes still imperfectly understood, and spending anywhere from decades to millennia in one form before facing the imperative to change or die. Communi- ties sweep across the landscape, in some cases rapidly, as in periods of glacial recession or advance; perhaps such a period is upon us now, if predictions of global climate change are correct. And even whole ecosystems--seem- ingly eternal, boundless, enduring---change at a pace vir- tually undetectable to medium-lifespan organisms like ourselves. Restoration thus uses the past not as a goal but as a reference point for the future. If we seek to recreate the temperate forests, tallgrass savannas, or desert communi- Don Falk is the executive director of the Center for Plant Conservation, 125 the Arborway, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130, (617) 524-6988. Parameter value Predisruption Disruption Restoration Postdisruption phase phase phase phase --Time-- Figure 1: A conceptual model for relating restoration goals to processes and trends on long-term change. ties of centuries past, it is not to turn back the evolutionary clock but to set it ticking again. Schematically, one might conceive of this process as in Figure 1. The "parameter value" can refer to a measurable aspect of any level of biological organization: the fre- quency of a allele, size of a population, average number of offspring, dispersal distance of seeds, latitudinal range of community, frequency of fires, and so on. Along the x axis (with time moving obediently left to right), the history of a place, a species, or a site falls into four phases: predisruption, disruption, restoration, and postdisruption. The pathway during the predisruption phase is represented here as linear, although of course most processes of change are multivariate and highly reticulated. "Disruption" in this context refers to the interruption of natural equilibria or trends, producing for example: a) a sudden increase in an earlier value (such as the population of an introduced species or the global atmospheric tem- perature); b) a sudden decline in an earlier value (number of populations of a native species suffering from compet- itive exclusion, the frequency of fire, global species diversity ...); or c) an oscillation in any of these values. Seen from this perspective, the goal of restoration is to re- establish the pre-disruption value of a given parameter. However, the most significant aspect of restoration is not the point at which this value has been attained. Rather, restoration seeks to permit the processes of balanced change to begin again. This orientation toward the process of change has profound implications for the practice of restoration. For one thing, it will make careful restoration more difficult. How can we know what the population of a species would be in its natural state? How can we guess at allele frequen- cies in a species whose populations, pollinators,and distri- bution have been altered by centuries of human impact? How can we fully understand the forces that move deserts, Restoration & Management Notes 8:2 Winter 1990 71