Ecological recovery is the ordinary response to the removal of a pressure

The argument

Proponents of this position begin from what happens to land that people stop using. A field left alone does not stay a field. Seeds arrive on wind, water and animals, fast growing plants take hold and begin to build soil, shade changes what can germinate, and structure accumulates, bringing with it the insects, birds and mammals that depend on structure. Proponents argue that nobody organises this. The process runs on its own, and its direction is towards greater complexity, because the organisms involved are doing what they do whether or not anyone is watching. The argument is that the same pattern holds across the kinds of damage the question has in mind. A river below an outfall that stops discharging clears, and invertebrates and fish return from the reaches above. A hillside closed to grazing regrows. A fish population left unfished rebuilds, because fish that are not caught breed. Air clears when what was being emitted stops being emitted. Proponents emphasise the common mechanism: in each case the damage was being actively maintained, and removing the thing that maintained it allows processes which never stopped operating to reassert themselves. Populations grow whenever losses fall below reproduction, and that is not a special event but the default condition of living things. Holders of the view draw a conclusion about what humans are being asked to do. The question is often put as whether people must intervene to repair nature, and proponents argue this mistakes the task. What recovery requires is overwhelmingly subtraction rather than addition: ending the discharge, closing the fishery, taking the stock off the hill, leaving the land alone. On this reading the capacity to heal sits in the system itself, and the human contribution is to stop obstructing it, which is a very different claim from the proposition that nature is helpless without management.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue that the examples are drawn from the easy end of the range. What returns to an abandoned field is some assemblage of species, not the one that was there, and proponents move between those two claims as though they were the same. They also note that the premise about removing the pressure assumes the pressure can be removed, which is exactly what is in dispute for a changed climate, an established introduced species or a persistent contaminant, none of which stop because people walk away. Others add that recovery at the rate described may take longer than the species and communities now at risk have left.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] What recolonises a released site is whatever can reach it, which need not be the community that was lost, so recovery in this sense does not restore what was damaged. [Rejecting P2] A changed climate, an established introduced species and a persistent contaminant are not maintained by continuing human action, so the damage does not stop when the activity does. [Rejecting C] The conclusion holds only for pressures that can be removed, and says nothing about damage which now persists independently of anything people do.