Future Terrains germinated somewhere between mountaintop removal coal mines in America’s Appalachia and ‘farmlandscape’ restoration in Patagonia’s windswept southern wilderness, by way of Everglades ecosystem revival – Costa Rican dry tropical forest restoration – alien species in the Galapagos – Atlantic forest revival in eastern Brazil – and post-mining restoration of Amazonia’s rainforests.

Thirty months ago I was experiencing another once in a lifetime opportunity ‘Exploring World Class Landscape Restoration’ after being fortunate enough to receive a prestigious Travelling Fellowship from the UK’s Winston Churchill Memorial Trust (WCMT). My project was to spend two months travelling through the Americas, visiting the people, projects and places of some of the world’s most significant landscape restoration projects.

My fellowship aimed to:

  1. Identify and understand the main challenges to delivering world class landscape restoration projects.
  2. Identify and understand the elements of success required to deliver world class landscape restoration projects.
  3. Develop a set of generic recommendations that should apply to almost any project almost anywhere.

I took a pragmatic rather an academic or philosophical approach to meeting these objectives, which focused primarily on what could be learned from first-hand, on-the-ground experiences that would be of use to other groups in other places struggling to deliver their own projects. This involved visiting the projects, meeting the people behind them and researching relevant literature before, during and after the visits. The places and projects that I visited were:

  • The Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative and allied projects of the eastern USA’s central Appalachian coalfields – an initiative that aims to restore the region’s diverse temperate forest after extensive denudation by mountaintop removal mining.
  • The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan and allied projects of Florida’s Everglades – a multi-billion dollar programme to restore a more natural hydrology to the Everglades to ensure future water supplies for people, industry and the ecosystem’s unique ecology.
  • Costa Rica’s Area de Conservacion Guanacaste where the restoration of dry tropical forests on degraded farmland has been underway for decades, alongside the simultaneous encouragement of a new economy based on conservation, sensitive farming and eco-tourism.
  • Tropical island restoration in Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, which aims to address the damage caused by introduced species and poorly-planned development.
  • The REGUA, Serra da Concordia Wildlife Sanctuary, SOS Mata Atlantica and Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact projects of Brazil’s eastern seaboard, all working towards restoring the Atlantic Rainforest – one of the most important and degraded forests in the world.
  • Three enormous mines in Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest, namely: Carajas iron mine and Trombetas and Juruti aluminium mines, all concerned with re-growing the Amazon rainforest after its land has been mined, and incorporating forest-derived socio-economic opportunities for local people in the future.
  • Pumalin Park, future Patagonia National Park and Estancia Menelik in Chilean and Argentine Patagonia, which are creating, through restoration, new regional economies based on conservation, responsible farming practices and eco-tourism.

I became inspired by ordinary people doing extraordinary things in some of the world’s most challenging places. Not all were millionaires – far from it; not all were ecologists or environmentalists; but all set out on a selfless journey of their own, not quite knowing how they would reach their destination or even where it was, but driven by a passion to make a difference, set an example and leave a legacy. In most of the people I met I sensed a frustration that they wished they could do more, but that a human lifetime is inevitably limiting. Many inferred that, “We may not know all the answers, but we know enough now to make substantial improvements to degraded lands and their people”.

So, to cut a very long story short, somewhere on a dusty road in the middle of all that, stimulated by the time-out from routine, given space to think and inspired by what I was experiencing, a notion was born to create an organisation that would develop, promote and implement this kind of work more broadly. The organisation would be based fundamentally on combining practical experience from different places in terms of geography, discipline and sector, adding a large dose of collaboration, a twist of creativity and cutting across barriers (institutional, cultural, dogmatic) in order to learn and deliver.

And here we are!

 

Further information:

Download my WCMT ‘Exploring World Class Landscape Restoration’ report here.

A travelblog of the experience is available at www.petewa.blogspot.com

Winston Churchill Memorial Trust – www.wcmt.org.uk