Faking it? The multiple meanings of environmental restoration near Twyford Down

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 9, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 313-333

  Eden, Sally ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HULL   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 84992792932     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1191/1474474002eu251oa     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. On Twyford Down, see B. Bryant, Twyford Down (London, E. & F.N. Spoon/Chapman & Hall, 1996); E. Must, ‘Twyford rising’, ALARM bells (Aug. 1993), pp. 2-3; Roadblock: how people power is wrecking the roads programme (Alarm UK, no address, no date). On related sites of resistance, see P. Routledge, ‘The imagineering of resistance: Pollok Free State and the practice of postmodern politics’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 22 (1997), pp. 359-76; B. Seel, ‘Strategies of resistance in the Pollok Free State road protest camp’, Environmental politics 6 (1997), pp. 108-39; G. MacKay, Senseless acts of beauty (London, Verso, 1996).
2. Quoted in Bryant, Twyford Down, p. 299.
3. Now part of the Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions (DTLR) under the present Labour government.
4. This could be interpreted as the commodification of the Down through the sale of land assets for economic gain. Landowners like the Church and colleges of the University of Oxford have sought to increase their economic return from land, including direct sales of high-value parcels to developers since the 1950s, as described in D. Spencer, ‘Pulling out of landed property: the Oxford colleges and the Church Commissioners’, Area 32 (2000), pp. 297-306. However, although Winchester College was willing to sell its Twyford Down land to the DoT, under powers of compulsory purchase the DoT would have been able to buy the land without the school's consent, and in fact held it under temporary Precautionary Title during the M3 construction. Private developers in the UK and USA have used restoration and environmental gains as compensation for environmental losses elsewhere, through the spatial abstraction and translocation of habitat or other qualities to the restoration site, as seen in S. Whatmore and S. Boucher, ‘Bargaining with nature: the discourse and practice of “environmental planning gain” ‘, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18 (1993), pp. 166-78; M.M. Robertson, ‘No net loss: wetland restoration and the incomplete capitalization of nature’, Antipode 32 (2000), pp. 463-93. However, the steep slopes and multiple designations of St Catherine's Hill make it difficult to develop for housing or retail. I prefer to see this as Winchester College deploying its social and political capital to assure its continued enjoyment of scenery and tranquillity, rather than ‘incomplete capitalization’ of nature.
5. Bryant, Twyford Down, p. 72.
6. Bryant, Twyford Down.
7. At the time, the economic evidence provided in the DoT's cost-benefit analysis (COBA) effectively crushed all opposition. Since then, environmental economics has changed greatly and the COBA would probably be done differently now, to respond to the kind of criticism expressed in J. O'Neill, ‘Cost-benefit analysis, rationality and the plurality of values’, Ecologist 26 (1996), pp. 98-103; J. Adams, ‘Cost-benefit analysis: the problem, not the solution’, Ecologist 26 (1996), pp. 2-4.
8. For details of the legal battle, see Bryant, Twyford Down.
9. e.g. ‘A road too far’, Guardian (18-19 July 1992), pp. 14-15.
10. See Routledge, ‘The imagineering of resistance’; Seel, ‘Strategies of resistance’; MacKay, Senseless acts of beauty.
11. A post-restoration report in The Independent on Sunday (18 June 1995), p. 9, by Roger Bell, pointedly describes the restored land as ‘a consolation prize’.
12. See discussions in W. Cronon, ed., Uncommon ground (New York, Norton, 1995); B. Braun and N. Castree, eds, Remaking reality (London, Routledge, 1998); P. Macnaghten and J. Urry, Contested natures (London, Sage, 1998).
13. See W.M. Adams, Future nature (London, Earthscan/BANC, 1996); W.M. Adams, ‘Creative conservation, landscapes and loss’, Landscape research 21 (1996), pp. 265-76. Positive advocacy and prescriptions for restoration are also made in: W.R. Jordan III, ‘Sunflower forest: ecological restoration as the basis for a new environmental paradigm’, in A.D. Baldwin Jr, J. de Luce and C. Pletsch, eds, Beyond preservation (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 17-34; W.R. Jordan III, M.E. Gilpin, J.D. Aber, eds, Restoration ecology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987); A. Wilson, The culture of nature (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992); A. Phillips, ‘The challenge of restoring Europe's nature and landscapes’, International planning studies 1 (1996), pp. 73-93; R. Jarman, ‘Habitat restoration - recanting the status quo’, Ecos 16 (1995), pp. 29-38; A. Brookes and F.D. Shields Jr, eds, River channel restoration (Chichester, Wiley, 1996).
14. See A.D. Bradshaw, ‘Restoration: an acid test for ecology’, in Jordan et al., Restoration ecology, pp. 23-29; A.D. Bradshaw, ‘What do we mean by restoration?’, in K.M. Urbanska, N.R. Webb and P.J. Edwards, eds, Restoration ecology and sustainable development (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 8-14. See also W.R. Jordan III, ‘On the imitation of nature’, Restoration and management notes 3 (1985), pp. 2-3; P.J. Edwards, N.R. Webb, K.M. Urbanska and R. Bornkamm, ‘Restoration ecology: science, technology and society’, in Urbanska et al., eds, Restoration ecology and sustainable development, pp. 381-90; A. Gunn, ‘The restoration of species and natural environments’, Environmental ethics 13 (1991), pp. 291-310.
15. Urbanska et al., eds, Restoration ecology and sustainable development.
16. Jordan, ‘Sunflower forest’; Wilson, The culture of nature. But N. Smith, ‘The production of nature’, in G. Robertson, M. Mash, L. Tickner, J. Bird, B. Curtis and T. Putnam, eds, FutureNatural (London, Routledge, 1996), p. 46, criticizes such ‘restorationist’ visions from a Marxist standpoint as ‘a romantic universalist view of human society that utterly forgets the vicious externalization of nature as object of capitalist labour’.
17. G.S. Kane, ‘Restoration or preservation? Reflections on a clash of environmental philosophies’, in Baldwin et al., eds, Beyond preservation, pp. 69-84; C. Wilbert, ‘Wilderness and working landscapes’, Town and country planning (Feb. 1996), pp. 52-3; Edwards et al., ‘Restoration ecology’.
18. E. Katz, ‘The ethical significance of human intervention in nature’, Restoration and management notes 9 (1992), pp. 90-96.
19. Elliot, Faking nature; see also Katz, ‘The problem of ecological restoration’.
20. B. Latour, We have never been modern (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993); M. Callon, ‘Four models for the dynamics of science’, in S. Jasanoff, G.E. Markle, J.C. Petersen and T. Pinch, eds, Handbook of science and technology studies (London, Sage, 1995), pp. 29-63; S. Whatmore, ‘Dissecting the autonomous self: hybrid cartographies for a relational ethics’, Environment and planning D: society and space 15 (1997), pp. 37-53.
21. L.A. Teclaff, ‘Introduction’, Natural resources journal 34 (1994) pp. 777-9.
22. Katz, ‘The ethical significance of human intervention in nature’ and ‘The problem of ecological restoration’.
23. The debates over environmental history/ies of North America are beyond the scope of this paper, but are dealt with in many sources, just some of which are: R. Nash, Wilderness and the American mind (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1967); W. Cronon, Changes in the land (New York, Hill and Wang, 1983); D. Worster, Under western skies (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992); D. Demeritt, ‘Ecology, objectivity and critique in writings on nature and human societies’, Journal of historical geography 20 (1994) pp. 22-37; J. McCarthy and J. Guthman, ‘Introduction’, Antipode 30 (1998), pp. 67-72.
24. L.M. Dilsaver and W. Wyckoff, ‘Agency culture, cumulative causation and development in Glacier National Park, Montana’, Journal of historical geography 25 (1999) pp. 75-92
25. F. Golley, A history of the ecosystem concept in ecology (New Haven, Yale University Press,1993); S. Bocking, Ecologists and environmental politics (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997).
26. A. MacEwen and M. MacEwen, National Parks: cosmetics or conservation? (London, Allen & Unwin, 1982). UK National Parks are national in name only because land mostly remains in private hands, like those of farmers or peers, with the exception of landowners such as the Ministry of Defence, the National Trust (a large heritage management charity) and other charitable and educational organizations.
27. D. Lowenthal, ‘British national identity and the English landscape’, Rural history 2 (1991), p. 215; D. Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, Reaktion Books, 1998), p. 227; S. Bocking, Ecologists and environmental politics, p. 24.
28. D. Exton, W.M.G. Morris, J.A. Thomas and N.R. Webb, M3 Bar End to Compton habitat reconstruction: a review (Firsbrook, ITE/NERC, 1991).
29. Brookes and Shields, River channel restoration; Philips, ‘The challenge of restoring Europe's nature and landscapes’; Bradshaw, ‘What do we mean by restoration?’.
30. Environment Agency for England and Wales, Policy and practice for the protection of floodplains (Bristol, Environment Agency, 1997); Environment Agency, Introduction and Contents in River rehabilitation: practical aspects from 16 case studies (Bristol, Environment Agency, n.d.).
31. For an example drawn from river restoration, see S. Eden, S.M. Tunstall and S.M. Tapsell, ‘Translating nature: river restoration as natureculture’, Environment and planning D: society and space 18 (2000), pp. 257-73
32. Robertson, ‘No net loss’.
33. More general use of ‘environmental planning gain’ has been used to ‘green’ development proposals, albeit without specific citation of restoration: see Whatmore and Boucher, ‘Bargaining with nature’.
34. W. Cronon, ‘Toward a conclusion’, in Cronon, ed., Uncommon ground, p. 458.
35. Macnaghten and Urry, Contested natures; M. Sioh, ‘Authorizing the Malaysian rainforest: configuring space, contesting claims and conquering imaginaries’, Ecumene 5 (1998), pp. 144-66; L. Kong, B. Yuen, N.S. Sodhi and C. Briffett, ‘The construction and experience of nature: perspectives of urban youths’, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 90 (1999), pp. 3-16.
36. J. McCarthy, ‘Environmentalism, wise use and the nature of accumulation in the rural west’, in Braun and Castree, Remaking reality, pp. 126-49; G. Bridge and P. McManus, ‘Sticks and stones: environmental narratives and discursive regulation in the forestry and mining sectors’, Antipode
37. (2000), pp. 10-47; Macnaghten and Urry, Contested natures.
38. Winchester City Council in Local Public Inquiries report 1987-8, p. 71. Quotations relating to the Local Public Inquiries are taken from the unpublished Inspector's report, accessed through the Winchester local library. Although this was not a verbatim transcript of the Inquiries, the report recorded all representations and evidence given to the two periods of the Inquiries.
39. DoT in Local Public Inquiries report 1985, pp. 17 and 27.
40. Winchester City Council in Local Public Inquiries report 1985, p. 53.
41. Friends of the Earth in Local Public Inquiries report 1987-8, p. 117.
42. DoT in Local Public Inquiries report 1987-8, pp. 50 and 111. However, the inspector seemed to retain ‘full’ restoration line in his comment, in Local Public Inquiries report 1987-8 (p. 159), that the PR offered ‘the chance to replace [the bypass] with a sympathetic, natural landscape… [and] the restoration of a rural landscape’.
43. SAMs number 273 (Bronze Age/Saxon settlement site) and 543 (the Dongas medieval trackways) were bisected by the M3 and a substantial area of each was lost, compromising their historical integrity.
44. Inspector in Local Public Inquiries report 1985, p. 300.
45. Hampshire County Council in Local Public Inquiries report 1985, p. 190.
46. Winchester College in Local Public Inquiries report 1987-8, p. 17.
47. Hampshire County Council in Local Public Inquiries report 1985, p. 190.
48. Merrick Denton-Thompson, local planner and activist in Twyford Down Association, interviewed by the author, Feb. 1996.
49. J. Price ‘Looking for nature at the mall: a field guide to the Nature Company’, in Cronon, Uncommon ground, pp. 186-202; Smith, ‘The production of nature’; J. Burgess, J. Clark and C.M. Harrison, ‘Respondents’ evaluations of a CV survey: a case study based on an economic valuation of the Wildlife Enhancement Scheme, Pevensey Levels in East Sussex’, Area 30 (1996), pp. 19-27; C. Katz, ‘Whose nature, whose culture? Private productions of space and the “preservation” of nature’, in Braun and Castree, Remaking reality, pp. 46-63.
50. See e.g. O'Neill, ‘Cost-benefit analysis, rationality and the plurality of values’; Adams, ‘Cost-benefit analysis’.
51. S. Owens, ‘Land, limits and sustainability: a conceptual framework and some dilemmas for the planning system’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 19 (1994), pp. 439-56; R. Cowell, ‘Stretching the limits: environmental compensation, habitat creation and sustainable development’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 22 (1997), pp. 292-306; Robertson, ‘No net loss’; M.J. Clark, ‘Ecological restoration - the magnitude of the challenge: an outsider's view’, in Urbanska et al., Restoration ecology and sustainable development, pp. 353-77.
52. Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust in Local Public Inquiries report 1987-8, p. 119.
53. The forum included local stakeholders such as Winchester College, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust and Winchester City Council.
54. St Catherine's Hill and Twyford Down Management Plan 1992, p. 41.
55. The ITE note that this is problematic because ‘exact replicas cannot be produced readily’ from seed mixes, resulting in only ‘an imitation species-rich grassland within seven to fifteen years’: Exton et al., M3 Bar End to Compton habitat reconstruction, p. 21.
56. Exton et al., M3 Bar End to Compton habitat reconstruction, p. 5.
57. Hampshire Wildlife Trust leaflet, St Catherine's Hill (Eastleigh, HWT, 1995).
58. L.K. Ward and R.G. Snazell, M3 Bar End to Compton botanical monitoring: downland restoration 1995 (Firsbrook, ITE/NERC, 1996), p. 10.
59. M.J. Stevenson, R.G. Snazell and L.K. Ward, M3 Bar End to Compton site management plan for the A33 restoration area (Firsbrook, ITE/NERC, 1994), p. 5.
60. R.G. Snazell, L.K. Ward, W.E. Rispin, J.A. Thomas, M.G. Morris and N.R. Webb, M3 Bar End to Compton ecological survey (Firsbrook, ITE/NERC, 1991), p. 35.
61. See also Bradshaw, ‘What do we mean by restoration?’; Clark, ‘Ecological restoration - the magnitude of the challenge’.
62. The table perhaps could be interpreted as a form of ‘moral ladder’ for restoration in this case.
63. M. Cousins, Site management plan for Arethusa scrub/grassland (Eastleigh, Hampshire Wildlife Trust, 1994), p. 6. However, post-restoration visitor surveys of the site conducted by the HWT's warden, Mark Langford, in 1996 did not demonstrate discernible increases in usage. Without a large-scale survey of Winchester residents, it is difficult to substantiate the claim for local benefits from the restoration, although Winchester College have benefited because its uses of the area, so far as it used it at all, have been prioritized and protected.
64. Gunn, ‘The restoration of species and natural environments’, p. 308.
65. C.M. Cowell, ‘Ecological restoration and environmental ethics’, Environmental ethics 15 (1993), pp. 19-32; Jordan ‘Sunflower forest’; Adams, Future nature.
66. e.g. Katz, ‘The problem with ecological restoration’.
67. For examples that have had a more direct influence on restoration discourses in the UK, see Eden et al., ‘Translating nature’.
68. Clark, ‘Ecological restoration - the magnitude of the challenge’.