Rationale for Not "Planting Nature"

Just what is it about planting things in “natural areas” that strikes me as so… evil, so antithetical to humility and so arrogant whereas extracting things seems so “natural” and relatively harmless, even proper. 

For one, as I elaborated on already, it has to do with the actual harm you can do by injecting things into a system.

But there is something beyond that, something deeper. 

And now it suddenly occurs to me why taking-out seems “natural” and putting-in seems unnatural and wrong. 

It is 2 things: 

1. tradition--the role of humans and all other animals has always been to extract and not to insert; the only thing they put back is what they excrete, but that is only recycling what they extract; putting new things into a system is limited to their own selves, and what might be sticking to them
2. arrogance--by putting things in, things that Mother Nature could have and likely did put there herself, we are saying that we can do her job better than she can; only Mother Nature knows for sure what should grow where. 

1. weeds--which are basically our mistakes--trying to remove things we put in earlier and shouldn’t have
2. “resources” (food, fiber, etc) which are infinitely renewable, and which connect us, make us value and appreciate nature’s generosity 

This is nothing more or less than Playing God. Further, it gives us a false feeling of even more control over nature. It takes something as fundamentally natural as the distribution of plants, and makes it unnatural. 

Such arrogance extends to this: very often, native species are already present, either visibly or in the seed bank, and “restoration” projects can then actually replace a perfectly good native flora with another one chosen by some human. 

3. Intellectual integrity. Biogeography is the study of, among other things, the natural distribution of plants and animals. What possible use is it, what can you possibly learn, from the artificially manipulated distributions that result from human tinkering. Such tinkering is justifiable only at an extremely localized scale--the “neighborhood” scale. Scrambling the distributions of plants on a larger scale threatens to invalidate any future studies involving the species used for such projects. (This is an argument for using the fewest possible species, rather than more and more, which is the current trend). Soon, occurrences of all but the most obscure genera will be suspect as to whether they were “natural” or introduced. But, far more important than “species” are infraspecific differences (forms, “vars,” undescribed “sister species,” odd or local genotypes, etc etc); these are inexhaustible sources of new knowledge. If all species were uniform and interchangeable like “#22.1-5” widget, then not so much a problem. “Restoration”-type thinking, unless at the neighborhood level, disregards these distinctions and can forever ruin a piece of natural land for any future study of this kind. 

Things like planting redwood trees under a redwood forest are silly but harmless--or are they? 

[If you are a student, please avoid the “restoration” trap and look instead to study something of real use, like management or systematics. If you are a philanthropist, use your funding likewise. Popularity doesn’t guarantee merit.]

[The California Indians followed this “natural” system to the letter, and early agricultural cultures only departed from it in a very limited and temporary way--crop plants don’t persist].