Robert Elliot - Faking Nature

In his article "Faking Nature", Robert Elliot attacks the restoration thesis, a thesis that plays an important role in debates concerning conservation:

Restoration thesis (RT): "the destruction of what has value is compensated for by the later creation (recreation) of something with equal value."

Suppose a company proposes a mining project on an especially striking area of forest. Large areas of forest will be cleared and the land destroyed. Not surprisingly, this project is met with a great deal of resistance from environmentalists, who charge that short-term economic benefits don't justify the destruction of such a valuable area. However, the company promises that once the mining project has been completed, they will consult with various biologists, ecological, landscape architects etc and work to restore the area: the soil will be replaced, trees replanted, species reintroduced, rivers will be recreated; and all of this will be designed with the irregularity and randomness that one is often confronted with in natural landscapes. Even to a trained eye, the forest will look just as it would as if humans had never interfered with it. The values that are destroyed by the mining project will be fully restored. Hence, it's unreasonable for environmentalists to continue to resist the project.

The restoration argument doesn't address some concerns we might have about the project, for instance, animal rights objections appealing to the rights of the individual animals whose habitats are destroyed. But it does hope to assuage the environmentalist concern. Of course, the basic objection to the restoration argument is that restoration projects are rarely successful. Indeed, companies rarely follow up on promises to restore the area to the best of their ability; often restoration projects are half-hearted, or fail to secure enough funding, with the resulting "restored" area very clearly impoverished relative to its original condition.

However, there's no reason in principle why restoration projects should not be carried out successfully. If, in our imaginary example, we could know without any question that the restoration would be successful, would environmentalists have any grounds for continuing to resist the mining company's proposal? Elliot argues they would. He rejects RT. He argues that there is an important kind of value that can't be restored.

Contra the RT, Elliot suggests that "an area is valuable, partly, because it is a natural area, one that has not been modified by human hand, one that is undeveloped, unspoiled, or even unsullied." Part of the reason we value wilderness areas is because they're untouched. They have developed entirely on their own terms without human interference. We value wilderness areas not simply for their intrinsic properties, but also because they have a special kind of history, a special kind of origin. This is a value that can't possibly be realized by a human artifact, and a restored landscape is ultimately an artifact, a human creation, however much it may resemble nature.

Elliot thinks we can make this argument more precise by appealing to the notion from aesthetics of art forgery. The RT essentially asks that we accept a fake or forgery of nature as a substitute for the real thing. Elliot takes it as uncontroversial that forged artworks are less aesthetically valuable than the originals they copy, no matter how alike they are; similarly then, forged nature is less valuable than the original, even if the restoration is perfect. We have an argument along the lines of:

(P1) Original artworks have an aesthetic value that forgeries lack, even if the original and the forgery are identical.
(P2) Restored environments are analogous in relevant respects to forged artworks.
(P3) Original environments have a value that the restored environment lacks, even if the original and restored environment are identical.


Elliot then considers various objections:

1. The argument will rest on an unworkable distinction between natural and unnatural. In fact, I'm not sure why it would need to rest on this distinction. Obviously, the argument regarding forged artworks doesn't appeal to any such distinction. So why would an argument based on analogy between forgeries and restored environments need to appeal to it? However, it does seem to be true that many environmentalists use the notion of "natural value" and this is the approach that Elliot takes. Elliot defines "natural" to mean "unmodified by human activity", and accepts that this is a spectrum rather than a strict line: some areas are more or less natural, i.e. more or less modified by human activity, than others. People value nature not just for its beauty, but because it is has developed independently of human interference. The value of the wilderness lies in that it's untouched.

I tend to agree with Elliot that the natural/unnatural distinction, at least as he's defined it, makes sense, even if there are vague cases. Still, some worries remain. First, how do we quantify the degree of modification by human activity? No areas in the modern world are free of human interference. Nowhere on the surface of the planet is free of the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Furthermore, almost all areas on the planet have been altered by humans in the past; many apparently natural places look how they do due to extensive human modification. A good example of his is Dartmoor, a barren and haunting moorland that is often promoted as one of England's few remaining wilderness areas (see here, here, and here for instance). But Dartmoor, like almost everywhere else in England, used to be completely covered with forest. It looks how it does today thanks to the activity of prehistoric farmers: their farming methods lead to severe soil acidification and the development of extensive peat bogs that to this day remain central to Dartmoor's ecology. Dartmoor is, in a sense, a testament to the power of human transformation of nature.

Second, there are various moral difficulties with the notion of "untouched landscapes". Callicott (2008) discusses a number of these. I will note two. First, Callicott notes that the concept of untouched wilderness erases a history of genocide and imperialism. For example, Europeans did not discover the Americas as "virgin lands" free of people; they were heavily populated by peoples who had significantly transformed their environments - peoples who were subsequently murdered, raped, and enslaved by the European invaders (Stannard 1992 provides a powerful account of the genocide of Native Americans). Second, the wilderness concept is used as a tool for the continued oppression of indigenous people. Callicott cites a number of examples of indigenous peoples forcefully evicted from land on which they have lived for centuries in order to create wilderness areas in line with the "no human interference" ideal. So, it's questionable whether Elliot is on the right track in emphasizing the importance of completely untouched natural landscapes.

2. If the original area and the restored area are exactly alike, they must have the same value. There can be no grounds for assigning different value to them. Elliot responds that this simply begs the question. The claim for which the environmentalist is arguing is that the value of an area isn't determined merely by its intrinsic properties, but also by its history. Elliot gives a number of other examples to motivate this view. Suppose I'm promised a Vermeer painting for my birthday. When the day arrives, however, I'm given not a genuine Vermeer, but an exact replica of a Vermeer that was destroyed. Because of this painting's history - because it wasn't painted by Vermeer - I value it less. Or suppose I'm given a particularly beautiful and elegant sculpture. It's one of my prized possessions... until I discover that it was made from the bone of a person who was murdered to create it. Because of the sculpture's history, I value it less. Elliot is quite right, I think, that people can value or disvalue things for their history. Indeed, this is actually quite common, and we don't need to appeal to such arcane examples to make the point. Suppose that on his deathbed, my grandfather gives me a watch. If this watch is then destroyed, it would hardly be compensated for by giving me an exactly identical watch.

3. By placing boundaries around certain areas, by designating certain areas to be wilderness areas deserving of protection, we transform the wilderness into an artifact, hence removing its naturalness. The point is that preservation of wilderness can only be achieved by active, deliberate policies. We have to place boundaries around certain areas, we have to perhaps prevent overgrazing by animals, we have to keep a watch for illegal uses of the land, etc. But given this, it seems that the wilderness area has in some sense been positively created by humans. It's not simply that the land has been left alone; we've actively worked to preserve it in a certain state.

This is a common argument, and one that has always struck me as very silly. As Elliot says: "What is significant about wilderness is its causal continuity with the past. ... There is a distinction between the "naturalness" of the wilderness itself and the means used to maintain and protect it." There's an obvious and important distinction between simply preventing people from spoiling a landscape and activiely transforming a landscape e.g. through farming or building houses or roads or whatever.

4. The analogy between forgery and restored nature fails. An important feature of our reactions of artworks is that they are judged as as artifacts, as things designed for particular reasons. When we judge the aesthetic value of an artwork, we consider the goals and intentions of its creator. This is what accounts for the relative disvalue of forgeries. But this can't be appealed to in nature: nature has no author. So there are no grounds for valuing the original landscape over the restored one.

Elliot responds that our judgements can be informed by knowledge of many kinds, not just knowledge of intentions and goals. What we see and what we value in nature is partially informed by our understanding of its ecology and history. Indeed, with this knowledge, seemingly barren and uninteresting landscapes can be rendered unique, complex, compelling. An ecologist who has spent his life studying a particular area will see more in it, and hence see more to value in it, than an ecologically illiterate tourist.


I will now consider two objections that Elliot doesn't raise.

5. Notice that the argument must be about restored areas that are identical to original areas. Elliot doesn't actually state his argument this way, but a little analysis shows that this is an oversight. For, as Elliot himself notes, a landscape can have many other sources of value beyond naturalness (naturalness in the sense of "unmodified by human activity"). Here are some that Elliot notes: "diversity of animal and plant life, stability of complex ecosystems, tall trees". Now if we were to perform a mining operation on some very barren part of the land, say Dungeness, and then afterwards restore it by producing a lush forest, then the restored area would surely be more valuable than the original.

The problem for Elliot's argument is that restoration never produces an identical area. This makes it rather unclear what exactly Elliot's argument actually achieves. Most of the time, of course, a restored area is simply much worse than the original, but this just brings us back to the standard pragmatic argument against restoration proposals: contrary to the promises of the company, the area won't really be restored. Elliot's argument is superfluous in this case. And if the company can persuade that they will restore the area properly, and thus dislodge the pragmatic argument, it shouldn't be too difficult also to persuade us that they'll add various other sources of value to compensate for the naturalness that's lost. If we can restore Dungeness, we can surely improve its ecological value as well (just import better soils, plant various trees, etc).

6. More seriously, (P2) is questionable. Are restored areas analogous to forgeries in a way that's relevant to our valuation of them? One way to approach this question is to ask why exactly we consider forgeries to be aesthetically deficient. An intuitive and popular response, discussed in Stalnaker (2001: 514), is that forgeries are aesthetically deficient because they lack originality. Evidently, originality is something we value highly in the arts; many artworks are famous for pretty much nothing more than having innovative, original features. Also evidently, a forgery won't be remotely original, at least in terms of its intrinsic properties; indeed, the more effective a forgery is at fooling people, the less original it will be. This kind of explanation is simply not applicable to restoration projects. Nobody wants the restored area to look original: ideally, it should be indistinguishable from its former state. 

I think there are some fatal problems with appealing to originality to explain the aesthetic deficiency of forgeries. I won't go into these problems here (I'll do another post about forgery sometime), but obviously, I think Elliot can resist this objection. There is however a second difference between environmental restoration and art forgery, pointed out by Sylvan (1994), that I think is more damaging to (P2): while art forgery necessarily involves deception, there's no deception involved in restoration proposals, at least not in principle. No doubt many restoration proposals are deceptive in that they suggest that more effort and more care will be expended on restoration than anybody in fact intends to offer. But whereas a fake or forgery involves passing off a copy as an original, restoration doesn't involve pretending that the restored environment has been untouched. Restored landscapes are thus nothing like forgeries; they are more analogous to mere copies of artworks.

Would an exact copy of an artwork be less aesthetically valuable than the original artwork? To me, the answer is obvious: it depends. Most of the time, an exact copy would be of equal value. In certain special cases, a copy would be of less value, e.g. where the original has some special historical significance. In other special cases, the copy may be of more value, e.g. a copy produced in some special way: consider a not especially remarkable painting copied exactly by a robot. We may value the copy more than the original, because of the special history of the copy (first painting made by a robot!).

Elliot may respond that this is just what he's been arguing: the history of an object makes a difference to its value. A landscape can be valuable for its naturalness, for its history of developing without human interference. I accept this point. But then what is the purpose of the analogy to forgeries? We can make the same point more accurately by drawing an analogy between restored landscapes and mere copies of artworks. Indeed, Elliot himself draws this analogy in his example of being promised a Vermeer painting for a birthday present (in the example as Elliot gives it, the receiver of the gift is explicitly told that the painting is not an original Vermeer). The appeal to forgeries is at best superfluous and at worst misleading.


To conclude, while I find Elliot's conclusion quite attractive - that a restored landscape may be of less value than the original, even if they're nearly identical - his argument suffers from some serious problems (points 1 and 6), and in any case, given the very specific circumstances in which the argument applies (point 5), it's questionable whether it really has much force against restoration proposals.


Callicott, J. B. (2008) "Contemporary Criticisms of the Received Wilderness Idea", in Nelson, M. P. and Callicott, J. B. (eds.) The Wilderness Debate Rages On, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, pp. 355-378.

Elliot, R. (1982) "Faking Nature", Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 81-93.

Stalnaker, N. (2005) "Fakes and Forgeries", in Gaut, B. and Lopes, D. M. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, pp. 513-525.

Stannard, D. (1992) American Holocaust, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sylvan, R. (1994) "Mucking With Nature", in Sylvan, R. Against the Main Stream: Critical Environmental Essayes, Canberra: Research School of the Social Sciences, pp. 48-78.