Pre-1788 Is Pure Fantasy
The convenient delusion that keeps conservationists from honest work
There’s a map on the wall of nearly every Australian conservation office. It shows the continent's vegetation cover in 1788 and what remains today. The first is a tapestry of green. The second looks like it has been through a shredder. The implicit message is that restoration means getting back to that first map.
Only it doesn’t. It can’t. And believing it can is one of conservation’s most seductive and dangerous fantasies.
Core Idea
The conservation establishment has built its entire framework around the impossible premise that ecosystems can be returned to pre-European conditions.
In Australia, this manifests as the “pre-1788 benchmark,” the vegetation patterns that supposedly existed before European settlement began altering the landscape.
The logic appears sound.
Document what was there before human disturbance, then use that as the target for restoration efforts. Set aside land, remove introduced species, plant native vegetation, and nature will return to its original state. It’s tidy, measurable, and fundable.
It also rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how ecological systems actually work.
Counterpoint
The pre-1788 benchmark treats ecosystems like museum pieces that can be restored to their original condition, rather than dynamic systems that respond to their current environment.
Remove the weeds, replant the natives, control the feral animals, and gradually the ecosystem will heal itself back to pre-disturbance conditions.
This story has powered countless restoration projects and consumed billions in conservation funding.
Only here is the thing.
There’s no way that nature could return to what it was.
Consider what has actually changed since 1788. Vegetation patterns have shifted permanently due to different fire regimes, grazing patterns, and fragmentation. Soil nutrient levels have been fundamentally altered by 235 years of agriculture, with nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon cycles disrupted beyond simple recovery. The climate itself is different, with temperature and rainfall patterns that would be alien to pre-European ecosystems.
More fundamentally, the available species pool has changed irreversibly. Some species are extinct. Others have been introduced and are now part of the system’s functioning. At times, over 200 million sheep were grazing native vegetation across outback Australia, with their fleeces and meat exported to Europe, representing a permanent net export of nutrients.
Yet the restoration fantasy persists because it promises control over complexity. It pretends we can fix what was broken.
But ecosystems aren’t machines that can be disassembled and reassembled with a torque wrench and some spare parts. They’re dynamic webs of relationships that respond to current conditions, not historical blueprints.
Thought Challenge
The soil test... Find a restoration project in your area. Ask what soil carbon levels were in 1788 versus today, and how long it would take to rebuild soil organic matter to historical levels. Research how soil formation actually occurs. Now ask yourself, if it takes millennia to build soil, how can we restore it in decades?
The species audit... List five species that have been locally extinct since European settlement. Now list five introduced species that perform ecological functions in your local area. Now decide which list represents the available species pool for any realistic restoration effort?
Both exercises sharpen the sceptical instinct to look beneath comforting narratives to physical reality. Instead of accepting restoration rhetoric, you learn to ask whether the proposed outcomes are actually achievable given current conditions.
Closing Reflection
Abandoning the pre-1788 fantasy isn’t giving up on conservation. But it will begin honest conservation.
Nature has an uncanny knack for persistence. It will always occupy available space and continue to have organisms interacting to transfer energy and nutrients around. But it will do this according to current conditions, not historical ones.
What we need is not restoration to an impossible past, but management for a functional future.
The dead cat on the table is that every hour we spend pursuing impossible restoration targets is an hour not spent on achievable conservation. Every dollar invested in returning to 1788 is a dollar not invested in maintaining ecosystem services under current conditions.
The pre-1788 benchmark fails scientifically, but it also fails morally, because it allows us to avoid the harder question. That one is how do we work with nature as it exists now, rather than as we imagine it once was?
Evidence Support
Foster, D. R., Motzkin, G., & Slater, B. (1998). Land-use history as long-term broad-scale disturbance: Regional forest dynamics in central New England. Ecosystems, 1(1), 96–119.
TL;DR… centuries-old land use and disturbance have irreversibly altered forest soils, species composition, and ecosystem processes in New England. Restoration efforts that attempt to return landscapes to a “pre-settlement” state consistently fail to recreate historical ecological conditions due to legacy effects and missing species.
Relevance to insight… even in relatively “pristine” forests, historical changes have left permanent scars on biodiversity and ecological function. It challenges the restoration fantasy by showing the futility of benchmarking against a lost past.
Hobbs, R. J., & Harris, J. A. (2001). Restoration ecology: Repairing the earth’s ecosystems in the new millennium. Restoration Ecology, 9(2), 239–246.
TL;DR… critically analyse the ambition to restore ecosystems to historical baselines, arguing that irreversible changes in climate, soil, and biota shape what is now possible. Restoration must focus on process and function rather than “pristine” pre-disturbance states.
Relevance to insight… This foundational synthesis in restoration ecology directly debunks the notion of historical fidelity, highlighting that most restoration targets are unattainable because essential baseline data and conditions have vanished.
Jackson, S. T., & Sax, D. F. (2010). Balancing biodiversity in a changing environment: Extinction debt, immigration credit, and species turnover. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 25(3), 153–160.
TL;DR… historical baselines are moving targets where species turnover, extinction debt, and novel arrivals guarantee that today’s assemblages will never match any past state. Restoration targets based on “original” condition are both scientifically and practically indefensible.
Relevance to insight… a deep-time perspective, showing how ecological change is the norm, not the exception and making any “pre-1788” restoration a historical fiction.
Seastedt, T. R., Hobbs, R. J., & Suding, K. N. (2008). Management of novel ecosystems: Are novel approaches required? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 6(10), 547–553
TL;DR… so much has changed in soil chemistry, species assemblages, disturbance regimes, that most present-day landscapes are “novel ecosystems.” Restoration must embrace new realities rather than chasing vanished historical conditions.
Relevance to insight… shifting the discourse to the management of “novel” rather than “restored” ecosystems, this research exposes the physical limits and ecological impossibilities of the “restore to 1788” paradigm.
All these papers converge on a singular, uncomfortable truth that restoration to a pre-settlement or pre-disturbance state is a fantasy, not a scientific or practical goal. They highlight the irreversible changes wrought by centuries of land use, species introductions and losses, climate shifts, and altered ecological processes. These studies underpin the contrarian insight that restoration ecology must abandon nostalgic baselines and instead aim for functional, resilient systems suited to present and future realities and not imaginary pasts.