The Case for Doing Less

On the Ayrshire wetland the single most effective intervention cost almost nothing: we stopped maintaining the field drains. Everything that followed — the scrapes, the meander, the trees — was refinement.

This is uncomfortable for a profession that is paid to specify. There is no line item for restraint, no drawing that shows an absence, no photograph of the thing you did not do.

And yet the landscapes that recover fastest are almost always the ones where we correctly identified the one thing preventing recovery and removed it, rather than the ones where we installed a great deal of well-intentioned habitat.

Doing less is not the same as doing nothing. It requires more survey, not less; more evidence, not less; and considerably more confidence in front of a client.