My youtube feed gets a decent amount of recommendation from channels such as Mossy Earth, Plant Wild, etc. that showcase some nature restauration project. While I cannot help myself to be a bit skeptical of those efforts (how really sustainable is all of this; isn't that just a tiny drop in the ocean, etc.), I really like to have positive and hopeful news like the one of this article amidst all the ambient negativity and pessimism.
The way I see it, yeah it's a drop in the ocean, but these individual sites will act as "seeds", safe havens for wildlife that, from there, can spread out far and wide. Like these fish, they don't stay there, they go far and wide and become part of a much bigger ecosystem. Part of the reason why these restoration projects are important is because at the time, people weren't aware (or didn't care) of the scale or impact their efforts in hunting beavers had. I'm sure the individual hunters also figured their hunting was a drop in the ocean.
This is a good way to look at it. The more and more complex life survives the anthropocene, the better off the biosphere when this Age has passed. Many times in the past life survived in small pockets (an evolutionary bottleneck event), so making small pockets is more than just a symbolic gesture.
At the very least they give us real-world experiments for what works, and honestly I will take the occasional bit of ecological good news over another article explaining how doomed everything is
And new techniques for future efforts. I forget which groups are doing what but they're doing things like pulling over trees in old plantations to increase diversity, and designing(and iterating on) coral-reef-promoting structures that can be locally manufactured and installed where restoration is needed.
Next up - if human manipulation of the world makes it so that these animals stay animals or if we're just setting things up to be the next padded safe room and their behavior changes. (as if it hasn't already)
