Wild by Design

The Rise of Ecological Restoration
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-0-674-97942-0
Verlag: Harvard University Press

Buch, Englisch, 336 Seiten, Format (B × H): 164 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 668 g

An environmental historian delves into the history, science, and philosophy of a paradoxical pursuit: the century-old quest to design natural places and create wild species.

Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and the first practitioners of the new scientific discipline of ecology.

Restoration has been a touchstone of US environmentalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. Diverging from popular ideas about preservation, which romanticized nature as an Eden to be left untouched by human hands, and conservation, the managed use of natural resources, restoration emerged as a “third way.” Restorationists grappled with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? Laura J. Martin shows how, over time, amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that powerfully influenced what we understand the wild to be.

In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more—a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Martin, Laura J.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Umweltpolitik, Umweltprotokoll
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Regierungspolitik Umwelt- und Gesundheitspolitik
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Angewandte Ökologie
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Ökologie
• Technische Wissenschaften Umwelttechnik | Umwelttechnologie Umwelttechnik
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Umweltschutz, Umwelterhaltung
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Umwelttechnik

Über Autor(innen)

Martin, Laura J.
Laura J. Martin is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College. She is a past fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment. She has written for <i>Scientific American</i>, <i>Slate</i>, <i>Environmental History</i>, <i>Environmental Humanities</i>, <i>Trends in Ecology and Evolution</i>, and other publications.