Chapter Synthesis

The world and its creatures have sustained too much damage to persist through protective isolation. Restoration, not preservation, is the best hope for achieving the goals of conservation biology. And the human experience will continue to be impoverished by the absence of living creatures and functioning ecosystems if we see ourselves only as the cause of their demise, and our separation from them the only cure. We will reclaim our full knowledge, our cultural heritage, and our proper role only through active participation in restoring the world around us.

Historical benchmarks provide good guides for restoration, but they are not the only appropriate targets. Restoration is not simply turning back the clock on natural processes because living systems constantly change, and those creatures that live within such systems adapt to and depend on change in order to survive. Moreover, no such historical view may be available to guide us in many cases; historical data on most ecosystems are sketchy at best, absent at worst. To restore ecosystems effectively, we must combine respect for a system's past with the ability to imagine, create, and invent its future, often aiming toward functional goals rather than historical measures.

Restoration is essential to conservation. There are simply not enough pristine areas left for all the remaining individuals of the world's other species to survive solely in areas that humans choose to "preserve." Restoration changes the equation of human use and degradation from an endless process of habitat loss and degradation to, potentially, an equilibrium in which humans give back some of what they have received, and habitats are created for populations to grow, not merely preserved for populations to persist.

Restoration rightly expands, as well as dignifies, the human ecological role. As Frederick Turner said, "Potentially, at least, human civilization can be the restorer, propagator, and even creator of natural diversity, as well as its protector and preserver" (Turner 1994). Restoration is the process that actualizes humanity's best relationship to nature—that of necessary contributors to the health and beauty of the world around us—and requires that we reflectively and intelligently participate in making what is damaged work, and making what is degraded whole. That humans are often the cause of ecological damage and degradation does not diminish the value of present and future restoration. In this we find the true meaning and ultimate expression of conservation.

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