ABSTRACT
While the term “restoration” is widely used in the United States and Europe, many projects and activities falling under this rubric might more appropriately be labeled “renaturing.” Restoration often aims to recreate presettlement conditions (in the United States) or some other chosen point in the past. We are not alone in questioning this focus; many of the authors in this volume challenge and evaluate the use of a single historical point to frame restoration activities. We fi nd that “restoration” is especially problematic in urban situations, where the settlement activity impacts soils and nutrients, fragments land cover, alters hydrology, and can change human values for the land and thereby seriously restrict hopes of returning a site to historic conditions with any degree of authenticity. For example, a prairie restoration at the scale of a nature garden or even one 50 acres (20 hectares) in extent will never be home to a bison, the prairie’s keystone species. Instead, most projects focus on recovering or reintroducing the key fl ora of a target community and hope to attract smaller fauna such as butterfl ies and reptiles. A dune restoration cannot be given the freedom to shift across a park road or into a neighbor’s backyard. Instead, plant communities in the urban world are necessarily fi xed in space and any movement of elements in the community must take place within site boundaries. And while prescribed burning may be used to manage the understory of an open oak woodland or savannah restoration, setting back succession with a stand-consuming crown fi re is not in the urban restorationist’s playbook. While the historical context can provide ideas of what plants to use or stream shapes to reconfi gure, we also need creative, contemporary strategies to deal with the new realities of climate, species arrivals (be they invasives or endangered species fi nding new habitat), fragmentation, changes in human population and settlement patterns, industrial legacies, altered hydrology, and other unknowns involved in bringing back ecological structure and function.
