ABSTRACT
Ecological restoration may be perhaps the most intellectually stimulating and ethically troubling of all forms of environmental action. Restoration design (sensu France 2007a), as opposed to restoration ecology (the assembly of the broken bits and pieces of damaged ecosystems), is a comprehensive and integrative way in which to look upon both the world and our role within it. Restoration design can be dened as the activity through which “reparation-minded individuals directly and creatively nd ways in which to engage nature by establishing deeper physical and intellectual relationships with their world during the process of re-imagining, reconguring, and ‘restoring’ the ecological spaces in which they live and their consciousness in terms of how they live” (France 2007a). The restoration of the Iraqi marshlands has the potential to become one of the most important cases in the next few years of how this full potential of restoration can be realized, a way of not simply restoring the damage we have done to the physical environment, but also restoring the relationship that people have had to that special environment. The full potential of restoration, then, as Andrew Light (2004) sees it, is not simply the technical restoration of the environment but also the restoration of the cultural relationship with nature.
