ABSTRACT
For decades, the dominant trope in environmental writing has been elegy. Optimism, to the extent that it was in evidence, was largely defensive: save the redwoods, declare an unspoiled area “wilderness,” list a species as endangered. But then in the 1980s, a shift of perspective began to take hold among environmentalists and, more particularly, among a growing group of biologists and ecologists who carved out a new sub-fi eld they called “conservation biology.” Acknowledging loss was still at the center of concern (indeed, conservation biologists promoted the idea of a biodiversity crisis) but the point was less to save the few remaining remnants of unspoiled nature than it was to enlist fellow biologists and the public in an effort to recover what we have lost, to undo where possible the damage we have done. Conservation biology quickly gave birth to another sub-fi eld, restoration ecology, and a formal society, the Society for Ecological Restoration.1
