Nature's Restoration: People and Places on the Front Lines of Conservation

by Peter Friederici

Across America and around the world, people are working to helpnature heal itself. In Bermuda, a man single-handedly grows thousandsof trees on a small island to restore nesting habitat for a rare... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 155963085X
• ISBN13: 9781559630856
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Island Press
• Length: 308 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A Rest Oration

Let's face it, picking up most environmental books, with their relentless message of doom and gloom, seems to require a talent for masochism or depression. And it's only gotten worse: in the 1970s environmentalists worried about polluted rivers or violated public lands, but now its planetary disasters like global warming, resource depletion, or mass extincitons; and the human race hasn't been showing much talent at facing these realities. How refreshing, then, to come upon a book that inspires environmental hope. The concept of environmental restoration, the idea that humans can nurse damaged landscapes back into health, has been quietly gathering momentum for years, and this book finally brings its thinking and its leaders and its dramas into full view. Peter Friederici is uniquely placed to write this story, since he has been involved in two of the leading restoration efforts in America, the efforts to restore prairies in Illinois and ponderosa pine forests in the Southwest. In addition to these places this book offers an even greater variety of landscapes, from an Hawaiian island long used for military target practice to a Bermuda invaded by luxury developments to ghost chestnut forests in Virginia to a flooded canyon in the Southwest. That such a variety of landscapes can be addressed by the same concept of restoration is a testimony to its value. Friederici also comes up with an amazing cast of characters who are involved in restoration efforts, people deeply in love with their land, dreamers enough to take on a major challenge yet practical enough to maneuver through complicated politicial realities. Restoration involves some philosophical challenges to our usual sense of nature, including challenges to environmentalists. Here in northern Arizona environmentalists will walk through a grotesquely unnatural forest, the product of a century of logging and fire suppression, a forest almost groomed to produce catastrophic fires, and yet they will feel a naive, book-induced sense of oneness with primordial nature and will oppose any interventions in the forest. Environmental restoration includes the paradox that the only way to return the land to pre-pioneer "naturalness" is through further human intervention. Thus restoration efforts have been opposed both by developers and by environmentalists. The political complexities faced by restoration efforts are also explored in this book. But amid all the complexities, Friederici maintains a poetic feel for the land and offers graceful philosophical musings on the place of humans in nature.