Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Wild by Design : The Rise of Ecological Restoration, Hardback Book

Wild by Design : The Rise of Ecological Restoration Hardback

Hardback

Only a few left - usually despatched within 24 hours

Description

An environmental historian delves into the history, science, and philosophy of a paradoxical pursuit: the century-old quest to design natural places and create wild species. Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern.

Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats.

But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced.

It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and the first practitioners of the new scientific discipline of ecology. Restoration has been a touchstone of US environmentalism since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Diverging from popular ideas about preservation, which romanticized nature as an Eden to be left untouched by human hands, and conservation, the managed use of natural resources, restoration emerged as a “third way.” Restorationists grappled with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake?

What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore?

Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness?

Laura J. Martin shows how, over time, amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species.

At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that powerfully influenced what we understand the wild to be. In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy.

But Martin also offers something more—a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.

Information

Save 13%

£34.95

£30.19

Only a few left - usually despatched within 24 hours
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information