The modern urge to turn a landscape into “what it once was,” to make it “better” by eliminating “pests,” to rid it of plants and animals that, because they didn’t coevolve with the environment, have a special capacity to devastate it, is a complex desire to appease—biologically, ethically, and practically. It is impossible, biologically, truly to “restore” any landscape. The reintroduction of plants and animals to a place suggests that though human engineering of one sort or another has “destroyed” a place, human engineering can bring it back, a bold but wrongheaded notion: humans aren’t able
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