Word: ecosystems
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...restoration at times resembles gardening, it draws inspiration from a very different philosophy. Gardeners seek to improve on nature and tame its excesses. Restorationists, however, strive to return to the landscape the very things people find hostile, including fires, floods and all the noisome critters that help keep each ecosystem in healthy kilter. "The restorationist is a servant of nature, not of his or her personal whims or tastes," reflects William Jordan III, of the four-year-old Society for Ecological Restoration in Madison, Wis. "A prairie, for instance, is not altogether a pleasant place to be. Some people would...
Restoring an ecosystem is somewhat like restoring a house or piece of antique furniture. "Before you begin," observes Holly Richter, a consultant with the Nature Conservancy in Boulder, "you need to know what the original looked like." Historical records can provide valuable insights. Passages from the Old Testament, for instance, have helped Israeli restorationists re-create biblical landscapes at Neot Kedumim, a 220-hectare (545-acre) nature reserve in the Judean hills. In similar fashion, the diaries of a 19th century doctor have provided Illinois ecologists with a list of plants that once flourished under the light shade...
...Biospherians, they insist that there is nothing fraudulent about their enterprise and chalk up many of the objections to misunderstandings between "hard" scientists and those in the softer field of environmental research. Ecosystems cannot be strictly controlled as can experiments in a lab, observes Kathleen Dyhr, the project's director of communications. "The charges are those every ecosystem ecologist has to face all the time from laboratory scientists...
Over the ages, indigenous peoples have developed innumerable technologies and arts. They have devised ways to farm deserts without irrigation and produce abundance from the rain forest without destroying the delicate balance that maintains the ecosystem; they have learned how to navigate vast distances in the Pacific using their knowledge of currents and the feel of intermittent waves that bounce off distant islands; they have explored the medicinal properties of plants; and they have acquired an understanding of the basic ecology of flora and fauna. If this knowledge had to be duplicated from scratch, it would beggar the scientific resources...
...verb monere, to warn. If a city sinned against heaven, heaven sent it a monster. One can argue that the Sphinx, who confronted travelers to Thebes with her famous riddle, was born of some Oedipal crime and performed an important, if carnivorous, role in the balance of the ethical ecosystem. Monsters, therefore, were created to teach lessons. And they can still be pedagogical -- even in an age that no longer believes in the gods or their messengers. Our misfortune is that monsters need not look monstrous. Hence, schoolboys in Africa. Hence, Jeffrey Dahmer in Milwaukee, who, with his strong cheekbones...