Ecological Restoration 149
been laid out. My underlying position is that we should try to tease apart a description
of what a restoration is—let’s call this the descriptive project—from our assessment
of whether a restoration is a good thing in a social or moral sense—let’s call this
the normative project. Under the infl uence of Elliot and Katz these two projects have
been run together by allowing our assessment of whether a restored environment is an
artifact drive our intuitions about whether or not it holds positive moral or social
value. Naturally evolved ecosystems are good, or at least contain some kind of value
that must be respected in a moral sense, by virtue of them being biological rather than
artifactual. In turn there is something morally or socially suspect about restorations in
part just because they can be described as artifacts. Following the terms of this
debate many critics of Elliot and Katz have tried to either re-describe the intrinsic value
of nature in some way so as to make it applicable to a restored environment or else show
how there are artifactual components of nonhuman environments that do not detract from
the value of those systems (see, e.g., Gunn 1991; Rolston 1994; Scherer 1995; Throop
1997).
To my mind these debates do not get us very far either for the descriptive project of
defi ning restorations or the normative project of determining their value. I fi nd it unassail-
able that restorations are made things, and so, in that sense, human artifacts. But the fact
that they are artifacts seems to me largely inconsequential for determining whether they
are good or bad for us, other animals, or the environment. Therefore in the fi rst part of
this chapter, I look at various attempts at defi ning restorations, coming back to a claim
that an understanding that may work best, and I hope does not run together the descriptive
and morally or socially normative dimensions of restoration, is one that can be generated
out of a functional description of restored environments. While there is certainly a norma-
tive dimension of our description of a restoration it need not entail a normative assessment
of its social or moral dimensions. Whether or not something is good for us, or good for
other animals or the environment writ large, should be determined by other means. And
so in the second and third parts of this chapter I give a very different set of reasons for
why artifacts can have positive or negative moral or social value regardless of the fact that
they are artifacts. If this argument holds then we can give Elliot and Katz their contentious
claim that the world can be divided between things that are more or less natural and things
that are not, and undermine the claim that anything necessarily follows about the moral
or social value of those things.
9.1 What Is Ecological Restoration?
The primary organization for restoration ecologists is the Society for Ecological Restora-
tion International (SER). Over the years it has tried again and again to defi ne restoration.
Here are a few representative examples: