150 Andrew Light
1990: “Ecological restoration is the process of intentionally altering a site to establish a defi ned,
indigenous, historic ecosystem. The goal of this process is to emulate the structure, function, diver-
sity, and dynamics of the specifi ed ecosystem.”
1996: “Ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery and management of ecological
integrity. Ecological integrity includes a critical range of variability in biodiversity, ecological pro-
cesses and structures, regional and historical context, and sustainable cultural practices.”
2002: “Ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been
degraded, damaged, or destroyed.” (all three quotes from Higgs 2003: 107–110)
One notable thing about these different defi nitions is how thin they become over time. In
1990 the defi nition invoked what most ecologists and historians today would consider
contentious categories, most especially, the notion of an “indigenous” ecosystem as if
indigenous necessarily denoted a valuable end-state. By 1996 the defi nition had put the
burden of defi ning whether something had achieved a good state on the substantive notion
of “ecological integrity,” though by this time admitting a range of variability in meeting
that target without appeal to an indigenous system. By 2002 all substantive attempts to
defi ne restoration were scrapped so that the practice amounted only to the “recovery” of
an ecosystem that had been damaged in some way. Whether this recovery created some
form of integrity or historical fi delity to an indigenous system had dropped off the map
of determining whether a practice was a restoration or not.
While this evolution of the defi nition of restoration by the SER was not directly driven
by the philosophical criticisms offered by Elliot and Katz, having taken part in some of
the discussions over the years about how to defi ne restoration, I can attest that it is the
case that these sorts of worries were in the air (one also gets a strong sense of this in Higgs
[2003], to be discussed more later in this section). The choice essentially came down to
this: either hold onto the distinction at the root of Elliot and Katz’s concerns—again, things
that are “natural” and things that are “artifacts”—and then show that restorations really
are natural, or else reject the distinction between the natural and the artifi cial altogether
and come up with a different way of referring to the realm under discussion that does not
depend on such a distinction.
Those in the restoration community who opted to keep the distinction and prove that
restorations really are natural, and so were not subject to the kinds of criticisms offered
by Elliot and Katz, started what became known as the “authenticity debate.” On this view
we should redefi ne the desired end-state of a restoration in such a way that it was clear
that what was wanted was to create the most purely authentic and natural landscapes
possible. The debate was over how we would defi ne those criteria for authenticity. We
can see this in the language of the 1990 defi nition, which again puts a priority on re-creat-
ing an “indigenous, historic ecosystem.” By and large what was meant by indigenous
in this sense was to go back to a state that would be free of any trace of prior human
disturbance. The logic here, while fl awed, is clear: If what makes something artifi cial is