Ecological Restoration 151
that it is produced by humans, then the natural state of an area is what it was like prior to
human contact. If this state can be re-created, then we succeed in creating something
natural.
The history here, however, is a bit more interesting. As this debate was by and large
occurring in New World countries, it played out in a context whereby many participants
assumed that there was something to the notion that there either did exist a presettlement
condition to much of the Americas that was free of human infl uence or else one could
meaningfully distinguish between the “naturalness” of the Americas prior to and after the
point of European settlement. I cannot fully discuss here the origins of this view, but I and
others discuss it, its fl aws, and its unfortunate infl uence on natural resource policy else-
where (Cronon 1995; Light 2008). What is perhaps most important for the question of
defi ning restoration is that this strategy for answering Elliot and Katz would result in the
absurd claim that a truly authentic restoration could exist only in a place where there were
discernable presettlement conditions. If these conditions were temporally defi ned as con-
strained by a particular wave of settlement in the course of history (in the case of the
Americas, the pre-Columbian period), then authentic restorations could not exist at any
other place. If these conditions were spatially defi ned as constrained at all by the arguable
existence of human settlement in a place then authentic restorations could not exist in
many places because of the climactic or geographic changes that had occurred over time.
In short, in addition to the other criticisms that one could give of this kind of approach to
defi ning restoration, the route of accepting Elliot and Katz’s nature-artifact distinction and
then trying to prove “authentic” restorations as natural would result in far too constrained
a defi nition of restoration as to be practically useful.
In addition, such a view would of course be fallacious. What matters to Elliot and Katz
is not whether some place created by humans is or is not like some prior state (sullied or
unsullied by humans) but rather the place’s origins. Is something made by humans or not?
As all restorations are anthropogenic (as opposed to “natural” regenerations and the like)
none of them can be natural on this defi nition and so the premise for the moral worries
raised by Katz and Elliot follows.
So what about the option of responding to Katz and Elliot by rejecting their nature-
artifact distinction altogether? As I mention earlier, several authors have tried to take on
the terms of the debate offered by Katz and Elliot by denying the legitimacy of the nature-
artifact distinction. Most of these debates don’t appear to go very far as they too often
reduce to philosophical linguistic analysis by intuition. A critic, for example, of Katz will
point out that there are artifacts in the natural world that are not made by humans, such
as beaver dams, and be off and running. Katz will simply deny that beaver dams are arti-
facts by stipulating that an artifact is something that must be made by a human. Both sides
can point to numerous assumptions in the philosophical and nonphilosophical literature
that do or do not assume the anthropogenic nature of artifacts but neither proof by stipula-
tion is particularly compelling. To date neither Elliot nor Katz has cried uncle in the face