152 Andrew Light
of such examples though Elliot at least has signifi cantly mellowed in his overall moral
assessment of restoration.
Another kind of answer is pursued by Eric Higgs who has produced the most ecologi-
cally informed treatment of the philosophical dimensions of restoration so far (Higgs
2003). One fair way of understanding Higgs’s view is that it is in part based on a claim
that we should expect that restorations should have cultural components because their
reference ecosystems have cultural components as well insofar as humans have evolved
a variety of modes of interaction with different places. The mistake of many defi nitions
of restoration (especially those espoused during the authenticity debate) is that they
focused too much on technical profi ciency and did not provide an “indication of the wider
cultural context of restoration practice” (p. 108). A good restoration on Higgs’s account
is one that is characterized by attention both to historical fi delity to predisturbance condi-
tions as well as to re-creation of the ecological integrity of a site.
I fi nd nothing wrong with the general direction in which Higgs is moving. Good restora-
tions should pay attention to natural and cultural elements insofar as we can meaningfully
distinguish between those elements at any particular site. But I do feel compelled to stay
true to the intuitions I expressed at the start that we should try to keep apart the descriptive
and normative accounts of restoration so as to avoid what I take to be the unhelpful direc-
tion that most of the philosophical debate on restoration has gone in, again, to too easily
derive our moral and social assessment of restorations from our description of the kind of
thing we take them to be. In Katz’s review of Higgs’s book we can see how the account
opens itself up to this traditional move in the literature. For Katz, something like the eco-
logical integrity of a place immediately disappears as soon as human intentionality is
introduced, and, on his view, nature is made into an artifact (Katz 2007: 216). An artifact
cannot have an “ecological” integrity, good, bad, or otherwise. Moreover, it becomes clear
by the end of Higgs’s book that the baseline defi nition of restoration in terms of historical
fi delity and ecological integrity eventually point us toward a broader notion of restoration
(“ecocultural” restoration) where companion categories of “cultural fi delity” are added
onto the normative description of what counts as a good restoration. Unfortunately this
move even further blurs the lines between our descriptions and prescriptions of restoration.
This is not to say there is anything necessarily wrong with Higgs’s overall view. It deserves
assessment in its own right separate from the defi nition of what counts as a restoration.
To get around these debates I believe that we should simply accept that restorations are
artifacts and defi ne them as such. But how can we identify them? What kind of artifacts
are they? If we go back to the three defi nitions formulated by the SER there is one common
element to ecological restorations that is sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit: all
three defi nitions in some way appeal to the function of a restoration as part of its descrip-
tion. The 1990 defi nition says this explicitly. The 1996 and 2002 defi nitions imply it by
appeal to the creation of a thing that actively does something, namely, assisting in the
recovery of some state or process. The underlying intuition is that something is a restora-