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This chapter describes different discourses of agricultural systems to help us think through different modalities for human relations with the biotic community, including restoration agriculture and agroecology. Exploring the metaphors and narratives that underlie these agricultural practices enables us to trace the consequences of existing and alternative practices. Stories from farmers who have adopted these practices show how stories and metaphors provide alternate models for human–earth relations that then lead to changed practices.

Restoration is undertaken not only to reverse habitat losses but also to recover the many valuable ecosystem services associated with coastal habitats. While ecosystem services are increasingly being used to define restoration objectives for a number of marine and terrestrial habitats, historical estimates of ecosystem service delivery are rare, in part due to the difficulty of making such estimates. However, by combining historical data with an understanding of the habitat characteristics (e.g., density or habitat complexity) and environmental conditions (e.g., salinity, location relative to other habitats) that influence service provision, historical estimates of ecosystem services can be used to target restoration efforts and management practices toward the desired outcomes. Oyster reefs have suffered an estimated 85 percent decline globally over the past 150 years, and there are growing efforts to restore oyster reefs at a large scale to recover oyster fishery, fish production, water quality, and other ecosystem services. In this chapter, Philine zu Ermgassen, Mark D. Spalding, and Robert D. Brumbaugh explore the estimation of historical provision of ecosystem services in oyster reefs as a case study to understand the ecological and socially relevant reference points that these estimates provide for restoration goals.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between restoration ecology and climate change. It addresses whether climate change implies the death of restoration, and discusses how the current and future climatic change caused by anthropogenic global warming challenge the practice of restoration.

This chapter addresses restoration ecology. It proposes a definition of restoration ecology that is intended to avoid confounding the natural-artificial distinction with normative issues. It assumes that restored environments are artifacts with specific functions and argues that they may have values on account of these functions. It provides 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. This chapter suggests that the moral potential of restoration ecology is that restorations can agitate links between persons and nature as well as simply among persons.

Historical perspectives are relevant to marine conservation, yet rarely integrated into planning efforts. Marine conservation planning is concerned with measures that should be taken in the future. It usually focuses on mitigating anticipated adverse changes caused by current and future human activities, with the assumption that present conditions should be maintained. In this chapter, Natalie C. Ban, John N. Kittinger, John Pandolfi, Robert L. Pressey, Ruth Thurstan, Matthew J. Lybolt, and Simon Hart show that without incorporating historical data and analysis, such approaches, in the best case, will cause us to aim too low and, in the worst case, can result in inappropriate targets for planning and management. We review the role that historical perspectives can provide in marine conservation planning, highlight planning exercises in which this has occurred or has been discussed, and provide recommendations for researchers and planners. Using the systematic conservation-planning framework, we show that each planning stage benefits from a historical perspective, and we illustrate that failure to consider historical information reduces the effectiveness of marine conservation planning. We posit that historical perspectives may shift the conservation focus from restoring previous ecosystem states to recovering critical ecosystem functions that maintain resilience. Historical perspectives can change the conservation vision for a region, providing a window onto possibilities for the future.

Rewilding is an optimistic environmental agenda to reverse the loss of biodiversity and reconnect society with nature. This chapter explores Britain’s ecological history, back to the Last Interglacial before the arrival of modern humans, when the climate was similar to today, to analyse how conservationists can learn from the past to rewild the ecosystems of the present and prepare for an uncertain future. Because there is no single point in history that should or could be recreated, rewilding focuses on re-establishing naturally dynamic ecological processes that, through an appropriate sequence of species reintroductions, attempts to move the ecosystem towards a more appropriately biodiverse and functional state. A state that is self-sustaining in the present climate, and that projected for the near future. Specifically, this chapter explores a rewilding solution to conservation challenges associated with over-grazing, limited germination niche availability, and river dynamics: the reintroduction of wolves, wild boar, and beaver respectively. This sequence of reintroductions is suggested to be complimentary, each altering ecosystem dynamics to facilitate the return of the next. Evidence indicates wolves will reduce deer abundance and re-distribute browsing intensity promoting tree regeneration, particularly in riparian areas, increasing woodland availability to the more habitat-dependent wild boar and beaver. An important message behind rewilding is that a rich biodiversity with all guilds well represented, including the ones that polarize public opinion, such as large predators, are important components of ecosystem service rich and self-sustaining ecosystems, particularly in core areas.

Conservation in developing countries like India increasingly involves approaches transcending boundaries that have traditionally constrained nature conservation. As species range and ecological processes play out over large areas, including outside protected reserves and in human-use areas, conservationists increasingly integrate their efforts across wider landscapes involving human communities and newer constituencies. The recognition that few, if any, natural areas remain pristine or completely uninfluenced by humans, emerging from studies of deep ecological history and global changes, stimulates a recasting of nature conservation. Ecological field research that has revealed gradations of human influence on biological diversity, ranging from destruction and degradation to recovery and restoration, indicates effective conservation requires areas of low anthropogenic impact to be retained in the wider landscape. At the same time, restoration and rewilding efforts that use ecological history as a guide to enhance ecological and cultural potential of a landscape demonstrate positive roles for humans in conservation.