"The modern urge to turn a landscape into "what it once was", to make it "better" by eliminating "pests", to rid it of plants and animals that, because they didn't co-evolve with the environment, have a special capacity to devastate it, is a complex desire to appease - biologically, ethically, and practically. It is impossible, biologically, truly to "restore" any landscape. The reintroduction of plants and animals to a place suggests that though human engineering of one sort or another has "destroyed" a place, human engineering can bring it back, a bold but wrongheaded notion: humans aren't able to reverse the direction of evolution, to darn a landscape back together like a sweater that has unraveled. Restoration privileges some animals and plants over others, and therefore presents ethical problems identical to those one faces in examining any project of social engineering or any country's policies of racial and ethnic discrimination. Finally, it is not possible to restore the soil chemistry of lands turned nearly lifeless by decades of irrigation, chemical fertilizers, and overgrazing.
Lopez, Horizon, pp396-397
