AGENDA
- The big picture/recap
- What to do about vanishing wilderness
Restoration vs rewilding
- Restoration--deliberately recreating a feature that existed before
- Rewilding--letting areas revert to being beyond human control (next time)
Restoration examples in Elliot, "Faking Nature"
- Dune example (p. 81)
- Moving a creek to accommodate a highway (p. 82)
More restoration examples
- Restoring the buffalo--
- at the brink of extinction at the end of the 19th century
- preserved by breeders and in zoos
- conservation movement decides to create herds
- buffalo from the Bronx zoo sent to Wichita wildlife refuge in Oklahoma
- contrast with buffalo herd at Yellowstone (not restored but highly managed)
- Eliminating non-native species in Florida
- Restoration projects involving plants and geological features?
Extreme faking (not restoration)
- Termite mounds at the Dallas Zoo
- Rock formations at the Arboretum--poured concrete
Elliot's arguments about restoration--
- "restoration policies do not always fully restore nature" (p. 84)
- "object's origins do affect its value and our valuations of it" (p. 85)
- real Vermeer painting vs. fake vermeer (p. 85)
- experience can be spoiled by knowing the origin (p. 86)
- knowing the buffalo came from the Bronx zoo
- knowing keys of an old piano are made of elephant tusks
- experience can be enhanced by beliefs about origin
- John Muir talking about Hetch Hetchy Valley (Yosemite)--p. 86
- He is not saying wild nature is the only thing we value--we may also admire aspects of a city or even a dam--p. 86 (exampled of a mixed natural and built environments--Trollstigen in Norway)
- He is not saying "natural is better" in all cases (diseases, etc.)--p. 87
- He is saying: "nature is not replaceable without depreciation in one aspect of its value which has to do with its genesis, its history" (p. 87)
- "Of course I can be deceived into thinking that a piece of landscape has that kind of history, has developed in the appropriate way. The success of the deception does not elevate the restored landscape to the level of the original, no more than the success of the deception in the previous example confers on the fake the value of a real Vermeer." (p. 88)
- Thought experiment--(a) virtual nature, experience machine (bad) (b) totally synthetic nature (a bit better) (c) real but restored (best, but still not great)
