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Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration is a 2022 book by Laura J. Martin, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College. The book explains how ecological restoration became a cornerstone of global environmental policy and management. Martin defines restoration as "an attempt to co-design nature with non-human collaborators." Wild by Design calls for the unification of ecological restoration and social justice.

Content
Wild by Design reflects Martin's experience as both a historian and a scientist. The book begins with the founding of the American Bison Society in 1905 and ends with efforts to use assisted migration and assisted evolution to save species from climate change. During this period restoration transformed “from a diffuse, uncoordinated practice into a scientific discipline and an international and increasingly privatized undertaking."

The game restoration movement began in the early 1900s when conservationists dissatisfied with gun and hunting restrictions argued that bison could be bred and then released onto designated reservations. Showing that five of the first bison reservations were established on Indian reservations, Martin argues that these restoration efforts focused on biodiversity benefits accruing to white settlers while disregarding Native American sovereignty. The railroad was a crucial technology in the settler colonial origins of the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System.

The 1930s were a key time for restoration efforts. As ecology became a professionalized science, ecologists competed with foresters for influence over federal environmental management. Ecologists began to frame nature reservations as scientific control sites for their studies. Pursing scientific investigation, restorationists sought to protect ecosystems like grasslands that had previously attracted little attention. At the same time, women botanists and landscape architects like Eloise Butler, Edith Roberts, and Elsa Rehmann developed the science of native plant propagation. Influenced by their work, Aldo Leopold and other Ecological Society of America members began to focus on managing animals by manipulating plant species rather than eliminating predators or artificially propagating species.

Martin analyzes how the Atomic Age lead ecologists to shift from single-species restoration to ecosystem restoration. From World War II until the 1970s, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was the world's main funder of ecological research. Ecologists traced radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons as they moved through organisms and ecosystems. During the 1960s, the AEC funded ecological simulations of World War III, in which ecologists intentionally destroyed ecosystems to study how biodiversity recovered. E. O. Wilson, for instance, poisoned entire islands off the Florida coast to study their restoration. Martin writes that through these experiments, ecologists developed the narrative that beyond a particular threshold of damage, nature would no longer be able to heal itself. The diversity-stability hypothesis emerged from these Doomsday experiments, along with the idea that certain species are more resilient to environmental disturbance than others.

Part III of Wild by Design analyses the impact of post-1970s environmental laws on restoration efforts and why the goal of returning ecosystems to precolonial conditions emerged. The Endangered Species Act of 1973, for example, revolutionized the management policies of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. For decades, the agency had worked to kill native predators, but with the new law in place, the FWS initiated captive breeding programs for endangered wildlife, including predators. Martin argues that Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act played an unappreciated and crucial role in the subsequent professionalization of ecological restoration. Meanwhile, land trusts like The Nature Conservancy found it increasingly difficult to secure federal permission to work with endangered and threatened species and it shifted to killing non-native species. Invasive species management became a widespread practice among land trusts, and the number of land trusts globally skyrocketed in the 1980s. Land managers "naturalized the precolonial baseline, obfuscating their role in designing native nature." The international Society for Ecological Restoration was founded by land trust managers in 1988.

In the 1990s restoration was corporatized and consolidated. Martin argues that wetland restoration practices during this period set the intellectual and procedural precedent for international carbon offsetting. Off-site mitigation is when environmental destruction in one place is compensated for with restoration of an environment elsewhere. Martin explains how off-site mitigation began with wetland mitigation under Section 404 of the U.S. Clean Water Act. Wild by Design analyzes how the Walt Disney Company, The Nature Conservancy, the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation, and other entities brokered the Disney Wilderness Preserve as the world's first large off-site mitigation project. Noting that off-setting projects are often based in the Global South, while those purchasing offsetting “credits” are in the Global North, Martin denounces carbon colonialism as an example of how restoration can create unequal distributions of power and resources.

Today ecological restoration is one of the world’s most influential forms of environmental management. The United Nation Declared 2021-2030 to be the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and governments, corporations, and NGOs spend billions of dollars on restoration. The growing appeal of this approach, Martin writes, is that restoration represents a middle ground between preservation and conservation, “more active than preservation but more restrained than conservation.” Wild by Design emphasizes that over the course of history, restorationists often caused social injustice, and it argues that successful environmental management must pursue social justice alongside ecological health. Martin portrays restoration as an active social and political pursuit that offers the most hopeful future for biodiversity protection.

Awards
Wild by Design won the 2023 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies. It was a finalist for the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History and the 2023 Project Syndicate Sustainability Book Award.