Invention

Abstract

Ecocentric restoration, understood as the attempt to compensate for novel influences on an ecosystem in order to allow the system to continue on or to resume its original, or natural, trajectory, was clearly conceived by biologists such as GeorgeWright and his colleagues. But it is hardly surprising that it failed to take root as a viable idea or accepted practice in the context of a large agency such as the National Park Service, where a wellestablished institutional culture oriented toward the satisfaction of public tastes and interests sturdily—and effectively—resisted what it rightly saw as a challenge to its basic assumptions about the agency’s mission. However, during the same period that Wright’s group and a few other like-minded biologists were pressing for a program of ecocentric restoration in the national parks, a handful of other scientists, experimenting with the same or similar ideas under very different conditions, actually managed to realize them in a practical way. They did this not on the grand scale of a national park such as Yosemite or Shenandoah but on the small scale appropriate for a new, and in many ways impractical, form of land management. And they did it either, as Ossian Simmonds had done, on privately owned land or under conditions in which, whether benefiting from the freedom of the private institution or the ivory tower privilege of the academy, they were as free as kids playing in a sandbox to tinker and experiment on their own terms, even when this seemed nothing more than fooling around or chasing pie-in-the-sky daydreams.