Sage on my left and crested wheatgrass on my right on my way into the deep nowhere of high desert Oregon.

We live in a society that replaces craftsmanship and beauty with functionality. We don’t raise animals. We produce them by the tens of thousands inside walls, and then we thaw and heat them according to the instructions on the package. We don’t build cathedrals. We put churches in strip malls. Most red barns are sided with sheet metal. Most new houses are sided with vinyl. I think this cheapness has metastasized into our view of the natural world and ecological restoration as a practice. We should raise our standards, and consider beauty and complexity and what they add to human experience.

Restoration seeks to recover aspects of a natural system that have been lost through some form of disturbance, usually resulting from human activities. Ask a scientist to provide…