Making Amends to the Myriad Creatures

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.​

The purpose of the rapidly growing discipline called ecological restoration is to heal damaged landscapes by reinstating their original plant and animal communities, thereby making amends for humankind's degradation of ecosystems. Thousands of people nationwide are involved in this rigorous, labor-intensive, painstakingly slow work. Stephanie Mills, a leading figure in the bioregional movement, describes the difficulties, pitfalls, and rewards in store for those who return a given area to its earlier biological diversity, stability, and beauty. She shows that protecting wilderness is not the only motive behind restoration: another is to regain a sense of belonging to and depending on one's local ecosystem, with the hope that "cultural interaction with [it] will inculcate a moral restraint on the impulse to control and determine, to expand and exploit," resulting in a sustainable way of life for future generations.