BOOK TALK WITH AUTHOR LAURA J. MARTIN, MODERATED BY BRADLEY CANTRELL + ELIZABETH MEYER
FOLLOWED BY A BOOK-SIGNING + RECEPTION
Restorationists grapple with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? Laura J. Martin shows how amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that transformed what we understand the wild to be.
In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more―a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.
Wild by Design is the recipient of a 2023 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, presented by the UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes' Landscape Studies Initiative for its significant contributions to landscape studies.