A number of environmental philosophers, foremost among whom are Eric Katz and Robert Elliot, have offered influential arguments against the very idea of ecological restoration. A significant part of the value of a natural environment, they argue, lies simply in its naturalness, which is to say the absence from it of human intervention. Once human beings have harmed such an environment in the various ways they can harm it—plowing it over, degrading its soil, introducing exotic species, poisoning it with toxic wastes, turning it into parking lot or suburb or park—that naturalness is lost, and no attempts at undoing that harm, no matter how successful they might be at reproducing the flora and fauna and ecosystemic functioning of the original landscape, can recapture it. A restored landscape, Elliot argues in his essay “Faking Nature,” is like an art forgery: even if it were perceptually indistinguishable from the earlier landscape it attempts to reproduce (difficult though this situation may be even to imagine), nonetheless crucial facts about its history, and in particular about the role of human beings in creating it, would still mean that its ontological status would be significantly different from that of the earlier one, and that its value would be less. 1