"Restoration"--A Misnomer?

Keith Kloor's News Focus article about the restoration of North America's forests (28 Jan., p. 573) suggests to me that it might be time to retire the word “restoration.” There are at least three problems with the field of restoration ecology. First is the arbitrariness of determining which time period in the past should be the target of restoration efforts. In the United States, this has typically been assumed to be before settlement by Europeans. But why should that be the target any more than the time before the native Americans settled the region? Perhaps the most common environment in the past 15,000 years should be the target. In Minnesota, this would mean that much of the landscape would be restored to several hundred meters of ice. The second problem is that there is an implication of stasis with the word “restored.” Not only do we try to replicate some past environment, but then we try to maintain it in that form through management. Yet nature is not static. The third problem is that true restoration is simply impossible. The climate is no longer the same, and keystone species are absent or new species are present that make it impossible to truly restore the habitat to any prior state.