catching up

Last month I attended the 3rd National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration, held in Los Angeles... the bi-annual event which originally inspired this blog about two years ago. It was perhaps slightly surreal to sit and talk about restoration in an upscale hotel in downtown LA, in one of the least natural places on the planet, a paved over semi-desert now covered by shiny glass and steel boxes. Yet, there we were.

The event was a little smaller this time, heavier on agency folks and lighter on corporate folks, a reflection of the current economic times. I was only able to stay for the first two days, because I was just off a Midwestern trip, and had deadlines waiting for me back at the office.

The key thing I heard at the event: Several folks in keynote talks saying that we're now in the third great wave of restoration. The first, they said, was early preservation efforts, the National Parks set aside by Teddy Roosevelt and so on. The second phase, the regulatory changes of the 60s and 70s, beginning with the publication of "Silent Spring" and with the surge of command-and-control laws which followed. The third... well, I heard several definitions, with the word sustainable thrown around a lot, but I'm not sure I heard one clear definition that stuck. That's so often the case in times of change.

More on that in a little bit.