Where we've been

There has been a history of debate about how, if at all, to repair damaged natural spaces. There have been a number of answers to the question of how much to repair these spaces.

There are still many who believe that the cost of returning these spaces to inhabitable condition is way too high for the positive impact. There have of course been many others who believed that the Earth provides us with many services of a high enough value that we should work to clean up after our messes.

Among those who want to repair the damage we've done, there have been three major ideas about the state to which we should return natural spaces. The first is that we should not cause harm to humans or to especially sensitive environments. This is the stance the the EPA took with Superfund sites. Basically, this involves remediating the area to remove any toxins if they could harm humans. A second opinion is that we should return as much of the Earth to a "wilderness model", where we return everything we can to the state that it was before human involvement. This is the idea that we should fully restore natural spaces as much as possible. These first two ideas have been the ideas debated between for the last few decades.

The third idea, which is somewhere in the middle, is what has become a more popular idea recently. This idea is that we need to restore natural spaces to the point where humans are a sustainable part of the natural ecosystem. This approach acknowledges the fact that humans are going to continue invade natural spaces, but that we should do so without totally destroying them.