ABSTRACT
Ecological restoration as a widely recognized fi eld of practice and research emerged in the 1980s, partly as a reaction and addition to traditional nature conservation strategies, and partly as a result of the availability of novel technologies for restoring, cleaning up and redesigning industrially degraded or contaminated ecosystems. 1 Given the inevitability of unexpected change in the course of restoring or designing a piece of land, the self-descriptions of many restoration practitioners point to the social-ecological co-constitution of nature based on attributed ‘natural activities’. In the course of almost any restoration project, at certain points, actors step back and then begin to realize that they have been participating in a piece of natural land or ecosystem, and that, by doing so, they have become part of the often unexpected and sometimes little understood ecological processes involved. This realization is part of many discussions in ecological practice.
