st century restoration's equivalent of Yellowstone or the Wilderness Act.Finally, if practical, on-the-ground democracy has been one of the defining triumphs of conservation and preservation, then we have to ask: Who gets to be in charge of restoration in the next century? Some restorations - of wolves, of fire to the public lands, of bison to the plains, of the Western grasslands after a century of plowing and grazing abuse and brush spread, of salmon - are obviously of national interest and scope. But many restoration projects are not only local but often occur at the level of the shortest feedback loop of all - on private land. Arresting weed spread in the West is an example of a restoration that has an enormous private-land dimension.Across the West the spread of exotic weeds, one of the unintended aspects of European biological imperialism, is creating biological wastelands at a dizzying rate. The spread is bad enough on the public lands, where roughly 4,600 acres of wildlife habitat are being lost to weeds every day, but the rate of spread and corresponding loss of native species on private land is horrifying.In my home state of Montana, a 1988 study found that in three years of invasion, the exotic spotted knapweed is capable of knocking six of 21 native plants in mountain meadows into the "rare" category. A knapweed-infested foothill prairie eventually will lose 95 percent of its native grasses. And knapweed spread from 4.5 million acres in Montana in 1989 to cover nearly 12 million acres in the state by 1993.There's one more aspect of restoration. In our efforts to restore the West we may confront an issue that will bewilder all our inspiration and striving. Fifteen years ago down in the Texas Panhandle, with literary descriptions and 19th century photographs in hand, I set about using fire to restore to native prairie a little 12-acre ranchette then enveloped in a mesquite thicket almost impossible to walk through.Two or three...
