the reconstruction of the damaged fabric of the natural world. If public retention and management of Western resources is the great conservation theme of the late 19th century, and preservation of select pieces of the West that of the 20th, restoration may well be that of the 21st.As noble a cause as restoration is, the plans and processes of it easily raise as many questions as preservation ought to have. If we aim to restore the West, we ought as a first step to have clearly in our minds exactly what it is we're about. And in hopes of avoiding some of the mistakes and grand controversies that have come to surround preservation, looking the problems in the eye might not be a bad idea, either.The place to begin is with the premise, because it's a doozy: What exactly do we mean when we speak of "restoring" the West, and what on earth was the West's "original condition?" For most of the 20th century we've thought we've known the answer to that last question. Certainly John Muir, gazing awestruck at the soaring gray granite in Yosemite, was convinced he knew. Since Thoreau, and right down to the time of Aldo Leopold and Stegner, we were sure we knew what the West was originally. The tradition, as spelled out in the enabling acts of both the National Park Service and the Wilderness Preservation System, has been to seek that baseline condition in the earliest journals of European explorers and travelers.The Old Westwas superabundantErnest Thompson Seton's famous Lives of Game Animals did that three-quarters of a century ago and produced not just anecdotes but extrapolated statistics. Seton's wildlife figures for the "original" West are truly astonishing: 60-75 million bison, 30-40 million pronghorns, 10 million elk, 10 million mule deer, 1.5 to 2 million sheep across the West at the time the first European explorers traversed it. Big predators as a sign of a healthy continental ecology? Seton assembled accounts indicating that grizzlies had ...
