until Indian populations rebounded, whereupon bison once again vanished from the region. Several recent paleobiologists, most notably Charles Kay of Utah State, believe that populations of many ungulate species in the West remained suppressed for more than 7,000 years before being briefly released, by human disease epidemics, in the 17th and 18th centuries.A snapshot in timeWhile these arguments may never persuade us to drop the term wilderness and substitute "Indian-managed America" or "Continent undergoing ecological rebound," these insights are obviously problematic for restoration ecology. Even if I succeed in eradicating the Asiatic wheatgrass and exotic spotted knapweed that have mostly supplanted the native fescues and bluebunch on my 25 acres of Bitterroot Valley prairie, and even if I turned a buffalo loose on it, it may be that what I'll have restored is nothing but a snapshot of time and place - not the face of nature as pristine superorganism at all - but merely another of the kinds of landscapes that humans, and history, have produced.I've decided that I simply don't care if the image of America we hold in our heads doesn't deserve to be called "wild." Most of the things humans hold dear and value, after all, are cultural constructions. Few readers of the Bible think that the accounts of the creation there are anything but metaphorical, yet that knowledge apparently doesn't dim the power of the book. I feel the same about wilderness and ecological endeavors aimed at restoring North America to its previous or baseline condition.The United States, after all, exists in historic context.For Americans, value in nature lies firmly rooted just there. To give credit where it's due, I personally prefer the term Indian America when imagining that baseline nature of five centuries ago. But acknowledging that what I value springs not so much from God as from evolutionary history, humanity's hand firmly on the tiller for several thousan...
