Humans have long maintained a complex and dynamic relationship with wildland fire. While native North Americans utilized fire for hundreds of years to promote growth of certain plants, facilitate hunting, and clear travel corridors (Williams 1994), during most of the 20th century fire on U.S. public lands was viewed as dangerous and destructive. For decades, Federal agencies have worked to suppress and minimize wildland fire on public lands, including wilderness and other similarly protected areas (Parsons and Landres 1998). To protect scenery and natural features, for example, early National...

Restoring Layered Landscapes brings together historians, geographers, philosophers, and interdisciplinary scholars to explore ecological restoration in landscapes with complex histories shaped by ongoing interactions between humans and nature. For many decades, ecological restoration - particularly in the United States - focused on returning degraded sites to conditions that prevailed prior to human influence. This model has been broadened in recent decades, and restoration now increasingly focuses on the recovery of ecological functions and processes rather than on returning a site...

Restoring Layered Landscapes brings together historians, geographers, philosophers, and interdisciplinary scholars to explore ecological restoration in landscapes with complex histories shaped by ongoing interactions between humans and nature. For many decades, ecological restoration - particularly in the United States - focused on returning degraded sites to conditions that prevailed prior to human influence. This model has been broadened in recent decades, and restoration now increasingly focuses on the recovery of ecological functions and processes rather than on returning a site...