With fewer and fewer pristine places on earth left to preserve, restoration is the "new" conservation. Yet the work is anything but easy. Ecology is complex, and restoration projects are often controversial. How do we know what's natural? What should nature look like? Can we ever really turn back the clock?
These debates have real consequences for the land, and for the values people live by. Nature's Restoration poses intriguing questions about how people can live on the earth without destroying its natural systems.

Through detailed reporting and numerous interviews, Friederici's lyrical writing puts us on the front lines of restoration to learn how this growing movement shapes places and inspires people.

Nature's Restoration relates the passion of ordinary citizens who are changing the way we think about nature. They are restoring animal habitats, reintroducing native plants, bringing back lost species, and gaining a greater intimacy with the natural world. On a planet suffering from serious ecological problems, the growing restoration movement is a refreshing attempt to set things right.

The Qing state, driven by Confucian precepts of good government and urgent practical needs, committed vast resources to its granaries. Nourish the People traces the basic practices of this system, analyzes the organizational bases of its successes and failures, and examines variant practices in different regions. The volume concludes with an assessment of the granary system’s social and economic impact and historical comparison with the food supply policies of other states.