Thread · 4 tweets · 18 Dec 2023

Yes, that's why I mention rewilding. Folks there are thinking in terms of big functional contributions to ecosystems such that the rest of the details sort themselves out. (bookshop.org/p/books/rewild… is a good intro if you're interested.)

And so, they see it as a bad idea to try to do conservation with exactly the right species, as if nature were some kind of static system. Need big herbivores in the Amazon basin but giant sloths are extinct? Hippos might work!

A lot of the thinking that I know about in this space is about what *not* to do (e.g. jstor.org/stable/pdf/262…). Which is fair because we've got it wrong a lot, but it also doesn't address the question of how to do that constructively (and for society).

The closest I've found to a positive description (but it doesn't give you a blueprint) is in the resilience space: cambridge.org/us/universityp…. I'm working on a book in a very similar area (in tech/society). I'd be delighted to talk more if you're interested!