Laura J. Martin, Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 2022, ISBN: 9780674979420, 336 pp.

Ecologists' destructive "World War III simulations" facilitated now-familiar models and theories that also "explicitly drew on and influenced metaphors of human society" (p. 132) while giving the impression of objective scientific knowledge. Martin explores how biologists used radioisotopes to breed wild species and study landscapes so as to plan for the post-disaster recovery of irradiated environments, which became widely known as "ecosystems" due to the strategies of influential ecologists such as the Odums. What does it mean to restore an endangered species or a degraded ecosystem back to the state of wildness, or at least to a less imperiled state?. [Extracted from the article]