As scientists and practitioners committed to ecological restoration, we found the analogy you made in your April issue1 between restoring natural capital (RNC)2 and new forms of cancer treatment3 to be an extremely powerful one. To a certain degree, RNC and ecological restoration in general, are indeed related to ecosystem degradation in the way that tumor ecology-based treatments are related to traditional cancer therapies, e.g., combined radiation and chemotherapy.
What is clearly common to both approaches is that ecological restoration and cancer therapy are optimistic interventions with multiple payoffs to individuals and societies.4 Like cancer therapy, however, RNC is expensive. It is also time- and energy-consuming, and requires sustained commitment of the highest order. It is risky; there is no sure outcome in any given case, as your sidebar on South Africa's Working for Water program demonstrated.
Both RNC and cancer therapy are processes that assist the host to recover ...
