The ancient practice of agriculture, of shaping the growing world to our needs, is founded on five interrelated recognitions: things break and decay; there is something good in that perishing; once mended, things will grow again; mending is a form of belonging; and a mended place carries the mark of its own (often repeated) breaking. Modern destructive agriculture, fueled by the chemical industries after 1945, abandoned this five-part vision of belonging, making, and re-making and substituted it for a one-term gospel of dominance. Care for places became essentially unitary and divorced from time: clear the ground by excluding all competitors, clean it up, and extract what value you can.

To remake such a depleted landscape is not to rewild it but in some ways the opposite: to reculture it.