He shows how this analogy is useful but also points out important differences. There is probably no other science in which students are taught by being dropped into the deep end of complexity. Ecology is usually introduced to school children by showing them oak wood, prairies, an intertidal zone, or a pond or lake margin, and perhaps asking them to describe it. This is equivalent to introducing a child to chemistry by showing the structure of hemoglobin or a DNA helix. He argues that the study of ecology should be started with a very simple approach.
Harper shows that restoration ecologists can learn a great deal from agriculture and forestry.
He gives many examples. Turner argues that restoration is more than science. He suggests that the aesthetic sense is a capacity to organize and make sense of very large quantities of ill-defined information, to detect and create complex relationships and feedback systems, to take into account multiple contexts and frames of reference, and to perceive harmonies and regularities in them that add up to a deep unity, a unity which generates predictions of the future and can act as a sound basis for future action. Our sense of beauty tells us what is relevant, what is likely, what is proper, what is fruitful. We would be in a desperate case if the only capacity we could rely on was our logical ability to put two and two together.