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The article reports that the implementation of ecosystem restoration policy is being undertaken throughout the United States. The success of this policy is often determined by the acceptability of restoration and its physical impacts on the landscape. Notwithstanding the formal scientific parameters, it has been in the political arena where the ranges of desirable ecosystem projects have been both contested and supported. Workable scientific solutions to empirical questions of urban ecosystem restoration have depended in no small measure on the democratic deliberation of reaching agreeable policy goals. To the extent that science-based environmental policy making have increasingly become woven into the fabric of democratic societies, an analytic deliberative strategy of decision making looms to be a promising component to urban ecological restoration projects. Tracking the ups and downs of these projects reveal the evolving support to the goals of urban ecosystem restoration and conservation, as much as some of the adverse impact that the initial decoupling of ecological sciences from democratic processes had in the overall implementation of this policy.

The article focuses on the environmental legislative reform program of the U.S. 104th Congress. According to the author, the expanding influence of the global economic and political institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund would make the political leaders to be less capable of asserting political authority to deliver their promises including environmental issues. She stresses that the 104th Congress in the 1994 election represent the most anti-environmentalist Congress.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on the concept of public participation in the cleanup of contaminated military facilities and another on the impact of the environmental movement on the promotion of environmental knowledge.

The article focuses on the environmental legacy of authoritarianism in the context of Brazil and Chile. Insufficient attention has been paid to the environmental legacy of the military regimes in South America. Notwithstanding, the ideological and repressive resources of social control enforced destructive environmental practices, which for the most part went uncontested. It is only now that the evidences clearly demonstrate how damaging the policies of the military regimes were to the environment. The authoritarian administrations became the main agent in what can appropriately be called a campaign against nature whereby human rights and environmental issues were relegated to the status of luxury, for solving internal upheavals and economic crises allegedly resulted in a scenario in which these countries could not afford to engage in democratically or environmentally informed policies. The democratization process now occurring throughout South America and the concurrent strengthening of the civil society will hopefully provide the political atmosphere necessary to expose information relevant to human rights and environmental violations, and beyond.