Eco-Restoration Firms See Growing Profits

Eco-restoration is now a lucrative market for many private companies. One example is Biohabitats, a 20-year-old ecosystem restoration company, which makes a good profit replanting eel grass lost to pollution in the Chesapeake Bay.

Ecosystem restoration was just a niche market in the 80s, but it has bloomed in the past five years. Keith Bowers, chairman of the Society for Ecological Restoration International, says: "From an ecological restoration standpoint, there's something on the order of tens of billions of dollars in the pipeline just in this country."

Some projects are quite visible. Chesapeake Bay is a multi-year, $19 billion cleanup project. Another large project is the Everglades wetlands restoration in Florida, with $8 billion appropriated. Billions more are being spent in the U.S. on restoring estuaries, watersheds, rivers, deltas, and fish species such as .

Funding for such restoration projects far exceeds global funding for basic conservation. Because of that, future restoration may one day be a huge industry vital to the planet's well-being, some say. :: The Society for Ecological Restoration [by Justin Thomas]