n Rosenzweig's vision, a "reconciled city" would be a model of civic pride and enlightened environmentalism. Residents would work to understand the unique local mix of native plants and animals and come up with innovative ways to encourage those species to coexist with humans. People would inevitably develop a closer relationship with nature because nature would be closer at hand, and they would become more connected to their communities because those communities would have something more to rally around than the opening of a bigger Wal-Mart. Whole subdivisions might adopt a threatened hummingbird or butterfly, and home owners might choose to replace their rhododendrons with the native flowers such species require. Rosenzweig envisions people designing habitats with the same meticulous relish they currently devote to decorating their living rooms. One day, he predicts, "there will be a Martha Stewart of reconciliation ecology."

Rosenzweig's vision can sound hazy, even utopian, but as he crisscrosses the country to deliver his message, audiences say that his enthusiasm is contagious. "He really is like a prophet," says Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, in St. Louis. "He talks like a prophet, he looks like a prophet, and he's very inspirational to be around." Even top brass at the Pentagon were so impressed with a presentation he gave that they invited him to be the keynote speaker at a meeting of personnel responsible for overseeing conservation efforts on the 30 million acres of land under military control.

In his book Win-Win Ecology, Rosenzweig cites a number of real-world examples of reconciliation ecology at work. For instance, Mexican free-tailed bats began to roost under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas, after its 1980 restoration; today they outnumber the more famous population of bats in New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns.

Florida's Turkey Point nuclear power plant is an even more striking example. Situated on 6,000 acres practically next door to Everglades National Park, it would seem a particular affront to environmentalists. Yet in addition to powering thousands of homes in the ever-sprawling Greater Miami area, the plant harbors nesting sites that turn out about one-third of all the endangered American crocodiles born in the United States. The plant's system of canals and berms, engineered to store the water needed to cool the reactors, not only shelters important croc nesting sites but is now home to red mangroves, buttonwood trees, and at least 17 endangered species.

Then there is Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, where the military has protected some of the last longleaf pine stands remaining in the country. This forest habitat, which supports a number of endangered species, such as the red-cockaded woodpecker, once blanketed an estimated 90 million acres of the Southeast but has declined to fewer than 150,000 acres today. Eglin's longleaf pines are being preserved despite the fact that the base is still very much active: It was here that the Defense Department famously demonstrated its capacity for shock and awe in March 2003 by testing the 21,500-ton "mother of all bombs."

ome ecologists see Rosenzweig's approach as too piecemeal to be effective against a problem as overwhelming as mass extinction. He counters that the loss of species isn't like global warming or ozone depletion, which are caused by specific factors, such as emissions from power plants, that can be effectively regulated by governments. What makes the abundance of life so fascinating -- the adaptations that millions of species have made to exploit countless niches in their environments -- is the same thing that makes it impossible to come up with a centralized plan to save it. The threats facing individual species and the possible ways of protecting them are as unique and local as the species themselves. By understanding that, Rosenzweig believes, we might once again appreciate how intricately our own destiny is bound up with that of every other living thing.