An environment becomes consequential when it acquires the capacity to alter what a body, a mind or a collective can sustain. Restoration names one such capacity, but the literature assembled around it makes the term far more demanding than the familiar image of a calm subject entering a pleasant landscape. Ulrich’s experimental work establishes environmental recovery as a temporal and physiological event: after stress induction, natural scenes were associated with faster and more complete changes across affective and bodily measures than urban scenes, shifting the question from preference toward recuperation. Hartig, Korpela, Evans and Gärling then confront a different difficulty, constructing a scale through which qualities associated with restorative experience—being away, extent, fascination, compatibility—can become comparable without entirely stripping them of their relational character.