Jules' heart was such that he loved all ecosystems. All that was nature, he loved. But it is the nature of love that "all" does not mean "equally" and he loved his native land the most.
"Jules, this is all the budget they are going to assign to ecological engineering. If you want to keep the forest reclamation project funded you can't keep pushing for the others."
Consider: Is it better for the weak to ally with each other against the strong who oppresses them or to betray the former to the latter? If the weak are many and collectively strong, if time is plentiful and death acceptable, alliance is both honorable and effective. But if even all the weak ones are not strong enough together, if time runs out and that which has to be protected is worth more than integrity, not many will choose the honorable against the effective or just the immediate.
The route between the nearest airport and Jules' forest ran along a small dead stream that once had been neither. Jules drives without looking through his side window, but he can't point his mind's eye away from the memory of the meeting where he voted for its murder.
Jules could only get drones; even for that sort of old technology he had had to commit a minor assortment of financial crimes and personal betrayals. Dones got you sensors but forced you to get genetic samples manually. Ground-level microswarms would have been much better but were expensive and slow and the forest was dying quickly. Even worse, it was degrading: every day there was a more or less constant surface to record, all of it slightly worse than the day before. So it was cheap drones and even cheaper human labor and a race to map what he could so he could rebuild it later. Even the drugs that kept his workers active were commodity-cheap. His were more expensive but not expensive enough to be safe.
The applause during the opening ceremony is sincere. The few who understand the technical difficulties acknowledge Jules' skill. The rest see a unique opportunity to improve the tainted reputation of a country far past the possibility or desire for redemption. He accepts it with unfeigned modesty and does not turn around to see the thing they call a forest.
Grief is the death of what we love. Horror is their return as something worse than absence. What should we call the realization that the rotten thing that animates them now is not something they brought from where they return but something we gave to them? Something ours to begin with. All of us can with the best of intentions give birth to monsters by accident or weakness. What can be inferred of a person who regardless of intention can bring forth nothing else?
Buying the gun had been surprisingly easy. Jules had never owned or fired one and did not have high hopes for his aim. None of that would be a problem.