Resumo. Is the conflict of man versus nature a new synthesis for restoration processes? What models do we use to understand and apply restoration? What are the implications resulting from the choice of a paradigm for the restoration process? The development of the human race on Earth required drastic changes in the landscapes, structures and functionalities of the planet’s ecosystems. Techniques of productivity were responsible for the maintenance of the society, but those techniques do not serve to restitute nature, because the restoration of biodiversity is not a synonymous of productivity. A new tendency of restorers is to retrieve models of biofunctionality conservation and of interactions among the organisms of the system. Nucleation represents an opportunity to apply the key principles of the metaphor of the “flow of nature” to the practice of ecological restoration. The proposal of the nucleation model is biocentric, namely, to aid nature in nuclei covering about 10-30% of the degraded area, allowing a complex network of interactions between the organisms and a successional heterogeneity to be reestablished in the remaining space, where the ecosystem can converge towards multiple points of equilibrium in space and time.