How We Got Here: Ecological Restoration’s Surprising History

There’s so much money being put toward ecological restoration around the world and the United Nations recently declared this to be the decade of ecosystem restoration. So it’s a really important moment to be thinking about how to better align the goals of ecological restoration with the goals of social justice.

Bringing Back the Beaver: Excerpt

If you’re a ‘Beaver Nut’ and realise earnestly just how critical these creatures are to the future well-being of the earth, with a pivotal role in the creation of abundant biodiversity, water provision, purification, flood and drought alleviation, you will pursue beaver advocacy with the kind of tedious zeal generally restricted to deluded members of obscure religious cults.

Food from the Radical Center: Excerpt

While the subject of this story is what we may call biocultural, eco-culinary, or reciprocal restoration, it is quite often enabled through a social process that has been called either community-based restoration, collaborative conservation, or cooperative collaboration.

China’s Ecological Civilisation

So what a surprise when an Internet search brought up an intriguing phrase juxtaposing the word “ecological” to “civilisation”. Ecological civilisation? And it was all very official. In a statement to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), a Chinese spokesperson announced to the world that ecological civilisation was China’s new national strategy, that the view of man as conqueror of nature was outdated and that the new approach to modernization would be to strive to live in harmony with nature.

The Best Way to Restore Environments in the Face of Climate Change

How can the Kissimmee team and others best restore degraded environments in the face of the unpredictable and tumultuous future that climate change promises? A big part of the answer is by building in resilience — the ability to resist change or to recover from disturbance in a way that preserves the essence of a system’s structure and function.