A couple updates This article is a continuation of my last article, in which I presented the results of a botanical inventory of my home garden with the goal of analyzing biological diversity. I have two updates of this project.…
Why inventory the plants in my garden? This week I decided to do a botanical inventory of my small home garden. As I understand, knowing what plant species are present and in what amounts is an important metric to track…
Growing kalo for the first time A few weeks ago, a colleague gifted me with a kalo (taro) plant, my first kalo plant ever. The timing of this was perfect, as I had recently been thinking about growing kalo in…
The past couple of weeks I’ve been learning about biocultural restoration in Hawai’i, and I have some article ideas I’ve been stewing on. But in the meantime, I wanted to write about a different topic that I’ve been sitting on…
This week I read a paper that quickly felt unusual among the scientific publications I’ve encountered in my career. The abstract was in a familiar format, but then in the introduction, the authors–using a narrative style–invite the reader into their…
This week I read the paper Kōkua aku, Kōkua mai: An Indigenous Consensus-driven and Place-based Approach to Community Led Dryland Restoration and Stewardship. I chose this paper to learn more about biocultural restoration in general and about a specific restoration…
I ended my last article with a brief note about species belonging. I now explore that topic in more depth here. I do this using a framework presented in the 2025 paper by Rayne and colleagues, “Renegotiating Species Belonging in…
In a recent article, I explored some perspectives on the term “invasive species”, including those reported by Anishnaabe scholar Dr. Nicholas Reo. I ended that article with an open question about alternative terms for invasive species. Well this week, I…
As I wrote about in my first blog article in this series, learning about Yacouba Sawadogo many years ago was one of the early sparks for my interest in ecological restoration. The idea that one can modify the shape of…
In my last article, I compared views about ecological restoration presented by some ecologists to those presented by authors from an indigenous background. As I was writing, I used Claude to generate word clouds of the two scientific articles. My…