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…
‘“Restoration can then be viewed as an attempt to force transitions towards a desired state, and as requiring knowledge of the variables that need to be manipulated to achieve these transitions” (Hobbs and Norton 1996, emphasis added).’ [as quoted in…
I ended my last article with a series of questions I’m sitting with at this point in my exploration of ecological restoration. Of those, I’m currently most interested in the question: This article explains why this question matters to me…
Two articles ago, I shared some reflections on a webinar on indigenous knowledge and ecosystem restoration featuring Dr. Stewart Hill. Another thing in Dr. Hill’s talk that piqued my interest was his thoughts on invasive species. My most recent article…
In my recent explorations into ecological restoration, the topic of invasive species has come up a few times. I’m thinking of doing a more in-depth article on the topic. But in this article, I wanted to share a story that…