Healing the Land Teaches Us Who We Are

Introduction

“We had treasures buried deep inside our blood, hidden treasures we hardly knew existed.”
—Victor Martinez, Parrot in the Oven: Mi vida

It was September 2020, and a group of college students and I were in the third year of a community forest-planting project along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. Several months into the COVID-19 pandemic, we were skeptical that we could pull the project off, but we went for it. Instead of planting as a large collaborative cluster over one day, we divided the participants into smaller groups of around five people.

In years past, we’d had a collective of curanderas (healers who work with plant and earth medicines) give a blessing to the plants, people, and tools in attendance. But during this pandemic event, we had to scrap that plan. Instead, participants walked away with a cloth mask adorned with a colorful painting of one of the six medicinal plants we planted that day, done by a local artist who is famous for several amazing murals across New Mexico and around the world.

The two-day planting event was successful in spite of the stress of planning it. In two days, 120 people from the community planted 1,040 plants in what locals call the Bosque (Spanish for “forest”), which hugs the Rio Grande. The most rewarding aspect of the event was the enthusiastic feedback we got from the participants.

One participant named Terrie said, “Many of us, and me included, are somewhat drained and exhausted in many avenues of our being due to this epidemic. But this invitation gave me the opportunity to take a positive risk, step outside and plant: trees and seeds. This invitation gave me an unexpected uplift. . . . It wasn’t until we finished all the work that I was able to grasp and appreciate the why and purpose in giving to this great cause. It was exactly what I needed!”

Terrie’s reflection captured the sentiment many of us felt. This type of community event was exactly what we all needed during that time of deep social isolation. Rather than shunning others, this event allowed us to see “everyone working together to make a difference,” as another participant said.

“My daughter and granddaughter came,” reflected another participant, “so I got to teach two generations to give back, not just be takers.”

Getting outside was important. But what we needed socially—and what the Bosque needed ecologically—was the collective taking care of the earth. Our community planting helped restore native flowers, shrubs, and trees that have been rapidly disappearing from the Bosque habitat. The event offered living proof that the needs of human society and of nature can be aligned. Although many people ignorantly assume that the needs of the earth and those of humans are antithetical to each other—that you can’t meet the needs of one without sacrificing the needs of the other—events like the Bosque planting are important reminders that these needs are complementary.

The Ecology of Restoration
The Bosque community planting project is an example of ecological restoration. When people hear the word restoration, they might think of restoring a home after a flood, a fire, or deterioration through advanced age. They might think of setting broken bones or sewing up injured organs for someone involved in a major car wreck. In the simplest terms, restoration is the process of repairing something wounded to make it whole again and enable it to function like it did before. In the case of ecological restoration, also known as ecosystem restoration, we’re talking about healing wounded habitats on earth.

Now, a wounded earth comes in many shapes, sizes, and colors. It can be a huge river or a skinny little creek choked by urban effluent; a whole chain of mountains incinerated by a megafire and later ravaged by the rain; or an abandoned and abused park squeezed in between chunks of the city’s concrete like the plants that miraculously emerge from the cracks in the sidewalk, only to be sprayed and dug up. A healing habitat, or a collection of them as an ecosystem, comes in myriad forms as well. In general, healing the earth, no matter how small or vast our point of view is, shows up as an increase in biodiversity. This means an increase in life in its amount and types, from microbes to plants to animals, but especially the life indigenous to an area, meaning all the organisms that have lived in that place longer than humanity has been on this planet.

Given the global scale of humanity’s impact, the need for ecological restoration is massive and omnipresent. We would be hard pressed today to find a habitat on earth that hasn’t experienced some deleterious impact of stress from human society. Heck, chemical toxins and caffeine are found even in the most remote places on the planet, where hardly any people are present. The world is chock-full of eroded and abandoned lands, bodies of water swirling with some toxic mixture of runoff and plastic. The same could be said for our bodies.

Some forward-thinking economists are convinced that there is already a de facto restoration economy growing steadily across the world, meandering beneath the shimmering surfaces of energy-hogging AI data centers. The restoration economy, equipped with its own unique entourage of jobs and material flows, is composed of environmental planners, biologists, heavy machinery operators, plant and animal specialists, and environmental educators. More and more countries around the world are initiating policies that promote the ecological restoration economy. In July 2024, the European Union became the first political entity to pass legislation enforcing restoration as part of a national conservation effort. Several recent studies have shown that the restoration economy is growing, and there is great potential for it to further develop into a major job sector and career path.[i]

Despite the Trump-led effort to eliminate funding that does any good for the general public, one of the oldest and most consistent sources of governmental funding for restoration is the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937, which funds state wildlife restoration work through a small tax on each purchase of firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment. While there are serious concerns that restoration work is undervalued as low-wage and low-skill, there is no question that the earth desperately needs these jobs to be filled.

The specific ecological wounds that our Bosque planting project was addressing started many years ago and for many different reasons. Although the Bosque and the Rio Grande have coevolved for millennia, the construction of the Cochiti Dam by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1965, about forty miles upstream from where our community came together to plant, transformed this ancient relationship. The dam drastically altered the river’s natural hydrology, completely preventing the overbank flooding that naturally occurred every spring and thus starving its lower reaches of the rejuvenating sediments it had always relied on. Prolonged seasons of dryness have had drastic impacts on this riparian (meaning “riverside”) forest and the wildlife that depends on this green corridor that pulsates across the desert like an aorta. Because of this forced separation between water and land, the Bosque as we know it is dying.

Exemplifying this death is the disappearing cottonwood tree, the tallest and largest of the Bosque’s trees. When you walk through this forest today, you are struck by the lack of younger cottonwoods growing in the elders’ shade; nothing is there to take their place. Most of the remaining large cottonwood trees in today’s Bosque are about eighty years old, born during the last natural flooding before the dam was built. Once the river was channelized and the land was separated from its replenishing waters, the cottonwood trees and much of the Bosque’s native vegetation began disappearing. A citizen science education group that has collected data with the help of young students along the Rio Grande Bosque reveals that over the past twenty years there has been a steady decline in the amount of cottonwood leaves covering the ground during the fall season, which has ripple effects throughout the ecosystem, such as lessened insect diversity and reduced soil moisture. This unsettling reality is what made the Bosque planting project come to life.

The Culture of Restoration
A year before the 2020 planting event, a friend and I walked through a barren section of the Bosque that runs through the heart of Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 2004, this sixty-acre area had suffered a fire, and the scars we saw fifteen years later weighed heavy on our minds. The Bosque floor was bone-dry and almost sterile from continuous exposure to the desiccating powers of the sun and wind, caused by the lack of flooding and essential shade from the flickering leaves of the cottonwood and other native vegetation. When we encountered small patches of native plants, it felt like we had found treasures.

My friend worked at an agency that owned the strip of the Bosque we were walking. Several months prior, an artist friend of ours had called the agency to inquire whether local community members could gather plant medicines (remedios) from the Bosque as communities used to do in the past. Predictably, our friend was told it was against policy to allow anyone to harvest anything from the Bosque, which is typical for state parks or other public spaces. We realized, however, that our beloved friend had made an important point.

Historically, the local Indigenous cultures, predominantly Pueblo and later Mexican, used this area as common lands for fishing, hunting, and gathering plants for remedios and other needs. When you consider the long history of human habitation in the area, it is only relatively recently that the local community has been physically and culturally disconnected from its Bosque. The Bosque was once the people’s natural medicine cabinet, an area for gathering foods and art supplies, among other uses; but as these traditions died out, the Bosque became abandoned. The Bosque is now like a typical park where people pass through jogging, walking, or biking, with signs prohibiting people from staying longer or taking anything.

With the advent of Big Pharma, the introduction of Western education, and other cultural changes, the community’s memories of the Bosque’s remedios steadily evaporated. Compared to previous generations, few people today remember which bark or which leaf can be steeped in hot water to heal which sickness. Few people remember how to bend willow into baskets, how to carve drums from the cottonwood trunks or santos (images of saints) from their roots. A mentor of mine, a historian who has worked with the river and its Bosque for many years, once shared a delicious recipe using the bracket fungus that grows horizontally from the cottonwood’s bark after it has been soaked by the spring floods. When peeled, chopped, and added to the world-famous local red or green chile, it is a delicacy few have tried. Today, spring floods rarely happen, the fungus is rarely seen, and hardly anyone remembers the recipe.

Much has been forgotten: history, names, recipes, and medicines, among others. The cultural disconnection with the Bosque partly explains its barren soils, its lack of native vegetation, and the presence of countless heaps of trash. Until the 1980s, the city of Albuquerque officially used a large area of the Bosque as its primary disposal site for glass, which the city still doesn’t recycle to this day. This site is now a historic landmark, as the extra-thick glass from old bottles is no longer used.

The human community has been severed from the Bosque, just as the Bosque has been severed from its rejuvenating waters. To maintain the Bosque in the future, we must reconnect to it in ways that we haven’t in a while. We must bring the Bosque back into our lives somehow.

Gathering Herbs from the Bosque
Many years before I found myself doing restoration work in the Bosque, my father and I visited a site directly across the river to harvest yerba del manso (swamp root). Yerba del manso is a medicinal plant used in many cultures for healing ailments of the skin, something I struggled with at the time. I knew where a huge patch of the yerba grew right in the middle of Albuquerque. I will never forget this moment: the flutelike melodies of birds drowning out the mechanical hum of cars in the distance; my father and I hovering over the earth on all fours with trowels in hand, digging out the root of this venerated plant; placing them gently inside a paper bag; saying thank you. Layers of wet mud and dry sand highlighted the contours of the bulging veins and crevices of my dad’s old-working-man hands; the coldness of the wet mud gripped my knees as I was engulfed by a sweet celery-like smell coming from the yerba del manso. I figured the sweet smell was the plant’s way of saying “thank you” back to us, for remembering who they are. Harvesting remedios next to the river was our attempt to reconnect to the plant and to restore a healing relationship between our family and Mother Earth. It felt righteous to be in that space, several feet away from a river that was the artery of this plant, this desert, and all of us.

Not many people get their medicines from the nearby river anymore, and as we walked back toward our car, I felt jazzed to be in solidarity with the long cultural history of this place. Nowadays, the time-consuming act of harvesting and processing medicine from the Bosque might seem ridiculous; why do all this work when we can just mosey down the street and buy a skin cream from the drugstore? But we knew that collecting the actual plant was so much better for us. The sweet-smelling medicinal juices from the plant are wholesome, as opposed to a few individual chemicals saturated with artificial scent made synthetically in a faraway lab. Yes, it is more convenient to buy a synthetic skin cream than to harvest and process the yerba, but then there is no substitute for the experience with family and the quality of the medicine. The harvest experience is part of the remedio, part of the medicine. We both felt spiritually refreshed, as if we had just woken up a part of our bodies that had been dormant for years; as if we had internal organs that we suddenly realized were working.

Right before we got to the car, we heard a shriek behind us: “Hey! HEY! Where do you think you’re going with that?”

We turned around to see an older white lady with a furry little dog on a leash. She cried out, “This is a public forest, and you cannot take that!” Her tone was exasperated and patronizing. Even the dog’s choked growl felt like a ruffled reprimand.

Calmly, coolly, yet with a healthy dose of anger, my father responded: “Hey lady, we have been harvesting these plants way before any of you came here, so get lost!” We got in the car and drove off with our medicine. My dad scoffed, “Can you believe that lady?”

Bringing the Bosque back into our lives was a way my family and I attempted to restore our cultural connection to place. Like the connection between the river and its Bosque floodplain, cultural restoration goes hand in glove with ecological restoration. This mutual connection is the centerpiece of healing people and healing the land. Harvesting with my dad was a powerful experience of cultural connection and recovery; it is one of my most cherished healing memories. At the same time, restoration work can be an act of resistance and confrontation. A healthy confrontation is part of any healing process, and as I show throughout this book, it is one of the most stimulating and enlightening aspects of ecological restoration work in general.

Our Obligation to Heal
Walking around the severely burnt Bosque with my friend, it was apparent that Mother Nature was struggling to heal from her overlapping wounds caused by a lack of flooding, a vegetation-altering fire, and a disengaged human community. Mother Nature was calling for help, and my friend and I felt obligated to listen. Fortunately, we were both well positioned to do something about it. She worked for the agency that owns the Bosque area we were walking through, and I worked for an agency that helps restore the earth. We knew that the only way to ensure the Bosque will thrive—short of being naturally flooded by the river—is to get the general community involved and help plant the native plants ourselves.

Who better to help the Bosque than its neighbors living next door, who benefit from its cooling fresh air, and who depend on its purified waters? Usually, the work of ecological restoration is given to environmental planners, engineering firms, contractors, and academia. Community events like the planting we organized are seen as supplementary, a decorative nicety. Increasingly, however, community restoration events are becoming a means for important community bonding in addition to repairing ecological damage. This speaks to one of the clearest messages of ecological restoration, and of this book: The only way to truly heal and restore the land’s ecology is to bring community together. And bringing people together is also a means to heal our own wounds.

Over a five-year period, this Bosque planting project brought together seven hundred people to plant 1,330 native trees and 1,040 native shrubs and flowers. The area that we replanted, however, was just sixty acres, which compares to the entire Bosque ecosystem the way a person’s eyelash compares to their whole body. There is huge potential and need for restorative work throughout the Bosque, and there is still a long way to go to develop a consistent cultural connection to this work, the way we envisioned it at the beginning. Although we helped many people during each community restoration event, we did not truly gauge how such work translated into other healing relationships. Nevertheless, the urgency for such cultural and ecological work increases every day.

I have been working across the state of New Mexico as a restoration ecologist and planner since 2009. I didn’t find this job; it found me. The more I learned about the potential of restoration along the Bosque where I live, the more I realized that the work people are doing to restore the earth is a global movement that is deeply interconnected with who humanity is and what types of wounds humanity is dealing with. Through the Bosque restoration project and many other endeavors like it, I realized that an obligation to heal the wounds of Mother Nature is also an obligation to heal the wounds of the people.

Before I even knew what ecological restoration was, I worked on projects that combined youth education and experiential learning, especially as it relates to the Bosque’s ecology and culture, which I have been doing since 2001. As part of this ongoing journey to improve the educational experience for young people, I started investigating how people around the world were working to heal the wounded and abandoned lands they were living in. On the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, for example, local communities come out to replant mangrove trees to reestablish the coastal habitat destroyed by tourism-driven development, thereby bringing back local fisheries and blunting the formidable forces of hurricanes. In the Hawaiian Islands and along North America’s Pacific coastline, old rock and earthen structures called “clam gardens” are being resurrected to revive local food access and biodiversity.[ii]

The more I looked around the world, the more I started to see a pattern. Ecological restoration is not only about physically healing the wounds we have inflicted on Mother Earth; it’s also a process of embracing, remembering, and returning to older relationships humanity once had with water, fire, air, and the earth. While I was developing this newfound vision of what ecological restoration is, and what it represents for humanity, it took many years for me to fully understand what I was seeing and even longer to find the right words to describe it. More than just an embodiment of what I have learned, this book is an open invitation to a restorative and healing future.

Neither New nor Young
In the summer of 2021, the United Nations (UN) hosted the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration’s virtual opening. This UN initiative was established to garner financial support for restoring ecosystems across the world and to “promote the culture of restoration.”[iii] Considering that ecosystem restoration is very much my jam, I glued myself to my seat in front of my computer to absorb it all. During this well-polished multimedia event, António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, proclaimed: “Today let’s start a new decade, one in which we finally make peace with nature and secure a better future for all.”[iv] The audience learned about restoration projects from around the world, most of which involved massive community participation, such as the million-tree planting initiative in Pakistan and the ambitious project called the Great Green Wall of Africa, touted as the largest man-made living “structure” on earth. This ecofriendly wall, we were told, will keep the Sahara Desert from growing like an environmental cancer that destroys local livelihoods.

Conspicuously absent from the UN event was an honest discussion exploring the connection between ecological restoration and human culture. There were brief aspiring comments such as “let’s create a culture of restoration,” but that was it. This glaring omission became excruciatingly painful to bear by the end of the event, when the UN proudly unleashed its world premiere music video by artists Ty Dolla $ign and Don Diablo, called “Too Much to Ask,” tailored to appeal to the younger audience, or “#generationrestoration.”[v]

The music video showcased panoramic drone footage showing hundreds of Maasai people from a community in Kenya engaged in a restoration project in their desert homeland. Spread out over hundreds of acres of barren iron-red land, people constructed fifteen-foot-long half-moon-shaped berm structures called bunds, with shovels, hoes, and lots of sweat. Thanks to this earth-shaping community work, the rainwater and fertile topsoil that typically washed away during storms was now kept in place by the welcoming earthen arms of each bund, eventually converting the barren land to one covered in vegetation. The video, and the UN by extension, celebrated this project in Kenya as an innovation in ecological restoration.

What the audience was not told was that this collective bund-making work to restore abandoned and overgrazed grasslands is not something new. In fact, these soil and rainwater-harvesting structures and the collective work they require are some of the many ancient cultural practices that were common prior to colonization and that Indigenous cultures across Kenya and the African continent performed to take care of the land. So while there was hardly any mention of the connection between restoration and culture within the UN event, nor a single peep about the long history of land stewardship across Africa—let alone the long history of colonial land destruction—it was right there all over the music video for us to see! There was a deeper cultural part of this story not being told, or in this case, not being sung.

In today’s discourse, ecological restoration is often described as a “new relationship” to nature and categorized as a “very young” science, as it was throughout the UN event.[vi] However, as this book will clearly illustrate, the practice of restoration is actually a very old human relationship to the land, one based on a communal way of generating science—albeit a forgotten and belittled one. Ecological restoration, which is so desperately needed in today’s world, is not about “finally making peace with nature” but about finally making peace with our diverse human cultures and collective histories. Whether we look at the highest mountains of South America, the hottest deserts of Africa or the Middle East, the lush green tropical forests of the Caribbean archipelago, or your own backyard wherever you are reading this, many on-the-ground “innovations” to heal the ecological wounds of that specific location are the same expressions of cultural practice, history, and worldview that are deeply rooted in the original peoples of that place.

In her brilliant New York Times bestselling book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer—a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation—gave us a language to describe this culturally rooted restoration as “restoration reciprocity.” “Restoring land without restoring relationship,” Kimmerer explains, “is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.”[vii] Following Kimmerer’s example, Healing the Land Teaches Us Who We Are uses examples from across the world, including as many diverse cultures as possible, to explore what this “medicine for the earth,” this “restoration reciprocity,” looks like and means for all of us.

This is not to say that ecological restoration or ancestral cultural knowledge of the land will solve every environmental problem by themselves. There is never just one solution to any problem. Some might even say that restoration plays a minimal role because it does not immediately reduce greenhouse gases. Clearly, ending our fossil fuel addiction is crucial, but the climate crisis is much larger than just an issue of using different technology to meet our energy demands; it is also an issue of dealing with the relationships and mentality that got us into this mess to begin with. Yes, we always need to innovate and develop smarter, more efficient technology, but the real issue getting in the way of remediating the climate crisis is a lack of political urgency and social intransigence, rather than a tech problem.

Our future lies somewhere between the creativity of new ways of thinking and building social capacity around new ways of living. In this sense, the future is rather exciting. Righteous practices, such as community solar energy and local food production, are full of endless potential despite the insatiable corporate thirst for coal, oil, and gas. A new generation of more efficient technologies is needed, but a new generation of thinking needs to guide it.

Although ecological restoration is recognized as an essential and equitable step toward a sustainable economic transition, it is often placed somewhere near the bottom of a longer to-do list, somewhere after renewable technologies and decarbonized forms of transportation. In recent political discourse, restoration can sometimes be grossly oversimplified as planting lots of trees, which, interestingly, is used as a political football: One side uses planting trees as the only solution to the climate crisis, while the other side scoffs at its insignificance. While it is true that we cannot plant ourselves out of the climate crisis, we shouldn’t minimize the important role that community tree planting can play in society. And ecological restoration is more than just planting trees; it is an attempt to revive old communal relationships with water, earth, fire, and air.

The extreme swings between flooding and drought, hurricane-strength winds and earth-cooking fires, are manifestations of the earth herself lashing out, forcing us to engage once again with culturally rooted restorative practices, among many other changes. But this cultural revival vis-à-vis land restoration is also part of a long, complicated healing journey from the deep traumas and wounds carved out by colonization and capitalism—impacts we all witness, ingest, and deal with every day.

The interrelation between the biological healing of the land and the cultural/spiritual healing of the people is part and parcel of what Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore have called “reparation ecology.”[viii] “If we are made by capitalism’s ecology,” they write, “then we can be remade only as we in turn practice new ways of producing and caring for one another together, a praxis of redoing, rethinking, reliving our most basic relations.”[ix] By the end of this book, you will realize how environmental restoration work is one of society’s most useful methods for rethinking our most basic relations to the earth and each other, and for creating a healthier society and economy. In fact, ecological restoration is much more than a tool in the toolbox; it is the solid ground the toolbox rests on.

The Worlds Within This World
Although the term “resilience” is used in everyday conversations, we hardly take time to explore what exactly this word means. Studies on rivers, intertidal pools, and other habitats of the earth provide important teachings on what resiliency truly means. The more life forms and spaces are present in any habitat—the more niches, nooks, and crannies there are for life to find refuge—the more biological roles can be fulfilled. The more life’s roles are fulfilled, such as recycling dead leaves, fixing nitrogen from the air, and filtering contaminants, the more life overlaps on itself, making the habitat resilient to both abrupt and long-term disturbances. From nature we learn that the true measure of resilience depends not just on the quantity of life but also on how much life’s roles in the world overlap each other.

Typically, we use resilient to describe someone or something tough enough to withstand any challenge, able to bounce back from great trials and tribulations. But toughness, while extremely important, is not the real source of power in either human society or nature. Within human society, the real power of resilience is found in diverse views, expressions, experiences, ideas, stories, music, and poetry, among other things, and in how all these “things” overlap and are embedded in each other. The role that biodiversity plays in the natural world is analogous to the role that cultural diversity plays in humanity. If humanity is to survive the climate crisis, along with the host of other problems we face, it will be humanity’s cultural diversity—its collective stories, worldviews, and philosophies—that will get us through it.

In many ways restoration taps into this overlapping power of diversity from which resiliency is born. Our cultural diversity is humanity’s most precious wellspring of resiliency and restoration, from which healing is born. Just as a colorful rainbow marks the aftermath of the storm, the diversity of humanity will be the rainbow that brightens our world after the dreary storm has passed. By overlapping diverse stories of restoration from people around the world, by “seeing” and “hearing” our stories of trauma and healing in parallel with those of the land, this book attempts to explore what resiliency is made of. It is also an attempt to pause for a moment and sit with some of the words we use to describe the worlds around and within us.

Connected Trauma, Connected Healing
In The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, Amitav Ghosh’s insightful treatise on climate change and where society is heading, he points out, as many others have, that the climate destruction we face today is rooted in cultural destruction. A consequence of colonization was that the diversity of human thinking and relationship to land and water, along with the biodiversity of life itself, went from a pluriverse to a monoverse, from many ways of seeing and being in the world to only one.[x] The reciprocal bonds of stewardship between the earth and her diverse human communities have been breached and severely damaged, and we are living through the stages of grief and recovery. As such, we cannot honestly address one destruction without addressing the other. We cannot address the climate crisis if we continue to deny humanity’s cultural diversity.

Restoring the biodiversity of the land, restoring the health of the earth, is deeply connected to restoring the cultural diversity of the land. How humanity sustains its water and land in the future will have everything to do with how we understand (or don’t understand) our collective past, how we see (or don’t see) ourselves and what we are capable of (or not capable of), and more importantly, how we rethink (or don’t challenge) what we have been taught. In this way, rethinking our future starts with rethinking our past and restoring “our ancestors to their full humanity.”[xi]

Restoration is understanding, celebrating, defending, and reviving humanity’s plethora of alternative cultural worldviews, with its attendant variety of land and water practices. Restoration is healing for both people and planet. The fact that we avoid the various ways cultures view the world and take care of the land and water in K-12 classrooms and universities is itself a legacy of colonization. We rarely center this cultural perspective at large international environmental gatherings, especially those that focus on reviving and protecting biodiversity, and that too is a legacy of colonization. It is this legacy that this book disrupts.

In spite of, and perhaps because of, the matrix of troubles we face, this narrative offers a type of therapy to recover from the bone-bruising depression that living consciously in today’s world often brings. The compelling insights compiled from stories around the world are like nature-made antidotes that can counter the debilitating feelings about humanity’s future that are so prevalent in the public, especially in our youth. These stories also open doors and eyes, stirring us to undo the colonial-derived narratives that have locked us into hopelessness and self-loathing. No one culture is either the panacea or the culprit for what we collectively face; still, our matrix of cultural stories and their lessons—our pluriverse—when shared, discussed, debated, and more importantly, overlapped together, is a penetrating display of how we might construct and are constructing a healthier world.

The Four Elements
This book compiles a variety of ecological restoration projects from around the world. Each project, like the Bosque planting project discussed at the beginning of this chapter, offers a journey into the past, the present, and the future, exploring how justice for land, water, and people are intricately interwoven quilts whose colorful threads often go unrecognized, as does the process of weaving them together. Each individual project is told as a story flavored with voices of researchers, scholars, activists, and community members, and crafted as a synthesis of cultural history and ecology. Although each story stands on its own, when told together they amass into something bigger, generating its own universe of insights for the future.

The information gathered in these pages is nothing new, nor was I the first to discover any of it. In most cases, these stories are thousands of generations old; some are just now being unearthed and revived. Regardless of how deeply these stories might be buried under the earth, stuffed within academic archives, or embedded beneath our skins without us knowing, they are more important today than when they first originated. I hope you see the stories within this book as a colorful geography of humanity, an archeology of human memory, that speaks more about our future than our past. The book’s unique feature, perhaps, is its humble attempt to see ecological restoration through a global pan-Indigenous and historical lens. While this compilation is just a millisecond glimpse into the immense “tapestry of alternatives”[xii] that humanity embodies, it can still awaken sleeping embers and resuscitate new and old ways of being in the world.

The content of Healing the Land Teaches Us Who We Are is organized into thematic sections—rather than isolated parts—named after the four life-giving elements. The “Water” section explores humanity’s ancient relationship with rainwater and the astounding cultural infrastructure designed to save, celebrate, and share every drop of water gifted from the sky. The practice of conserving water for people, and for all of life, is one of humanity’s most ancient restorative practices, and one of our most underappreciated roles; and it is more necessary and relevant now than ever. This section provides inspirational testimony about how we can sustain our water despite a future of desiccation, a scenario that millions of people in urban and rural communities are confronting. The highlighted examples come from the arid and tropical regions of the Americas where lots of rain might fall from the sky, but freshwater on the land is still hard to find. This section traces the ways in which human cultures are shaped by water, where the need to conserve and protect this precious substance speaks volumes about humanity’s cultural expressions and solutions. This section explains why looking down at a pool of water and seeing our own reflection, and the reflection of the world around us, is not just a humbling metaphor but a practical reminder of the restorative power of water.

The “Earth” section explores the ingenious ways in which we organize ourselves to yield food from soil in ways that enhance the continuity—even the revival—of all life. Humanity doesn’t just work the earth, the earth works on us as well, which is why this section also delves into stewardship and human democracy. Bringing back the health of the land is often synonymous with bringing back ancestral cultural systems for procuring food and medicines, and this is actually a remarkable birthmark of all humanity that we desperately need to be reminded of. This chapter center-pivots around the myth of the tragedy of the commons, a lie whose imposition over many centuries has hidden the true face of humanity—and whose demise has finally come. Here we bring in some old-school land relationships from Southeast Asia, Mexico, northern Africa, and the Caribbean. Far from being a tragically depressing story, humanity’s relationship to land held in common provides some of the most hopeful insights into how we can reverse the climate crisis and amplify democracy itself. Humanity is not as ugly and destructive as we have been told; rather, we are an unspoken story ready to be spread far and wide.

The “Fire” section shines much-needed light on the cultural prelude to the ever-intensifying wildfire crisis, now referred to as the age of “megafire,” currently spreading across the globe. We can’t avoid the restoration of our forests any longer. In the past two years North America has been smothered, coast to coast, north to south, in smoke and apocalyptic skies. The whole globe is literally burning up. In this section we burrow deep into the human relationship between land and fire, letting the lessons from fire-adapted areas of Australia, California, Africa, and the southwest of North America sink into our skins. Believe it or not, fire is one of the oldest forms of medicine taught to humanity by the land herself. Today’s deadly megafires, unquestionably a direct result of racism and cultural exclusion, are the explosive expressions of suppressed land trying to wake us up. Megafires are a wake-up call to let us know that the land is desperately thirsty for the flame, and to urge humanity to remember its original cultural medicines.

The “Air” section explores how words shape the way we see the world and especially how we see the world needing to change. Much of the everyday language we use to talk about nature and sustainability has deep roots in a colonial worldview, which can hinder and confine our restorative healing. We rarely discuss this. This section visits with the cultural names for nature and place, each with its own peculiar stories, sounds, and colors, and discusses how the loss of language is parallel to the loss of biological life in profound and often surprising ways. English, Spanish, and some Indigenous languages of the Americas, like Nahuatl and Quechua, are brought into the conversation. Here we briefly outline how language can either liberate and re-create or straitjacket and confine our future, a rarely discussed aspect of our struggle for land, water, and culture.

Interseeded throughout these four sections are experiences and stories from my personal life and work travels that shape how I “understand the past and speak the present.”[xiii] I added these short narratives to explore how restoration topics play out in the real world. When I was growing up, it was common to hear elders and mentors tell young people that “to truly know where humanity is going, we have to know where we’ve come from,” and “how we treat each other is how we treat the land.” While I always respected these words of wisdom, I never knew what they looked like in real life, nor how powerfully important they are, until now.

I hope this book is a journey that propels you to want to learn more about and become engaged with the many movements across this world to restore this wounded earth, which is another way of saying “restore the cultural diversity that this world depends on.” As the late, great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once said during an interview: “One of the most beautiful things about the world is the quantity of worlds that this world contains.”[xiv] The following stories are some of the worlds this world contains, and I hope that embarking on such a journey reveals the colorful worlds inside you.

Introduction [i] Todd BenDor, T. William Lester, Avery Livengood, Adam Davis, and Logan Yonavjak, “Estimating the Size and Impact of the Ecological Restoration Economy,” PLOS One 10, no. 6 (2015): e0128339. Catherine Cullinane Thomas, Christopher Huber, Kristin Skrabis, and Joshua Sidon, Estimating the Economic Impacts of Ecosystem Restoration—Methods and Case Studies, no. 2016-1016, US Geological Survey, 2016. [ii] Andrew Curry, “Pacific Northwest’s ‘Forest Gardens’ Were Deliberately Planted by Indigenous People,” Science, April 22, 2021, https://www.science.org/content/article/pacific-northwest-s-forest-gardens-were-deliberately-planted-indigenous-people. [iii] “Virtual Launch Gala - UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration -#WorldEnvironmentDay,” UN Environment Programme, June 4, 2021, YouTube, 1:46:20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X_Dz0vD6cE. [iv] Ibid., about eight minutes into the video. [v] “Don Diablo & Ty Dolla $ign - Too Much To Ask | Official Lyric Video,” Don Diablo, June 11, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlT_xVAUEd4. [vi] “Virtual Launch Gala.” [vii] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013), 338. [viii] Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (Verso Books, 2018). [ix] Ibid., 206. [x] Ashish Kothari, “A Tapestry of Alternatives,” Scientific American 324, no. 6 (2021): 60–69. [xi] David Wengrow and David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 24. [xii] Kothari, “Tapestry.” [xiii] Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (University of Michigan Press, 1998), xii. [xiv] Eduardo Galeano, “The Worlds Within the World,” interview by David Barsamian, Alternative Radio, April 22, 1999, https://www.alternativeradio.org/products/gale001/.