From Restoration Ecology to Reparation Ecology

Emerging from critiques of development in the 1970s, ecological restoration and restoration ecology focus on the complex interactions among ecosystems in need of repair from anthropogenic processes. Restoration programs typically involve reforestation, species reintroduction, wetland creation, habitat rehabilitation, and other such activities and aims. They range in size and scope, from localized efforts to large regional initiatives that rely on state and federal coordination and funding. The Florida Everglades is a classic large multi-institutional example of state, federal, non-governmental, and Indigenous leadership attempting to bridge political and cultural differences in ecological restoration management with complicated results (Grunwald 2006; Ogden 2008). In the 1990s Indigenous thinkers, scientists, and advocates began to critique mainstream restoration ecology for not recognizing the depth and variety of human-ecological relations or the ways in which ecosystem health is enmeshed within social and cultural contexts (Deloria 1992; Ford and Martinez 2000; Tomblin 2009). In a 1992 article about the ecological consequences of European and US colonialism and the ways in which Indigenous knowledges and ecologies have been undermined by government agencies in the name of restoration, Vine Deloria Jr. wrote, “Restoration depends on relationships between cultures and between people and the land” (1992: 48). He pointed to the need for a “spiritual management” that entails returning land to Indigenous nations. Since then, restoration scientists have debated how their work is shaped by social processes, like: social values, cultural modes of evaluation, political will, individual and organizational discretion, funding, and ecological conditions (Holl 2020; Jackson et al. 1995; Martin 2017). While some have argued that the field embodies the racial and colonial politics of the wider environmental movement, others see restoration as a more critical break informed by holistic values that link ecological well-being to human well-being, Indigenous peoples’ experiences and initiatives, and environmental justice (Tomblin 2009).

These debates have prompted critical questions about what should be restored, to what form or reference, and for whom—questions that are inherently political and are easily co-opted by powerful people, organizations, and industries, and embedded within existing social structures. Ecological restoration and social justice are therefore interconnected. As restoration practitioner Peter Holloran wrote, “Restored areas that closely resemble reference ecosystems may be judged a success at some level, but if they are installed and maintained by methods that fail to address underlying social conditions, they may well be failures in other, equally important ways. Ecological restorationists should seek to repair ecological degradation, while, at the same time, challenging the social and economic forces that cause it” (1996: 116). Holloran emphasized a responsibility of restorationists to not only repair ecological harm but also disrupt the systemic social factors that perpetuate environmental degradation. Inspired by such provocations, over the last 30 years there have been increasing calls to better define restoration to clarify the diverse applications of restoration science (Robinson et al. 2021), enhance political ecological analyses of restoration (Bliss and Fischer 2011), and honor Indigenous knowledges and sustain the continuation of Indigenous lifeways as part of restoration praxis (Kimmerer 2011; Wehi and Lord 2017; Whyte 2017). There is also growing emphasis on process-oriented approaches to restoration that are grounded in and explicitly informed by struggles for social and environmental justice (Almassi 2020; Barra 2024; CritRest Collective 2021; Whyte 2017).

Meanwhile, critical social scientists have also observed that approaches to the social dimensions of ecological restoration—including questions around disparate power relations among humans and hierarchical divisions of scientific and Indigenous epistemologies—are often captured by state agencies or folded into extant regimes of environmental management that may further marginalize communities historically affected by the degradation restoration aims to remedy (Cattelino 2015; Ogden 2008). Moreover, ecological protection and restoration have transformed into new sites of capital accumulation, as is evidenced in global ecotourism industries (A. Moore 2019). Indigenous and Black ecological practices and cosmologies oriented toward mutual and sustaining relations between human and non-human life have long been marginal within restoration ecology (Wehi and Lord 2017). As restoration is assimilated into mainstream environmental management practices it becomes, in practice and theory, yet another development discourse or iteration of global capitalism's extractive and paternalistic relationship to the environment, only this time under the guises of “working with Nature.” Over the past decade we have seen this dynamic in wetland restoration efforts in Louisiana (Colten 2017; Barra 2021, Jessee et al. 2020; Maldonado 2019). Arguably, the role of development agencies and contractors in reproducing capitalist ecologies may help explain why projects of social and political repair have not been adequately taken up in ecological restoration.

A similar structural critique has been brought to bear on the struggle for environmental justice. There is a common historical narrative of the environmental justice movement in the United States that begins in the early 1980s with protests over a proposed toxic waste landfill in the African American community of Warren County, North Carolina. For many, the local decision in 1982 to approve this landfill was just another episode in a long history of white political leaders treating communities of color as disposable. In response, there was a large nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that attracted solidarity from organizations and communities across the United States. Central to this work were scholar-advocates like Charles Lee and Reverend Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. who later conducted the first national study to find a pattern in which communities with a greater percentage of racial and ethnic minorities were more likely to host hazardous industrial facilities (Commission for Racial Justice 1987). Sustained advocacy from communities of color throughout the country, including the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit co-organized by Lee, the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, and others in 1991 put continued pressure on the federal government to institutionalize environmental justice. As a result of the community organizing, President Bill Clinton passed executive order 12898 in 1994, which directed agencies to confront environmental racism and incorporate environmental justice in their work. Despite these commitments at the federal level and unrelenting environmental justice struggle in the decades since, racial disparities in permitting and siting of industrial pollution remain (Bullard 2001; Pulido 2017). Several scholars focused on the environmental justice movement have emphasized the culpability of the capitalist state in sustaining environmental degredation and inequities (Pulido 2017; Taylor 2011) and the central role of environmental injustice in sustaining the settler colonial structure (Gilio-Whitaker 2019).

So, we ask, if the foundations of ecological restoration and restoration ecology have been forged within and in critical response to a racial capitalist colonial ecology that reproduces human supremacy over nature, what would it mean to conceptualize and practice restoration as part of an ecology predicated on building sustainable and anti-racist, anti-colonial worlds and relationships? Emerging work in the field of reparation ecology(ies) offers one possible entry point for approaching this question. The intersection of ecological restoration and reparations—what we describe as “reparation ecology,” following (Lampis et al. 2022)—is an evolving field that aims to understand what is “at stake in the coupling of the ecological with reparation” (Papadopoulos et al. 2023: 1). Conceptually, reparation ecology is a term used to think through the ways responses to ecological harm, from chronic exposures to toxic environmental hazards to the ecological and human risks associated with global climate, can be linked to the “wellbeing of human societies and ecosystems” (Lampis et al. 2022: 1). This work underscores the relationship between capitalist industrialization, ecological degradation, and the reproduction of global racialized inequalities (Liboiron 2021; Pulido 2017; Táíwò 2022). It also provokes questions as to what justice means, encouraging analysis of how local responses to ecological crises prompt new forms of “resistance, remediation, and mutual care practices” that transform and heal damaged ecological and social systems (Lampis et al. 2022: 2; see also Blanco-Wells 2021). Bringing conversations about ecological and social repair together also draws attention to the “interconnectedness between ecological and reparative obligations,” as Papadopoulos et al. (2023: 2) write. In this regard, reparation ecology advances an aspirational ethos around the “liberation from multi-layered forms of oppression” (Lampis et al. 2002: 3) oriented a toward re-thinking what emancipatory relations between humans and humans and nature can be (J. Moore and Patel 2017).

Toward an Ecology of Reparation and Repair

These conceptual explorations of the traction between restoration and reparations raise important questions about the extent to which discussions about ecological restoration can learn from struggles for reparations. Like mainstream ideologies of ecological restoration, popular and scholarly discussions on reparations as a political project are largely oriented around notions of injury, harm, restitution, and repair. As a “compensatory framework for responding to a claim of injury or harm” within settler colonial and former slave-holding societies, reparations frequently encompass efforts at the state, national, and international levels to address the historic and enduring impacts of state-sanctioned forms of violence enacted through settler colonialism, chattel slavery, genocide, and its lingering impacts as structural racial and classed inequalities (Valadares 2023). This may take the form of state recognition and apologies of past harms, financial recompense and redress and policies to proactively dismantle ongoing settler colonial and racial capitalist structures. In the United States, for example, there is long-standing and ongoing debate regarding suitable reparations for the generations of Black Americans affected by the enduring social and economic repercussions of chattel slavery and anti-Black racism. Reparations work in this context has underscored the depth of redress needed, recognizing that the forced displacement, dispossession, and dehumanization of Black people has been foundational in US politics and global capitalism. The vastness of both atrocity and wealth generation in such oppression demands both economic restitution and political restructuring to address these injustices or “debts,” effectively fostering equality for Black Americans commensurate with their white counterparts (Coates 2014; Darity and Mullen 2022; Ritchie and Stahly-Butts 2019; Táíwò 2022). Conversations on the economics of reparations often turn to forms of payment or other monetary recompense to Black Americans—such as direct cash payment, debt relief housing vouchers, et cetera—which directly addresses the racial wealth gap that has codified racialized inequalities in American society over generations.

While these frameworks address reparations as a structural and institutional level, ethnographers have amplified the ways that Afro-descendant peoples self-define what personal and collective repair might look like beyond a kind of one-off transaction oriented more around national and capitalist redemption than well-being of those bearing the brunt of structural violence. After serving on California's historic Committee for Reparations and conducting ethnographic research on everyday forms of reparations enacted by Black communities in the United States and Jamaica, geographer Jovan Scott Lewis has argued that while such institutional frameworks for reparations that aim to make people “whole” are certainly important, we should be mindful of orienting the ethos of reparations around harm, specifically Black harm, especially when they reproduce the economic logics of valuing Black life through dollars and cents. Though there is a place for reparations as monetary transactions, Lewis suggests that the concept of repair encompasses redress in a fuller more “pliable, innovative, and constructive sense” that foregrounds the injured party's capacity to self-determine the meaning of their injury and subsequent form of redress (Valadares 2023: 89). Lewis offers the notion of “relational repair” as a framework for reparations oriented around the affirmation of Black life and framed by the claims of Black people (Lewis 2023; see also Lewis 2022). Framing reparations around self-determined forms of redress and relations pushes us to transcend the narrow confines of state and capitalist transactions in order to foreground recognition, care, and accountability as practices that are ongoing and exist beyond discreet political policies that oversimplify reparations as mere transactional economic or political fixes led by the state (Lewis 2020; Thomas 2019).

In her critical reflections on the meaning of reparations, anthropologist Deborah Thomas centers “affectability,” following Denise Ferreira da Silva, as a way to break from what we might call normative frameworks of reparation focused on accounting, causality, and easy distinctions of responsibility (Thomas 2019, 2012). Her question, “what does repair feel like,” as opposed to asking how to enact reparations as a discreet political project, indexes an important epistemological and temporal shift, where repair is not the object of politics but an ongoing practice of redefining how we relate to one another and negotiate accountability and care at the everyday level. As she writes:

I have said repair here rather than reparation in order to mark a shift in orientation, a shift similar to the one marked by a move from resistance to refusal. Repair, like refusal, is practice oriented and quotidian; it is non-eventful and deeply historical and relations . . . repair urges us to interrogate the multiple scales of entanglement that have led us to where we are now. But where reparation seeks justice through the naming of names, the exposure of public secrets, and the articulation of chains of causality, repair looks for something else. It demands active listening, a mutual recognizing, an acknowledging of complicity at all levels—behavioral evidence of profound interior transformations that are ongoing. (Thomas 2019: 212)

Enactments of repair may not look like state-led projects of reconciliation. In fact, they may very well be the opposite. Echoing Thomas in his reflections on fieldwork among Jamaican lotto scammers who describe their efforts to extract money from wealthier white Americans as a form of reparations, Lewis cautions us to see repair as contingent, deeply contextual, and provisional practice. For an ethnographer like Lewis, this becomes a methodological ethic to “take seriously” the ways the scammers he writes about “justify their participation in the scam as a form of reparations,” even if they do not palpably transform the structural conditions of the scammers’ lives, which have led them to the scam as a form of reparations in the first place (2022: 193). These ethnographic insights teach us that repair may be seen as a much more capacious project than popular notions of reparations, a practice that is at once aspirational/processual and grounded in questions of relationality at a more structural everyday level rather than solely a discrete standardized compensation outcome that is ostensibly evidence of rectifying a flawed moment in an otherwise working system.

Drawing these critical reflections on reparation toward broader questions of repair as a relational practice reflects how reparation is an ecology that reflects how reparations is an ecology that exceeds singular apologies or forms of economic restitution. As geographer Jason Moore notes, “a reparation ecology is not about writing a check and saying it's all good . . . though sometimes money is absolutely necessary” (Velednitsky 2017). Rather, it is a capacious vision of repair that departs from the market and capitalist transactions as the predominant framework of formalized reparations and, instead, advances forms of restitution that foster the healing of broken relationships on the terms of those grappling with the acute and intergenerational impacts of ecological and social harm. Invoking ecology as material and metaphoric enables us to at once consider the discrete role the environment/ecologies play in wider projects of social repair and also forward a re-thinking of reparation and repair as an ecology that encompasses multiple moving parts. As networks, ecologies are not singular objects and can be seen as more than the sum of their parts (Holling 1966). The health of any given ecology is not measured by discrete variables within it, but the capacity of relations between variables to sustain life across the ecosystem. Though a theoretical point, ecology is a useful framework through which to consider how forms of human and ecological repair are predicated on a variety of relations that must move in sync with one another to ensure mutual survival.

What does this imply for scholars of ecological restoration? In their review of an emerging body of cross-disciplinary research on reparation ecology and ecological reparations, Andrea Lampis and colleagues (2022) suggest four key dimensions of reparation ecology. First, it is a biocultural engagement that concerns the mutual repair of ecosystems and relationships. Second, it is a practice of resistance to dominant territorial and political struggle. Third, that it encompasses forms of compensation for ecosystems and humans from government, corporate and other entities. Finally, it reframes nature in ways that can “facilitate new forms of resistance or compensation, such as the legal rights of a river” (2022: 5, see also J. Moore and Patel 2017). These aspects of reparation ecology, Lampis et al. (2022) note, have been consistently taken up by work in the field of agroecology, particularly in Latin America, focused on the ways Black and Indigenous communities link movements for self-determination and sovereignty to food, farming, and securing land rights (Cadieux et al. 2019; Lampis et al. 2022: 3; Tacchetti et al. 2022). What emerges from this framework is a crucial focus on the “interconnectedness between ecological and reparative obligations” that recognizes how social and ecological repair are intrinsically linked (Papadopoulos et al. 2023: 2). As scholars developing the concept of reparation ecology note, Indigenous peoples and scholars have been at the forefront of articulating these interdependent relationships between ecological repair and restorative justice. This reminds us that the two are not only inseparable, but that linking the two requires an epistemological re-orientation of normative ideologies of restoration rooted in western settler colonial ideologies of nature. In this regard, notions of reciprocity and relations come to the foreground as the orienting ethos of reparation ecology and, more broadly, an ecology of reparation amid the extractive, objectifying, and commoditizing logics of normative restoration and natural resource management (Kimmerer 2009; LaDuke 1999).

Lampis and colleagues argue that bringing scholarship on restoration into dialogue with “different epistemological and political backgrounds to fight for climate justice” (2022: 20)offers tangible conceptual and empirical frameworks to our study and analysis of radical restoration practices. In his recent book Reconsidering Reparations (2022), Olúfẹ´mi Táíwò reflects on the ways “global racial empire” has sedimented the sacrifice of Black, Indigenous, and other non-European peoples while arguing that global climate change is where “a politically serious reparations project must begin” (Táíwò 2022: 11). Because ecological degradation and upending the Earth's climate turns extant forms of racial injustice into “overdrive at every scale of human life” (idem: 163), it becomes a critical space for radically imagining social transformation on par with the scale of global racial empire. This begins, Táíwò suggests, with concrete steps to address the disparities in political and economic power that sustain climate and social injustices. These include discreet economic recommendations—cash transfers, eliminating tax havens, divestment from fossil fuels, global climate funding—that are bolstered by a redistribution of decision-making power, “community control” as he describes it, that place historically marginalized groups and their empowerment at the center of a climate justice agenda (Táíwò 2022: 172–190). While Táíwò does not wholly reject an economic restitution framework for imagining reparations, which includes monetary recompense in a variety of forms, his long durée perspective on global racial empire and the ways ecological degradation are connected to these histories opens a space for thinking about restoration as part of an ecology of reparations that spans social, ecological, economic, and political realms (J. Moore and Patel 2017).

In order to think through reparation as an ecology of repair rooted in reconstructing and transforming the relationships between human and non-human worlds, the following sections advance three relational priorities that are characteristic of transformative restorative practice: traditional knowledges and cultural survival; land tenure, sovereignty, and community self-determination; and coalition building and solidarity. As we discuss below, examples of reparation ecologies exist in myriad geographic, political, and ecological forms that are connected to, and autonomous from, top-down, state-led ecological restoration frameworks. From urban farms to native plant conservation and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), projects enacted by Black and Indigenous groups demonstrate how forms of social repair, including land tenure, intergenerational ecological and medicinal knowledge, and agricultural self-sufficiency, are negotiated through ecological practices. These are not mere ecological or political fixes to systems of ecological degradation and the routine sacrifice Black, Indigenous, and non-white “others” through better environmental policies or official apologies, though these efforts certainly matter. Rather, they are epistemological and material reorientations that reframe restoration as a practice of making and maintaining what we can think of, following Robin Kimmerer (2021), as a kinship that entangles us in a “web of reciprocity”—of gratitude, obligation, and mutual exchange—with damaged ecologies in ways that ideologically break with notions of extraction, commodification, and control that have been the root of ecological and racial degradation. This means conceptualizing the work of restoration as a process-based approach with a longer time horizon, both in terms of being historically informed and thinking about several generations into the future.

Traditional Knowledges and Cultural Survival

Restoration as a reparative practice must honor and ensure the continuation of traditional, non-western scientific ecological knowledge systems—place-based expertise maintained by people who have sustained subsistence ways of life over generations of ecological interaction, observation, and education (Berkes 1993; Deloria 1992; Kimmerer 2013; Pierotti and Wildcat 2000). Such expertise often constitutes deep understanding of the behavior of certain plants and animals, seasonal patterns and changes over time, ecological dynamics, and the effects of some human interventions. According to Dan Wildcat, TEK “are the antidote to the current anthropogenic destruction of life-systems on Earth” in part because of its “respect for diversity of both Peoples and places” and “attentiveness to experience in the world, beyond our creation and design, in which humankind participates” (2022: 2). Robin Wall Kimmerer's chapter (2011) offers a significant resource, bringing together a wide array of contemporary Indigenous restoration initiatives. Grounded within local cosmologies and worldviews, every day and ceremonial practices, social institutions, and education, TEK systems are tied to the material conditions of those who maintain them.

TEKs also encompass knowledge cultivated in response to context of racialized oppression and violence, as evidence by a substantive field of Black environmentalism/ecologies (hereafter “Black ecologies”) that situates the cultivation and transfer of ecological knowledge among Afro-descendant peoples within the context of strategizing for biological and cultural survival, economic autonomy, and political freedom (Glave and Stoll 2005; Stewart 2006; Roane and Hosbey 2019). Though still marginal from mainstream work on TEK that largely assumes “traditional” equates “Indigenous,” there is a long history of ecological knowledge and practice across the African diaspora that has been central to making—and undermining—racial capitalist ecologies (Carney 2002; Finney 2014; Hosbey et al. 2022; Penniman 2023). From the slave garden plot to contemporary efforts to build Black owned farms in urban and rural contexts, research in the interdisciplinary field of Black ecologies reminds us that Black ecological knowledge and practices are not only circumscribed to vulnerability, toxicity, and harm, but have been the grounds of cultivating Black liberation from within anti-Black political, economic, and ecological formations (Fuller 2021; Hosbey et al. 2022; Lloréns 2021; Roane 2018).

As TEK becomes more widely appreciated by settlers and settler institutions, the risk of commodification and decontextualization from the social and cultural contexts in which it has been honed have become more pronounced. Many settler scientists have come to recognize that TEK offers distinct perspectives that can enhance and at times complement Western scientific thought and inquiry, leading to more objective and culturally appropriate understanding and restoration strategies (Robinson et al. 2021; Uprety 2012). More and more interest and investment in participatory or community-engaged environmental research, increasingly framed as the “co-production” of knowledges (Djenontin and Meadow 2018) have led to detrimental conceptual ambiguity (Mach et al. 2020; Norström et al. 2020) and new forms of old risks (Montgomery and Blanchard 2022; Whyte 2016). Increasingly, scholars and community advocates are warning of Indigenous knowledge extraction in the name of community engagement or environmental science (Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education 2022; Callison 2017; Montgomery and Blanchard 2022; Robinson et al. 2021). Participation can thus be extractive of time and knowledge, as well as a weapon. When Indigenous peoples’ expertise—rooted in material, cultural, historical, and spiritual significance—is valued only as “data” to advance settler agendas, it can become wielded against those same people who have sustained those knowledges despite the invasion of colonial governance and imposition of toxic industries (Montgomery and Blanchard 2022). Nicole Klenk's work highlights how sharing knowledge within environmental governance and community engagement processes can have detrimental material consequences for community members, for example, by altering the political economy of land and property with newly amplified senses of risk. In a vivid example from New Brunswick, Canada, Klenk describes how some residents faced increasing uncertainty and precarity due to vulnerability maps that they helped develop (Klenk 2018). As Nicole Latulippe and Nicole Klenk (2020: 7) summarize, “seeking Indigenous knowledge to inform environmental decision-making implies that Indigenous peoples are stakeholders as opposed to self-determining nations with rights and responsibilities regarding their knowledge systems and lands. Indigenous sovereignty is not respected when knowledge is treated as mere data for collective decision-making.”

Whereas Indigenous expertise is often integrated/co-opted into mainstream restoration in often superficial and exploitative ways, Black ecological expertise is almost non-existent in critical and non-critical literatures in the field of TEK. When Black communities have been brought to the table, it is often as stakeholders in the process of negotiating environmental harms. Black communities are not, however, consistently engaged as producers of ecological knowledge. In the United States, as Finney (2014) describes in her work, the marginalization of Black people from mainstream environmental imaginaries reflects the dominance of white, western European ideologies of Nature that marginalized African American environmental experiences and practices. The restoration of Black environmental narratives to the practices of the National Park Service, such as Virginia Beach in Florida or the Gullah-Geechee Corridor in the southeastern United States, for example, is only a recent endeavor, and one pushed forward by Black environmentalists and scholars who worked hard to integrate the Black experience into collective national imaginaries of the environment. Consequently, the focus of restoration work might be oriented toward socio-cultural repair across different groups while committed to materially supporting Indigenous and Black self-determined futures.

Land Tenure, Sovereignty, and Community Self-Determination

Critical responses to superficial nods toward Indigenous and TEKs compel us to think more deeply and urgently about how flawed and insufficient it is to strive to repair ecological systems without simultaneously confronting histories, legacies, and ongoing forced dispossession of land and waters and fragmentation of ecological relations among Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples worldwide. Sovereignty and self-determination over land has been a key aspect of theorizing reparations and restitution for settler colonialism and chattel slavery in the United States and other former slave-holding societies. Indigenous peoples have been subject to colonization, conquest, and settler expansion, resulting in the displacement and marginalization from their traditional territories and ecosystems. Likewise, European and US imperialism fostered mass migration and cultural fracturing of Africans who were captured and taken to North America and the Caribbean along the trans-Atlantic slave trade, where plantation owners and societies were reliant upon African ecological knowledge and labor to transform seized Indigenous lands into capitalist profits (Carney and Rosomoff 2009). While modes of land dispossession vary across regions, historical contexts, legal regimes, and cultural dynamics, there are important recent efforts to quantify the colonial policies, forced removals, land seizures, resource extraction and mining, and the establishment of conservation areas (Farrell et al. 2021; Scheidel et al. 2023). The consequences of land dispossession and forced displacement are far-reaching, as dispossession and displacement disrupts traditional livelihoods, traditional knowledge systems, and cultural practices tied to the land. It undermines the social fabric of Indigenous communities, threatens self-governance, and exacerbates socio-economic inequalities and has led to environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, extraction, and undermining of ecosystem function.

Land and water rights are central tenets of Indigenous and Black reparations in American history. Scholarship in the field of Black ecologies rightly points out that historical and ongoing relationships that many Afro-descendant people cultivate with the local environment have been guided by both continuation of traditional lifeways and the aim of creatively building social and ecological relations free from the dominant economic, social, and environmental ideologies of racial capitalism (Hosbey et al. 2022; Roane and Hosbey 2019; Garth and Reese 2020). Historic examples of petit marronage, autonomous rural Black communities across the southern United States, and movements for land and food sovereignty like Fannie Lou Hammer's Sunflower Farm in Mississippi offer historic examples of the ways Black liberation and self-emancipation have long been nurtured by relations of care and reciprocity between Afro-descendant people and the environment (Stewart 2006; Bledsoe 2018; Roane 2018; White 2018; McCutcheon 2019; Purifoy 2022).

Sovereignty and self-determination over land, broadly speaking, has been a key aspect of theorizing reparations and restitution for colonial dispossession and chattel slavery in the United States and other former slave-holding societies (Darity and Mullen 2022; Foner 2014; Lenzerini 2008). Efforts to redress Indigenous land dispossession involve recognizing and affirming existing Indigenous land rights, including legal recognition of ancestral territories and Indigenous institutions and governance (NDN Collective 2021; The Red Nation 2021). Land restitution and land rematriation are essential components of rectifying historical injustices and promoting Indigenous well-being (Josewski et al. 2023; Tuck and Yang 2012). Additionally, supporting Indigenous-led conservation initiatives, sustainable land management practices, and fostering meaningful partnerships between Indigenous communities and settlers aimed at re-establishing Indigenous land stewardship and social institutions are crucial steps toward ecological restoration (Estrada et al. 2022; Garnett et al. 2018; Kimmerer 2011; Sze et al. 2022; Whyte 2016). This is not to ignore the contradictions that pervade Indigenous or Black control of land, as there are plenty of examples of non-sustainable land uses among Indigenous peoples and colonial “ecologically noble savage” tropes have undermined Indigenous adaptation, self-determination, and livelihoods around the globe. However, the most egregious and harmful examples are clearly responses to racial capitalist ecologies that can put Indigenous groups, for example, into positions where options to enact forms of land sovereignty are pegged to ecologically harmful practices (Ishiyama 2002).

There are multiple innovative approaches to returning land to Black and Indigenous peoples and supporting the continuation and revitalization of traditional ecological relations while protecting against forced displacement in the United States. Some examples include the Wiyot Tribe of California's use of community land trusts (Nonko 2023) or the efforts of Gullah-Geechee groups from Sapelo, Georgia, who have worked to acquire land and cultivate relationships with local academic institutions to foster the restoration of heirloom sugarcane on the island in ways that reinforce cultural-continuity and forms of economic autonomy (Hardy et al. 2022; Heynen 2020). It is restorative in multiple senses for the local ecology and for Gullah-Geechee groups for whom the project enacts cultivating ties to ancestors, histories, and future visions for cultural sustainability for Gullah-Geechee participants. This is, in part, what has led scholars to characterize these practices as “abolition ecologies”: ecological practices that, though not always completely anti-capitalist, seek to build new form of socio-ecological relations divorced from the legacies of chattel slavery (Heynen 2020). There is a deep intentionality around the creation of these social and ecological spaces. Place like Soul Fire Farm in New York and Earthseed Land Collective in North Carolina reflect the multiple kinds of experiments in land tenure, ownership, and ecological practices that place Black and Indigenous ecological, intergenerational knowledge and well-being at the foreground of their ecological, economic, and ideological practices (Purifoy 2020; Penniman 2023). Though these examples are not always anti-capitalist, they reflect an ethic of Black land tenure, particularly in the southern United States that, as geographer Danielle Purifoy, following bell hooks (1990) and Dryer and Bailey (2008), describes as a “homeplace,” wherein “the purpose of owning land was not to profit from its sale, but to maintain a place of safety, security, and preservation of legacy for generations” (2022: 148).

For some Afro-descendant groups outside the United States, diverse forms of land tenure and ownership is also tied to asserting and protecting land rights to self-determination and sovereignty. Lampis et al. (2022) use the example of two peri-urban Afro-descendant territories, or Quilombos as they are historically known, on the outskirts of Rio De Janeiro—Vargem Grande and Camorin—as an exemplary reflection of the multiple ecological, cultural and political dimensions of reparation ecology. “Quilombos (Palenques in Spanish speaking Latin America)” Lampis et al. writes, “were the first free territories founded by formerly enslaved Brazilians” (2022: 10) and are frequently referred to as maroon communities for their specific relationship to the runaway slaves who founded these territories. A century after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, Quilombos were granted the status of “traditional population” and constitutional right to collective land ownership, however their capacity to access these rights are limited (Lampis et al. 2022). For Vargem Grande and Camorin, efforts to preserve Afro-Brazilian heritage are entangled with efforts to enact local based ecological conservation practices to protect traditional plant and archaeological sites, share intergenerational ecological knowledge, and assert forms of autonomy over land stewardship. Care for cultural heritage and defense of political protected rights to autonomy of land use practices reflect the ways dimensions of political resistance are enacted within and alongside distinct biocultural engagements with nature that seek to persevere and maintain cultural traditions through restoring local ecology, intergenerational ecological education, and collective land stewardship practices that push back against urban development and environmental degradation (Coelho-Junior et al. 2020; Lampis et. al. 2022: 12–13). “Reparation here,” Lampis et al. argue, “consists of the use value, food security, local and matriarchal protagonism, ecosystem management, education, and horizontal legislation which aim at the reconstruction of memory and relations of collective struggle and resurgence” (2022: 14). Or, put another way, reflecting the spirit of their Maroon ancestors, we can consider enactments of Quilombo ecological reparation as a manifestation of “self-liberation and autonomy” (Bledsoe 2017: 37) from settler colonial political and ecological systems through the mobilization of Afro-descendant ecological and cultural epistemologies. Restoration of local ecologies, history and culture, and rights to self-determination, in this regard, are entwined.

Coalition Building and Solidarity

Oppressed peoples often face intersecting struggles and with similar outcomes, including threats to livelihoods, health and mental well-being, cultural erasure, and systemic political and social marginalization. Emerging literature casts restoration as a potential pathway for cultural reclamation, healing, and resistance against environmental degradation and social injustice across differences. Cleo Wolfe Hazard, for example, offers a critique into solidarity, care, and anti-colonial thinking in his work on river restoration in the Scott Valley and Klamath River systems. Hazard's deployment of “queer trans feminist ecology”—“an [orientation] that holds space for different kinds of thought [and practice]” (2022: 14)—as conceptual and material practice of destabilizing normative settler colonial practices of restoration (and science) can be useful for thinking about what we mean by “radical” restoration. Radical restoration destabilizes and rebuilds more flexible, fluid networks of solidarity across ecological and epistemic differences. Hazard's work is an example of how “queer ecologies make kinship networks through the practice of field science” and how queer bodies compel heteronormative, settler science to critical reflect on their “fishy loves” (idem: 13, 35) that erode notions of objectivity foundational to normative restoration. Moreover, his work spells out the ways marginalized ecological knowledges reframe assumptions baked into normative restoration. This scholarship is an example of writing against the “add TEK and everything's okay” approach and building relationships of solidarity in the service to anti-colonial struggle through a radical epistemic departure from normative restoration ecology.

In coastal Louisiana, where Indigenous and Black communities have long taken the lead to build a more just and holistic ecological restoration for the region, recent partnerships with social and environmental scientists have led to new attempts at harmonizing disparate restoration priorities by drawing on traditional knowledges and place-based expertise and finding new ways to put the cultural and social survival of Indigenous communities on the state's coastal restoration agenda (Bethel et al. 2014, 2022). Tribal governments and Black cultural organizations throughout the region, as well as coalitions, like The First Peoples’ Conservation Council of Louisiana (FPCC)—an association of Tribal communities in coastal Louisiana formed “to identify and solve natural resource issues” on traditional territories of Indigenous communities (FPCC 2023)—and Coastal Communities Consulting, Inc. a women-of-color led non-profit that supports Asian-American fisherfolk in south Louisiana (Kang 2023), should be seen by state, local, and federal restoration professionals as leaders and actual partners in restoration. Instead, currently communities face enormous challenges in accessing resources, funding, and decision-making processes to mitigate the distinct impacts of coastal erosion and extreme weather on their communities. Indigenous and Black communities on the coast are cast by state agencies as “stakeholders,” and therefore hold limited power in shaping the ideological models driving ecological restoration investments, particularly when set alongside more influential stakeholders such as the oil and gas industry, private property owners, and national environmental groups. Consequently, their ideas of ecological and cultural repair are often disregarded as mere public input that is categorically marginal to “official” restoration, which has gained funding and political support by aligning with risk producers like the oil and gas industry. One challenge for restoration as a transformative reparative practice, is to both elevate and honor the rights and aspirations of these groups and their social institutions in restoration while also de-staking those organizations and logics that caused the coastal crisis in the first place.

Truly honoring Indigenous knowledges and land and other ecological relations necessitates distinct upholding responsibilities to Indigenous peoples and social organizations and commitments to existing local and regional efforts to ensure the continuation of Indigenous social and ecological relations, expression, and ways of life. Restoration paradigms must be driven by what Coulthard and Simpson (2016) refer to as “grounded normativity” and “place-based solidarity”—a notion of responsibility that challenges the prevailing commodification of knowledge driving so-called “scalable solutions” to environmental problems (Jessee 2022). Drawing on Critical Race Theory and Indigenous methodologies, ethnic, gender and labor studies scholar Michelle Montgomery and geographer Paulette Blanchard (2022) advance “7Rs”: Respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility—building upon an approach outlined by Verna J. Kirkness and Ray Barnhardt (1991)—and relatedness, relationships, and redistribution as key values for guiding ethical collaborations with Indigenous nations and communities. Blanchard and Montgomery emphasize the need for historically informed, anti-racist, and anti-colonial work that centers a solidarity premised upon the recognition of Indigenous self-determination and aimed at “eliminating racial and environmental oppression of Indigenous peoples’ land and seascape identities as a part of a broader goal of ending all forms of oppression.” Their important work also highlights the need to follow the lead of and materially support Black and Indigenous students and institutions and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU)s and Tribal Colleges and Universities, who have long been generating knowledge and ecological governance practices that better confronts social injustice alongside environmental degradation.

The efforts of Black farmers and environmental activists echoes these sentiments in their own key through efforts to build connections and coalitions across time and space that archive and enact what Penniman calls “Black ecological sagacity”: An intergenerational corpus of Black environmental practice and ecological knowledge that refuses narratives of Black alienation from Nature or those predicated solely upon environmental harm as the marker and legacy of Black environmentalism. Penniman's most recent book Black Earth Wisdom (2023), is a testament to a long history of Black environmental wisdom eschewed by mainstream environmentalism (see also Hosbey et al. 2022). But it is also an example of reparative and solidarity building practice in form and content as it puts a variety of farmers, activists, scholars, poets, and artists in dialogue with each other to share and grow the meaning of protecting and nurturing the Earth and Black social relations. “Our four hundred-plus year immersion in racial capitalism” Penniman argues, “cannot diminish that connection to the sacred Earth,” that many Black communities have (Penniman 2023: xx). “The truth of the matter is that black people have a 12,000-year history of noble, sacred, and dignified relationship to soil that far surpasses our 246 years of enslavement and seventy-five years of sharecropping in the United States” (Penniman 2022: 23). Beginning the book with a “prayer of homage to our Earth-listening Black elders,” Penniman reminds her readers that the roots of Black ecological relations run deep—from western and sub-Saharan African farmers and builders to “grandmothers” who braided the seeds of African Black rice in hair trapped in slave ships to George Washington Carver and Fannie Lou Hammer to Robert Bullard and Octavia Butler (2023: xxv–iviii). To name names, pour out prayers and libation is an act of repair that sutures past to present, growing solidarity across time and geographic and political context.

Such grounded solidarity work should inform all aspects of restoration, including the definitions of ecologies and scope of damage, the kinds of appropriate response and timelines of process, and the evaluation and assessment of activities. Several Indigenous Studies scholars have identified the power to define scope and nature of harm and response as critical to more just futures (Callison 2020; Gilio-Whitaker 2019; Todd 2017). As Candis Callison emphasizes in a piece about climate change, “Acknowledging settler colonialism and its structures, as well as a serious consideration of diverse Indigenous knowledges, experiences, and histories, offers profound insight into the crises . . . along with a differentiated sense of how to consider what must, should, and can be done about it” (2020: 130). With regard to TEK, Callison highlights an edifying point from Anishinaabe scholar Deborah McGregor: “One does TEK; it is not limited to a ‘body of knowledge.’ Non-Aboriginal views of TEK are more concerned with what the knowledge consists of and how it is transmitted. TEK is not just knowledge about the relationships with Creation, it is the relationship with Creation; it is the way that one relates” (McGregor 2004: 394). In sum, TEK may not be worth sharing with scholars or restoration practitioners, unless as Nadia S Santini and Yosune Miquelajauregui (2022, 1) describe, it can be assured that processes “align restoration outcomes with community benefits gained from environmental stewardship and knowledge.” Transformative restoration requires responsibility, commitment, and accountability, ensuring the material benefit of restoration at every moment of restoration research and practice—from before design, funding, and so on to implementation, evaluation, and beyond.

Similarly, in their Critical Restoration Meanders and Reading Lists, the CritRest Collective brings together approaches to ecological restoration informed by critical theory and social movements. Drawing on political ecology; disability studies; Black, Indigenous, and queer ecological thought; human geography; science fiction; and the history of environmental justice, their meanderings and reading lists challenge restoration scholars and practitioners to confront apolitical and ahistorical notions of restoration. They argue that restoration scholars and practitioners should counter ableist norms by amplifying the knowledge and values of disabled peoples. For them, critical restoration must involve recognizing interdependence and bolstering social structures and systems that “make life more liveable for all and ensure no one is left behind” (CritRest 2021: 1). They also argue that critical restoration builds on the demands of existing movements for environmental justice, abolition, and Black liberation through novel forms of knowledge production and a harmonization of imagination and planning (idem: 5). The CritRest Collective's work provides restoration scholars and practitioners an opening through which to think through the transformative politics of their work in a way that is rooted in existing intellectual and political struggles for justice and equity.

Conclusion: Restoration Never Ends

Restoration as a transformative reparative practice requires a fundamental shift in the scope of restoration knowledge production, planning, and policy. This article brings together literature on restoration and reparation ecology to confront enduring violence of the past, urgent needs of today, and aspirations for more just futures. We hope this contributes to conversations that explore what it would mean for restoration to be reimagined as a process that centers relationality, recognizing the interconnectedness of humans, social institutions, and non-human life in all its forms (Papadopoulos et al. 2023). We think the scholars cited here, and many we have yet to learn from, are inspirational for advocating for Indigenous and Black land stewardship, fostering reciprocity and mutual care as guiding principles of restoration work, empowering oppressed communities to actively participate in decision-making processes, and committing to their self-determined futures.

Furthermore, embracing epistemic diversity is essential to dismantling the dominance of Western scientific knowledge in restoration practices. Indigenous knowledge systems and other locally grounded ecological knowledge hold invaluable insights into ecosystem functioning and sustainable resource management. By learning from and supporting the ongoing existence of diverse knowledge systems, restoration efforts can benefit from a holistic understanding of ecological dynamics and cultural significance. It is crucial for practitioners, policymakers, and scholars to embrace the relationality, epistemic diversity, and solidarity for restoration to challenge normative ideologies and practices of restoration that risk reinforcing extant social-racial-ecological inequalities and the co-optation of localized restoration practices. The prioritization of economic interests and powerful stakeholders, such as the industrial sector or corporate private property owners, must give way to a more equitable and inclusive approach grounded in accountability to local Indigenous peoples and oppressed communities by centering their needs and aspirations. In this way, solidarity should be the guiding ethos of restoration praxis and ideology, transcending boundaries and fostering collaboration across communities, disciplines, institutions, and temporalities. This entails recognizing the interdependencies of struggles against colonialism, racial capitalism, and environmental injustice, and supporting them materially. Building and nurturing existing alliances among frontline communities, social movements, environmental organizations, scholars, and restoration practitioners can amplify marginalized voices, challenge existing perils of normative restoration, and advance transformative processes and mutually beneficial relationships.