Ecological restoration practices and technologies are emerging as a dominant tool for addressing global environmental crises. This shift in conservation from a protectionist paradigm to a more hands-on approach signifies a new era of active intervention to the repair of ecosystems. Such approaches demand novel forms of human participation, fostering new kinds of relations, practices, values, and assumptions of what is “natural.” This special issue brings together reviews reflecting the diversity of perspectives and questions raised by social scientists on the practice of ecological restoration, restoration technologies, and restoration logics. Together they reveal three interconnected themes: (1) Politics are inherent to restoration practices of care and repair, raising questions about the logics and values that drive restoration, and the kinds of natures these generate. (2) Restoration is embedded in historical and social-political contexts, reflecting ongoing discussions on the implications of restoration in terms of environmental justice and equity. (3) Restoration is a relational practice that engages human–ecological entanglement and responsibility as central for the repair of social ecologies.

What does it mean to restore the environment? What is restored, according to whom, and at the expense of what? And when or where does restoration end? Restoration activities often presuppose environmental degradation, and posit a historical state that restoration will re-attain, in turn licensing activities that benefit the relatively powerful rather than the relatively weak. Thus, this article critiques a complex set of interlinked ideas and practices around restoration through reviews of literature in political ecology, urban and environmental studies, and conservation science. It expands upon ideas of restoration and foregrounds an ideology of cure that underlies so much of restoration discourse and practice.

The literature of landscape architecture points to an intensifying interest in “landscape restoration” practices. This literature represents restoration projects as demonstrations of multifaceted societal ambitions achieved through landscape transformation. Through exemplary case studies, we trace the lineages and evolution of restoration and related concepts, situating them against discourses of beautification and civility; integration and functionality; and adaptation and complexity that characterized landscape architectural practice through the Picturesque, Ecohumanist, and Landscape Urbanist periods. Each case study presents a distinct practice employed to transform the landscape in ways that reflect scientific breakthroughs and societal ambitions, as understood through discourses between 1730 and the present. We highlight an apparent conflation in contemporary terminology describing these practices and a lack of critical evaluation of the complex implications of such initiatives.

Ecological restoration, the practice of intervening in ecosystems to address environmental harms and degradation, offers hope for livable futures. Institutional restoration projects are typically conceptualized as scientific endeavors. Yet, Western scientific framings for restoration often leave out that which is relational, subjective, and human in this work—considerations that are just as important as biophysical attributes. Framing restoration as not only a scientific intervention but also a design activity can address this gap. In this article, I review historical and contemporary understandings of design in the context of ecological restoration. Restoration often uses a mechanistic approach to design, yet new postures for restoration design are emerging. By confronting nature–human dualisms, a relational design framing for restoration offers hope that our futures will be livable and just for all.

Environmental non-profits use visual imagery, specifically photography, to communicate and educate the public efficiently. Harnessing the informative power and global reach of social media, images attempt to show the complex ecological issues surrounding restoration and what is at stake for our oceans and marine life, which depend on coral ecologies for survival. These images provide visibility to scientific interventions, while also shaping coral restoration as a visual concept. Coral restoration images have distinct visual communication techniques depicting coral as a site in itself and as a site of human and scientific intervention. These images attempt to reconcile scientific objectivity with affective advocacy both reproducing and challenging visual dimensions of restoration. Yet, they are not visual facts, rather they have a deep history and corresponding literature demonstrating how cultural values and visual tropes actively—if not intentionally—shape the public gaze at the illuminated sanctuaries of the reefs below.

Amphibious landscapes, wetlands such as coasts, mangroves, peatlands, and deltas, have seen a recent surge in large-scale restoration efforts. This article examines this trend in Southeast Asia, reviewing the history and contemporary dynamics of wetland restoration in the region. Drawing from literatures on the political ecology of restoration, infrastructure studies, and the financialization of nature, we understand wetland restoration as a form of repair to highlight it as a socio-political process. We conceptualize restoration as infrastructural land repair, the process of restoring dynamic ecosystems for specific anthropocentric and economic aims, mediated through an amalgam of expertise, technology, and finance. We reveal how restoration can function as a socio-ecological fix, maintaining the same political-economic systems that initially caused wetland degradation. Finally, we identify a need for three areas of scholarship to be expanded on how restoration unfolds in practice within the SEA context, which will be crucial to informing more reparative forms of restoration.

Ecological restoration increasingly relies on genetic tools and technologies to identify distinct populations, monitor populations, and even modify organisms to improve fitness. In this article, we review the role of genetic and genomic technologies in restoration and conservation, using the restoration of cutthroat trout in the Western United States as one example. Reducing restoration and conservation directives to the molecular scale often relies on a view of genes as discrete bits of information that produce controllable and predictable traits. This leads to life-and-death decisions about wildlife populations, even as measures of “pure” genes for organisms are constantly changing. We review the implications of a reductionistic approach centered on genetic composition of organisms and consider the broader relevance of these issues to the future of ecological restoration.

Planting trees is a prominent strategy to address myriad environmental crises, including climate change and biodiversity loss. I approach this form of tree planting as a preeminent practice of environmental restoration in the Anthropocene. I focus on temporality, an approach that counters the dominant understanding of tree planting as something that occurs in a specific moment of time—the moment a tree is planted. Yet, I show through my review of diverse scholarship, tree planting is better understood as involving the many moments surrounding the moment in which a tree is planted. In particular, I focus on how past and future ecologies, humans, and nonhuman species—and how they are understood—influence the restorative tree planting that is reshaping many landscapes around the world. Among those landscapes is postindustrial northern England—a case I use to consider how attention to temporality might shape ethnographic research of restoration.

From being a marginal variety of timber, Shihuahuaco has become today the most important timber export in Peru. As a result, growing concerns about its extinction have led to its inclusion in CITES, a multilateral agreement by which its international trade will be subject to regulations that ensure the sustainability of its harvest. In this article, I examine Peru's recent debates over the endangerment of Shihuahuaco in order to consider larger dilemmas surrounding the politics of sustainability in today's global environmental governance. I show how CITES demands increasing levels of technoscientific knowledge and oversight on endangered species. And yet, I also consider how such demands have unleashed various controversies rooted in the long histories of technoscientific uncertainty that are associated to Amazonian rainforests in Peru.

Restoration ecology has often prioritized Western science, neglecting Indigenous expertise. This article examines the U.S. government's ecological restoration efforts on the Navajo Nation, addressing the impacts of uranium mining. Diné cultural values, grounded in hózhó (harmony and respect for the land), offer a perspective on environmental healing. Historical discrimination, like The Long Walk and boarding schools, illustrates the systemic displacement of the Diné from their ancestral lands, the dinétah. Contemporary restoration strategies, influenced by neocolonialist views, result in inadequate efforts termed ‘wastelanding,’ shaped by racial and poverty biases. Environmental justice issues arise from these insufficient approaches and the restrictive legal frameworks of trust lands, which hinder Indigenous land ownership. The article underscores the necessity of integrating Indigenous self-determination and cultural values into effective ecological restoration.

This article examines ecological restoration as a possible transformative and reparative practice amid ongoing colonial racial capitalist environmental destruction. While restoration—traditionally focused on repairing damaged landscapes—has increasingly recognized the importance of Indigenous knowledges, community engagement, and environmental justice, this article brings together critiques of normative restoration and critical discussions on reparations to locate environmental restoration within a broader ecology of reparations, or repair, for colonial violence that has disproportionately hurt Indigenous and Black communities. We consider how ideas and activities focused on “reparation ecology” offer new terrain upon which to foreground the interconnectedness of ecological and social repair through land rights, relationality, epistemic diversity, and solidarity. Drawing on case studies across geographies, we highlight how ecological restoration is at a crossroads for either internalizing or confronting injustices perpetrated through colonization and racism.

Environmental health influences personal wellbeing through direct experience. Despite this, the focus of the literature on the regeneration and reuse of post- industrial sites considers them as biophysical spaces studied conceptually rather than as places of physical engagement. The literature lacks an embodied perspective and presents such landscapes as sensorially impoverished. Narrative scholarship counters this shortcoming by employing phenomenology, thick description, and immersive walking. Although landscape archaeology, autoethnography, and anthropology apply these approaches, the methodology has rarely been applied to environmental “restoration” projects. This article reviews the literature and proposes a methodology for studying post-industrial sites based on sensorial “mind walking.” The approach enables a better understanding of the reclamation process and offers lessons for professionals building restorative experiences.

Muehlebach, Andrea, 2023. A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. xvi +252 pp. ISBN 978147801831

Dansac, Yael and Jean Chamel, eds., 2023. Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality in a Living World, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 259 pp. ISBN 9783031102936

Boyer, Dominic. No More Fossils. University of Minnesota Press, 2023. 96 pp. ISBN 978-1-4529-7021-9

Bresnihan, Patrick and Naomi Millner. 2023. All We Want Is the Earth: Land, Labour and Movements Beyond Environmentalism. Bristol: Bristol University Press. 194 pp. ISBN: 978-1529218336

Sahlins, Marshall, with Frederick B Henry, Jr. 2022. The New Science of the Enchanted Universe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 196 pp. ISBN 978-06912115921

Helmreich, Stephan, 2023. A Book of Waves. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 411 pp. ISBN 978-1478020417

Russo, Joseph C. 2023. Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakanetsa. 2023. Dare to Invent the Future: Knowledge in the Service of and through Problem-Solving. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 388 pp. ISBN 9780262546867

Bacchini, Luca and Victoria Saramago. 2023. Literature beyond the Human: Post- Anthropocentric Brazil. Routledge Studies in World Literature and the Environment. New York: Routledge. 258 pp. ISBN: 978-1032153995

Khan, Naveeda. 2023. River Life and the Upspring of Nature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 256 pp. ISBN 978-1-4780-1939-8

Hobart, Hi'iliei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani. 2022. Cooling the Tropics: Ice Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 264 pp. ISBN: 978-1478019190