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Sat May 31 | Context Programme Day 2 - de Brakke Grond

In the fight against climate change and the sixth mass species extinction, environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Restorationists grappled with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? And even more profound: Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness?

In the last block of our context programme we invite Dr. Laura J. Martin to share her research on how people create habitats for other species. She is the author of Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration and numerous articles on just solutions to the global biodiversity crisis. Martin shows how, over time, amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species.

At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that powerfully influenced what we understand the wild to be. In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for policy, design and action. But Martin also offers something more—a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.

About the speaker

Dr. Laura J. Martin is an environmental historian and ecologist. Her research, writing and commentary have been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, and other major media outlets. She is an environmental studies professor at Williams College and a former fellow of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

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