Restoration's return in the age of climate crisis: toward a feminist environmental justice response

Abstract

This project is situated at the locus of discourses on feminism, environmental justice, climate change, and ecological restoration. Asking what kinds of responses to climate change are needed on this rapidly-changing planet, and which initiatives will address social and ecological dilemmas simultaneously, I turn to ecological restoration as a troubled but promising field to harness the insights of feminist environmental justice toward intervening in both the causes and consequences of climate change. In order to engender resiliency among human and nonhuman communities, I advocate a contextualized, grassroots response to climate change that I have coined justice-oriented restoration. This ideology and method strengthens voices and movements often marginalized by engaging diverse stakeholders in order to create ecologies responsive to climatically-induced biosocial shifts, as well as the declining field of restoration itself, which climate change threatens to render irrelevant. In so doing, this project contributes to debates on sustainability; to the cross-pollination of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences; and to the momentum building worldwide for community-driven, site-specific adaptations, mitigations, and remediations to environmental vulnerabilities.