Members in Action: Laura Martin, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College

Dr. Laura Martin is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Williams College in western Massachusetts (USA), and author of the book, Wild By Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration.  Dr. Martin is pictured surveying plant diversity in Phragmites australis stands in Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, New York. 

Tell us more about your book, Wild By Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration

Wild by Design is a history of the ecological restoration movement in the United States. To write it I dove deep into the archives of individual ecologists and of organizations like SER, the Wild Flower Preservation Society, The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. National Park Service. It argues restoration emerged in the early twentieth century as an alternative to both wilderness preservation and natural resources conservation. It was distinct in that its proponents strove to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. 

In exploring the history of restoration, Wild by Design uncovers surprising stories: It connects U.S. nuclear colonialism in the Marshall Islands to the release of genetically modified salmon and General Mills Bacon Bits. It locates the origin of the international carbon offsetting market in Walt Disney World's Animal Kingdom. And it argues that the purpose of early bison restoration was to consolidate land with white settlers. Some of the questions it tackles are: How did ecologists come to see some types of environmental damage as irreversible? When and why did restorationists begin to use historical baselines? How did invasive species management emerge? How did ecological restoration become its own subdiscipline? And what is the future of restoration?

What inspired you to write Wild By Design?

My whole career, I’ve never been able to choose between science and history. These two ways of knowing complement one another. Much of ecology is historical, and I’m interested in histories that go beyond human stories. 

I first became interested in the history of ecological restoration when I was a graduate student at Cornell University doing field work on invasive plants and deer over-browsing. Collaborating with land managers got me curious about how our current systems of management – and our current scientific ideas – emerged. I began taking classes in environmental history and science & technology studies, and I started doing archival research. Because of my scientific training, I was able to interpret sources that historians rarely touch – field notebooks, databases, data visualizations, and experimental designs. Eugene Odum’s archives even contain his field pants.   

Collecting Impatiens capensis seedlings in Jewett, New York, for a study on the impacts of deer herbivory. 

What other projects are you working on right now?

I’m working on a new book, The War on Weeds: How Hormonal Herbicides Reshaped the Global Environment. Since their development in the 1940s, auxinic herbicides have been used in agriculture, lawn care, warfare, and invasive species management, with dramatic consequences for ecosystems and public health. I argue that the proliferation of these “selective herbicides,” which kill dicots but not monocots, explains how agricultural and residential landscapes became grassscapes. My research follows these herbicides from test grounds in Kenya to battlefields in Vietnam, disposal sites in the Pacific, and American backyards.

I’m also working on a chapter on the history of wetlands mitigation banking for an edited volume on the environmental history of big box stores. I’m interested in how the idea of off-site mitigation emerged and spread, and its consequences for people and for other species. 

A clipping from the archives of the Wild Flower Preservation Society, held at the New York Botanical Garden Archives in Bronx, New York.

How does your work support the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration?

Wild by Design explains the origins of the very concepts that are framing the UN Decade – including “ecosystem” and “mitigation.” It calls for ecological restoration to fully embrace the cause of environmental justice. One of the take-aways of the book is that history is never determined. The idea, practice, and discipline of ecological restoration came about through a messy and unpredictable process. I hope the book will spark new visions for the future of restoration.   

What does ecological restoration mean to you?

Collaborating with other species to build a more just world where humans and non-humans jointly thrive. 

Why would you encourage others, particularly young people, to get involved in this field?

I note in Wild by Design that teaching has motivated me to seek out hopeful environmental stories, in this time when almost every environmental news story is one of catastrophe. There is hope to be found in ecological restoration. Restoration is, by definition, active – it is an attempt to intervene in the fate of a species or an entire ecosystem. If preservation is the desire to hold nature in time, and conservation is to manage nature for the future, restoration asks us to do something more complicated: to make decisions about where and how to heal – to care for and to repair relationships.