ETHICS OF RESTORATION

Learning from Kelp

Kelp teaches: to live is to bend, to release, and to be carried. Some of our best models for restoration come not from humans but from other species. Restoration is often imagined as a human endeavor: an attempt to repair, to return, to manage. But kelp resists such linearity. It teaches us that survival and renewal do not emerge from order or purity, but from entanglement.

When I first met kelp, its slimy fronds brushed against my skin. Its limbs bent and swayed around me, shaping the water as I moved through it. As ecologist Callum Roberts notes, “kelp defies monoculture. It refuses neat rows. It tangles. It touches. It ghosts across limbs and reefs” (Roberts, 2012). Survival in the ocean, like survival on land, depends on flexibility: letting go, holding others, bending with currents. Later I would learn the word resilience, but my first encounter with it was bodily.

Kelp does not resist change; it becomes it.

To imagine a kelp forest is to picture not just towering limbs but a bus stop in a restless city—a terminal where fish, invertebrates, microbial hitchhikers, and currents converge. Pneumatocysts keep fronds afloat; holdfasts cling to stone as waves pound by. Kelp does not resist change; it becomes it.  It senses shifts in light, nutrients, temperature, and currents and remembers through its body. Older fronds let go so new ones may grow. Its memory is not cognitive but material.

Kelp is an archive. 

It tells a story of shifting coastlines shaped by industry and of resistance. It absorbs what we discard, reassembling carbon dioxide into oxygen, to give us breath again.  As I write this sentence, I take a deep breath and imagine that it was first exhaled by algae. In this way, the sea and I keep each other alive.

Kelp reminds us that survival is relational. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “Kelp does not dominate; it entangles” (Kimmerer, 2013). It models what Stacy Alaimo calls “trans-corporeality: a being that is always becoming with another” (Alaimo, 2010). Their bodies aren’t isolated; they materially and biologically shape and are shaped by their surroundings and co-inhabitants. 

A Kelp forest is a system of distributed Intelligence.  

Detached blades form rafts carrying micro-ecosystems, crabs, bryozoans, nudibranchs, worms, that drift across oceans. Under the right conditions, kelp can grow two feet per day, forming canopies that buffer storms, redirect currents, and shelter hundreds of species. Otters nap in kelp’s fronds, while their appetite for sea urchins keeps the forest in balance. Octopuses carve homes into its stipes, stirring nutrients along the forest floor. Whales rub against its body in a ritual of care, shedding parasites while clearing space for kelp to photosynthesize. Hydroids cling, feed, and in return offer protection. These exchanges, as Anna Tsing names them, constitute “collaborative survival”: life sustained through overlapping interdependencies (Tsing, 2015).

Kelp models a different kind of Governance.

Kelp does not order through domination, but finds balance through reciprocity. Observing such systems can reframe restoration as a process of co-creation, in which human intervention is guided by the ecological wisdom already embedded in the living world, and kelp—its fronds and holdfasts tangled in currents—shows that to thrive in damaged environments is not to resist change, but to tangle with it.

What is restoration and who gets to decide?

Many restoration projects ask: Can we go back? These questions carry colonial fantasies of “wild” spaces imagined as empty and untouched by people. Mainstream restoration often relies on a “Pristine Reference State,” an imagined return to a pre-disturbed baseline (Jordan et al., 1987). Such frameworks erase millennia of Indigenous stewardship, collapsing complex ecologies into a single, fixed moment of “purity”. They erase the layered histories that shaped the land—the burns and blooms, the forced removals and massacres, centuries of tending and taking.

Conservation projects have often mirrored these systems of control. National parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite were declared “wild” only after forcibly removing Apsáalooke, Shoshone, and Miwok peoples. Species like the American bison were made “stable” only through enclosures after we nearly extirpated them. MPAs were often established without consulting Indigenous caretakers who had managed those same coastal areas for millennia.  

As Michelle Murphy writes, “Restoration often becomes a scene of managing life in the aftermath, a mode of remaking environments and bodies in ways that reproduce the systems that harmed them” (Murphy, 2017). 

Environmental protection is too often shaped by colonial systems of logic, where conservation becomes a tool of governance rather than a practice of care.

What Causes Ecosystems to Collapse?

Environmental collapse is never the result of a single factor; it emerges from intersecting ecological, social, and political forces. Resource depletion, industrial extraction, pollution, climate disruption are layered over legacies of land theft, forced displacement, and colonial governance. These histories are not abstract—they are embedded in the land itself: in eroded soils, contaminated waterways, disappearing habitats, and in the absence of species.  Landscapes carry memory: scars of controlled burns, deforestation, industrial expansion, agricultural runoff.

To restore an ecosystem without reading these histories is to erase the conditions that shaped it.

As Dylan Robinson writes, “Settler colonialism is not in the past—it is sedimented into the land.” (Robinson, 2018). These sediments are both literal and metaphorical: in pollutants and warming ocean waters, but also in the renaming of rivers, the drawing of borders, and the legal frameworks that govern access and control.  

Listening to land means attending to both its ecological signals and its human histories.

The Capitalocene, as Jason W. Moore names our current era—is an ecological crisis produced by economic systems driven by inequalities of power and profit (Moore, 2015). Toxicity is not an accident; it has a geography. The same imperial fictions that divided “Nature” from “Culture” institutionalized the idea that some lives and lands are disposable. Ecocide—the deliberate killing of ecosystems—reveals environmental harm as inseparable from power, exploitation, and settler colonialism. Restoration efforts that fail to name these forces risk treating collapse as a purely biological problem rather than as a deeply human-made crisis

Which species matter?

The challenge of restoration lies in the friction between a simple fix and a complex reality. Culling sea urchins to protect kelp may allow kelp to rebound but can produce cascading ecological effects. Sea urchins are often framed as the primary villians in kelp loss, yet their ecological role is context-dependent; in barren states, urchins frequently lack nutritional value for native predators, and indiscriminate culling risks disrupting predator–prey dynamics, nutrient cycling, and benthic structure. Restoration requires considering both immediate goals and the impacts on the broader ecological web. (Filbee-Dexter et al., 2018)

Who decides which species matter?

These decisions are rarely neutral; they are shaped by human values, cultural narratives, and aesthetic preferences (Heise, 2016). Human-centric biases privilege species perceived as valuable while overlooking others that are ecologically or culturally essential. Ursula K. Heise notes that “cultural narratives of extinction are not neutral, shaped by assumptions about beauty, heroism, and nostalgia” (Heise, 2016). Ethical restoration requires a holistic perspective: we must ask how interventions reshape the broader network and whose interests—human or nonhuman—guide them.

Underlying much of this history is a worldview that sees land primarily as a resource to extract from—a commodity to be owned, managed, and exploited. This extractive gaze reduces rich ecosystems to ‘natural capital,’ sidelining relational ways of knowing that honor reciprocity and interdependence over dominion. When land is seen only in terms of its utility — how much carbon it can store, how many species it can host, how many resources it can yield — we enact a settler form of violence (Merchant, 1980).  This framing not only shapes restoration priorities but also limits the scope of what is imagined possible, but prioritizes economic efficiency over ecological integrity and social repair.

Restoration that fails to acknowledge the violences—ecological, cultural, epistemic—that shaped the “current” state becomes complicit in repeating them. It becomes a project of sorting: this belongs here, that does not; this species gets to live, that one does not.

The key question—“What belongs here?”—must always be followed by another: “According to whom?”

Ecological Nostalgia and Futuralgia

Ecological nostalgia—a longing for imagined past landscapes—tempts us with visions of return. As Svetlana Boym writes, nostalgia is “history without guilt,” a selective forgetting that smooths over violence and dispossession (Boym, 2001). Nostalgia can soften grief into passivity, longing into complicity (Reyes-Aldana, 2023). In the face of climate disruption, many ecosystems cannot return to pre-industrial or pre-colonial states. On the other hand, Futuralgia—the grief for futures that will never come—opens space to compost loss into new possibilities (Reyes-Aldana (2023). It acknowledges irreversible losses while holding imagination open. Restoration becomes a space for grieving, learning, and creating together within hybrid ecologies. As David Schlosberg observes, “We might attend to memory not as a regression, but as a composting of what was, to nourish what might still become” (Schlosberg, 2013).

The kelp forest is a record of survival, both its own and ours. Kelp shows us that life is always collaborative: it anchors, bends, breaks, and regrows. Its entanglements—fronds, otters, urchins, whales, microbes—mirror a justice-centered vision of restoration, one that embraces relationality and reciprocity. It centers Indigenous knowledge, frontline perspectives, and the rights of other species. By entwining ecological resilience with social repair, restoration can address environmental degradation and historical injustices. It becomes a collaboration with multispecies kin, holding histories of loss as a foundation for renewal, and nurturing what is and what might emerge. 

To restore kelp is to restore relations: between humans and oceans, colonial histories and Indigenous futures, grief and resilience.