The voices of 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022 LRS Alumni:

Ecological Restoration is …

“This is collaborative work. Among people and plants and entities and schools of thought and artists and time. Ecological restoration is messy, imperfect, unending, and profoundly rewarding. Ecological restoration is rooted in hope, guided by listening to our teachers, and powered by love in action.”

“ER is the process of tweaking systems and structures to allow a place to be how it yearns to be.”

“Ecological restoration is a means of healing degraded land… We can help realign the rhythms, values and habits of our lives and care of one another through learning to restore the ecosystems and have healthy, reciprocal relationship with the land.”

“I believe the core principles of restoration are reverence and respect for a landscape. Diversity and inclusion of both ideas and people. And most importantly, understanding that restoration is ongoing process.”

“… Assisting in the process of recovering ecosystems that are degraded, destroyed, or forgotten; looking at the herstory, the future, the present and how these all affect space, carrying out the how and implementing sustainable methods that maintain the restorative process.”

“… The assistance of nature on her successional pathway, helping to initiate positive change in landscape health, being aware of community needs from the land and trying to mediate the relationship in a constructive way.”

“Ecological restoration creates safe and healthy space for people to learn and grow, helps reverse impacts of climate change and creates awareness of importance of natural areas, helps improve human health, creates meaningful work.”

“Ecological restoration hopes to convey that all plants, fungi, animals and other life forms are our relatives that have fundamental roles in our planet’s ecosystem. Restoration acknowledges the injustices of the past and present and seeks to provide all people access to the gifts provided by mother earth.”

“I mean we saw it demonstrated day in and day out. From soils to hydrology and everything in between this system is interconnected. All these different perspectives from the natural sciences supplement one another.”

“To assist in restoring the land is understanding the inherently complex relationships the land is a part of… the geologic underpinnings, the soil, the water, the stewards, the effects of our extractive and capitalist governing forces, climate, weather, wind, plants, trees, shrubs, and all the fauna, fungi, macro and micro invertebrates, time, and everything else unseen. This is an abbreviated way to say ecological restoration is understanding the big picture, by addressing the small parts. The small things are the big things!”

“Ecological restoration should be relevant to everyone because this is our home and we need to stop being out of balance with nature. A just society should see the importance of clean water and well functioning landscapes and a way to heal that imbalance.”

“We are going to need to restore ecologies if we are going to be able to survive as a species on this planet, and especially if we want to be inclusive of all communities of peoples' well being. In a just society we must extend justice beyond justice for humans toward justice for nonhuman beings, and also justice for people's lost relationships with and connections to nature.”

“Ecology, in my mind, can essentially be called the study of interconnectedness. This flows into and along with the practice of restoration as well as other ways of knowing – often approaching things holistically, attempting to recognize how things affect one another, and acknowledging the unknown. This inherently produces an awareness of the complexity of systems.”

“Any good professional understands that the real world employs knowledge from many disciplines to operate most effectively. We need to be proficient in botany, soil, wildlife, history, politics, climate, culture. The richer the understanding of each of these the better the ecological restoration.”

"It seems like such a curated and specialized learning environment for a skill that doesn't get much technical or sociological instruction and perspective elsewhere. I think this has the capacity to change the world in many ways and has definitely changed my world.”

“I learned about ecological restoration in different formats/learning styles that allowed me to retain information in a non-traditional way. I created connections with great people and reconnected with old friends! and got to create my own restoration plan as a project. This is a great program if you want to become a restorationist.”

“I gained a deeper understanding of Wisconsin's natural communities. We got to know soils, learned the names of both local and non local beings, and figured out how to work in a variety of settings with a variety of people. Getting to know the land on this deep of a level and learning how to read the landscape has been an invaluable experience that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.”

“The Land Restoration School was created with such incredible care and attention.”

“LRS taught me how to change a field into a forest. I made some amazing connections and learned more than I did at university.”

“I hope this continues to grow into something unique that thrives outside of academic confines.”

“I personally enjoyed how immersive, hands-on, and ‘intense’ this program was. I learned about such a vast amount of restoration and environmental topics. Some of these topics were small but still stuck with me such as trail building, wildlife stakeholders, topography and hydrology. I now know that these play a role in restoration and can explore them more later.”

“I gained miles on the path towards my goals; found a restorative process for myself and not just the land I’ll be working with.”