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When historian and ecologist Laura J. Martin decided to write a history of ecological restoration, she didn’t think she would have to go back further than the 1980s to uncover its beginnings. Deep in the archives, she found evidence of a network of early female botanists from the turn of the 20th century. Martin’s book Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration brings their work back into the record. The nonfiction account tells the stories of Eloise Butler, Edith Roberts and the wild and wonderful gardens they planted and studied.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Laura Martin: I found all of these, you know, gems of untold stories of women scientists in the early twentieth century, who really were laying the scientific foundation for restoration.

Sophie McNulty: I’m Sophie McNulty, and I’m a producer for Lost Women of Science.

I worked on the first two seasons of the show before I moved to the UK and ended up working on a gardening podcast for the Royal Horticultural Society. I recently returned to Lost Women of Science and, apropos of horticulture, I’m particularly excited to be hosting today’s episode on ecological restoration. 

This is quite the hot topic in the world of horticulture and environmental management at large. To give you a sense of just how hot it is, today billions are spent on ecological restoration projects each year, and the UN General Assembly declared 2021 to 2030 to be the UN decade on ecosystem restoration. But, the history of this field has been largely overlooked, and when it is told, women are often written out of the narrative.

And so today, we’re going to try to remedy that by zeroing in on important early restorationists who were themselves women. We’ll be focusing on botanists Eloise Butler and Edith Roberts. And to do this, I’m so pleased to welcome Laura Martin, a professor at Williams College and author of Wild By Design, The Rise of Ecological Restoration.

Hi, Laura. Thanks for coming on the show.

Laura Martin: Thank you. I’m very excited to speak with you today, Sophie.

Sophie McNulty: So to start, before we go back in time to the stories of these early restorationists, I want to quickly define terms. So what exactly is ecological restoration and how is it different from, say, conservation or preservation?

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Keren Mevorach (art design); Harvard University Press (book)

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