Masters students Mariana Kendall and Nicholas Fairbairn sit down with Dr. Carter Smith to learn about her circuitous career path to research ecology. Carter explains how her non-traditional and non-linear path to the sciences has made her a better researcher and educator. We center our conversation on the topic of ecological restoration, a field that inspired EO Wilson to deem the coming era the “Age of Restoration” and the UN to declare a “Decade of Ecological Restoration.” What is the next frontier for this field and how has Dr. Smith seen the field evolve throughout her career? What techniques are most salient and what considerations should practitioners and managers keep in mind when restoring an ecosystem? Dr. Smith shares insights into these questions and, along the way, touches on imposter syndrome in the sciences, ecological grief, and the merits of failure. This episode was recorded in Fall 2022 as part of our Lab Notes series.
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Featured Researcher
Carter Smith is an interdisciplinary coastal ecologist seeking to understand the socioecological drivers of and sustainable solutions for global change. Her interests lie at the intersection of multiple disciplines including community ecology, conservation and restoration science, and coupled human natural systems research. She is passionate about working directly with coastal managers and practitioners to solve coastal management challenges. Carter received a PhD in Marine Sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BA in Theater from Wesleyan University. When she was interviewed for the podcast, she was a research scientist at the Duke Marine Lab. Soon she’ll take up her new positoin as an Assistant Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences at the University of Washington.
Hosts
Nicholas Fairbairn. Nico earned a Master’s of Environmental Management at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment where they focussed on management and policy in coastal systems. Nico is interested in how coastal communities can build and restore natural infrastructure to support resilience to climate change. Their master’s project studied the distribution of living shorelines, a nature-based approach to shoreline stabilization. Nicholas identifies as queer, non-binary and vegan and believes that connection, belonging, inclusion and psychological safety are prerequisites for effective and meaningful work.
Mariana Kendall. Mariana earned her Master of Environmental Management focusing on Coastal Environmental Management at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment in May of 2023. While at Duke, her research focused on the ways humans have used coastal wetlands throughout history, and the long-term impact of human activity relating to these environments, as well as the impact entertainment media has on conservation efforts. She is interested in developing innovative strategies to strengthen coastal resilience.
Transcript, Episode 41 — The Age of Restoration with Dr. Carter Smith
[intro music, The Oyster Waltz]
Mariana: Welcome to the Seas the Day podcast. My name is Mariana Kendall.
Nico: And I’m Nicholas Fairbairn.
Mariana: We’re Master’s students studying coastal environmental management at Duke University. We have an exciting conversation for you today with Dr. Carter Smith. Carter is a research scientist at the Duke Marine Lab who studies interdisciplinary marine conservation and restoration in the context of a rapidly changing world. Her research broadly focuses on understanding how socio-ecological processes impact restoration success and coastal resilience. Our conversation will explore Carter’s journey to and through restoration ecology and the trends she’s seen in the field. We’ll learn about everything from ecological grief to what it takes to be an effective educator.
Nico: Before we dive in, let’s introduce some of the topics of our conversation. Let’s start by defining the topic. Restoration is the “process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed” to some reference point in time or space. Restoration is guided by many types of knowledge and can be conducted in different contexts, such as scientific research, engineering, or to derive human benefit. As you might imagine, restoration is subject to many of the same economic constraints that limit engineering and research projects. Some things you should know about restoration before we dive in: it’s generally expensive, it’s constantly evolving, and it has a notoriously high failure rate, which might be thought of as “growing pains.” The late and venerable ecologist EO Wilson once coined the coming century as the “Age of Restoration.”
Mariana: Alright with that let’s dive in…Hey Carter, thanks for meeting with us today. I guess to start off we can talk about your story. What got you into restoration work and what brought you here to Duke?
Carter: Sure, well thanks so much for talking to me. I’m excited to be on this podcast. I have a pretty nontraditional route to science and academia. So, I actually started out really spending most of my childhood and my adolescent years spending almost all of my time in theater arts, so really focusing not on the hard sciences at all, but on theater. I have an undergraduate degree in theater from Wesleyan University and I always loved my science classes, but I never saw it as like a viable path forward for me. And I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot lately and think that that probably has to do with, you know, what was modeled for me. I didn’t have a lot of science teachers that were women. I didn’t see a lot of female scientists in popular media. I always felt like people were pushing me towards the arts and not towards STEM. But luckily for me, I did a ton of outdoor education when I was in college. I did a lot of mountain guiding. And through that process—really falling in love with outdoor education—I got a job teaching at the Catalina Island Marine Institute, kind of funneling through a little bit of nepotism teaching a marine science curriculum to 4th through 12th graders. And I just totally fell in love with the ocean and I fell in love with teaching and I realized that I thought it was so crazy that in college—the time when you’re like most excited to take classes all about the things you’ve decided you’re really passionate about—a lot of the times you’re being taught by people that are not trained to be teachers. A lot of times teaching is not the focus of their job. I kind of decided I wanted to get a PhD and I wanted to be a college professor and I wanted to be, you know, an awesome teacher! And then, somewhere along in all of that process, I also completely fell in love with research and realized that it’s really hard to balance teaching with also being a productive researcher. But yeah, that’s kind of my circuitous path to getting here.
Mariana: Awesome! What about wetlands specifically drew you in?
Carter: I think wetlands and inner tidal coastal habitats really drew me in because my research interests are very applied. I love ecology. I love figuring out, you know, why things work and how different organisms interact with each other, but it doesn’t excite me unless I can also think about what the management and policy implications of that are. Coastal ecosystems are so fundamentally intertwined with human settlements that there are these really interesting confluences of coastal ecological processes with human development and human decision-making and human perceptions and so that was and continues to be really exciting to me. And so I think that’s why a lot of my research focuses in sort of nearshore habitats. And also probably from a really practical standpoint, it’s so much easier to study habitats that you can walk into from shore, and you don’t have to take a boat and put on a SCUBA tank and spend a lot of money on all of that type of stuff. So I like the ease of kind of studying these habitats as well.
Nico: I’m curious if your theater background has served you in some way in your role now. I have a little bit of background in theater throughout middle school and high school and sometimes I think it’s impacted the way I show up in the world and I’m curious if you think it’s like served your career at all.
Carter: Totally. I remember I think I spent the first few years of my career apologizing for it and trying to explain to people why it wasn’t a bad thing. And then for the last several years, I feel like I celebrate it now and can explain to people why I think it makes me a better scientist. The number one thing is: I think it taught me to be a better communicator. You know, I grew up performing in front of large audiences, so I don’t think I get nervous the way that some people do talking to large crowds. You know, in theater, you—at a very basic level—you learn to project your voice, you learn to kind of judge whether or not your audience is following you. That can be really helpful for teaching or giving a seminar. I’m always thinking about the story I’m trying to convey, not just the data I’m trying to get across, but you know “what’s the arc of this seminar that I’m giving?” I think that that has helped me…thinking more creatively and being a little bit of an outsider helps you have a perspective that’s different than “well theory tells us this” and “theory says it should behave this way, so that’s the way that it should behave.” So, it’s helped me be a little bit more creative about the way that I problem-solve and think about the world or at least I hope it has!
Nico: I think that comes through. Mariana and I both took your coastal restoration ecology course and I think we can both attest to you being a really great and effective teacher. So, it’s interesting to hear how you noticed that it seemed like maybe teaching wasn’t their primary objective or being a good teacher because they were more focused on research and that’s definitely something I noticed too in my undergraduate experience so I’m excited that that’s part of your mission. So, we want to talk a little bit more about the field of ecological restoration and restoration ecology. So, restoration is a relatively nascent field of applied science compared to more traditional sciences maybe like ecology more broadly. For example, the Society of Ecological Restoration was founded in 1988 and today the field has garnered substantial attention and investment globally, so much so, that the UN has declared the decade from 2021 to 2030 the “Decade of Ecological Restoration.” So, I’m curious—just in the time that you’ve been a part of this field and this discipline—how have you seen it evolve throughout your career?
Carter: Well, so I have not had a very long career! I’ve been doing this and sort of working in the restoration field for less than ten years. What I’ve heard from colleagues is that even, you know, going back 15, 20 [years]—certainly longer than that—especially in academia, I think there was a huge focus on basic sciences and really applied sciences like restoration were really looked down upon. You know, you weren’t really a “true scientist” if you were doing these applied science projects. There’s been a huge shift in the field overall where there is a massive acknowledgment of the fact that, you know, essentially applied sciences are just thinking more about how humans fit in to science, how humans can use the science that’s being produced, how humans impact ecosystems and vice versa. I think there’s now a great and very important acknowledgment of the fact that humans and environments are inextricably linked together. The fact that the UN has declared this decade the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration also just really emphasizes the fact that I think everyone from scientists to coastal managers to federal policymakers are acknowledging that restoration is gonna be a really important part of the puzzle for adapting to climate change and dealing with the impacts of humans on this planet. A really big concentration of what I focus in on is natural and nature-based infrastructure or “living shoreline.” When I first started doing that work, maybe eight years ago, you know, I don’t think the term “living shoreline” was widely known, and now for instance, I never talk to an MEM [Master of Environmental Management] student who is hearing that term for the first time coming from me.
Nico: Awesome! Yeah, I think that kind of fits into something else we wanted to pick your brain about. We’re curious what you see as, sort of, the next frontier of restoration. And maybe that fits into the climate change piece you were speaking to just a moment ago.
Carter: Yeah, that is a huge research need! And a really interesting research need is thinking about what does restoration look like in a changing world. We need to be talking about that from an ecological perspective. We need to be talking about it from a philosophical and an ethical perspective. You know, what species should we be restoring, knowing, you know, what’s happening to the climate, knowing what’s happening globally, just with global change? There are lots of interesting questions to be asked there. In terms of other frontiers for restoration, I’m also really excited about just expanding the interdisciplinarity of restoration and bringing in more engineers, bringing in economists that can help us understand how to scale these projects and make them more financially feasible. I’m also super excited about the techniques that we’re gonna use to actually grow restoration and scale it. So, how do we bring industrial techniques to restoration to make it cheaper and faster, and so that we can cover larger areas? The techniques I’m starting to see, like industrial-scale harvesting of coral larvae slicks incubating the larvae and releasing them back into the water from these massive barges. Like, what a cool innovation in bringing together all these different fields to make something happen at a really large scale!
Nico: Yeah, that interdisciplinarity seems like it’s core to the field of restoration. I’m curious also if there’s any particular aspect of your work that you’re really excited to study.
Carter: I mean, I’m definitely…again, a lot of my research has been sort of focused around natural and nature-based infrastructure. I am really interested in these novel restoration techniques that are designed to enhance biodiversity while also really delivering on a priority ecosystem service. Pure restoration for the sake of just restoration and restoring natural heritage values and biodiversity is incredibly important and should be a huge priority, but I think in highly urbanized areas or areas with a lot of conflicting land-use priorities there is a need for these hybrid restoration projects that kind of combine restoration with infrastructure. That’s definitely the area of research that really excites me!
Mariana: So we kind of mentioned earlier about failure rates in this field and the challenges that can come along with a restoration project that might not pan out the way that we want it to. Can you talk a little bit about your experiences in that?
Carter: I think why we’re seeing really high rates of failure with restoration is because a lot of times we’re trying to replicate systems that we don’t fully understand and systems that are unbelievably complex. And so, trying to replicate that level of complexity is just not something I believe we are capable of doing at this point. We are getting so much better at it and I think we’re learning so much more, but I’m trying to think of a good analogy for this, and I feel like we probably see similar things in the field of medicine. Like if you look at the way that doctors were treating cancer a hundred years ago, they were doing things that would be considered completely barbaric to today’s standards. You know, they were removing entire body parts to get rid of the cancer and part of that is because they didn’t have a great understanding of what cancer was or what cancer did and so without that knowledge, it’s hard to find a solution to fix a problem. And so, I think in a lot of cases, if we don’t understand the ecology of a system it’s really hard to repair the ecology of that system.
Mariana: Do you think there is any benefits to the failure?
Carter: Absolutely! I think we can learn just as much, if not more, from failures as we can from successes. I think the problem in academia and beyond is that we tend to be so much more excited about sharing our successes than our failures. A lot of times our failures get swept under the rug and so it can be harder to learn from them because we don’t see the data showing up in papers, we don’t see scientists presenting on their failures at conferences. But even that I feel like I’ve seen a shift of people really calling out for everyone to, you know, share their data from studies that haven’t worked out or present on their findings from projects that have been epic failures. And I have certainly had some of those myself! The first time I actually tried to restore an oyster reef, I just didn’t think about something that wound up being very important and the oyster reef was not very successful. Pulling lots of people in when you’re thinking about restoring an ecosystem to get, you know, lots of different perspectives on things from hydrology to abiotic factors to the biotic interactions—just further collaboration—I think will all…enhance our chance for success.
Mariana: Yeah, I completely agree. Sometimes I feel like we should be presenting our failures in a conference session like, “look, this is what happened, this is what I did wrong” and really building from each other and learning. But how do you think that if we were to really take ownership of our failures and embrace them, do you think that would make any change in the field?
Carter: Any more sharing of knowledge will help to move the field forward faster. I think we can learn really important things from failure. I think we can learn really important things from success as well. And just, the more that we’re communicating and sharing information, the better! I think it would be really cool to start moving towards aggregating monitoring data, having repositories for kind of collecting examples of failures so that somebody can kind of look at all of that data and start to understand: like what are the trends that are leading to successes? What are the things that are contributing to failure, so that we have a better idea of what may or may not work in any new context.
Nico: As someone who’s had their own struggle with like belonging in the field of academia, I think it’s definitely very normalizing for scientists to talk about their self-doubt and their experience with being in the Academy and the failures that they’ve experienced, so I’m very grateful for the experiences we’ve had in the Silliman Lab where you and other lab members have been very honest about your experience and very humble. Acknowledging failures plays an important role in science.
Carter: Totally! And that is definitely something we are very good at in the Silliman Lab because I think it’s totally true! There’s so much imposter syndrome. Something we’ve been trying to do in our lab meetings is just, yeah, talk about all the times that you mess up, talk about all the experiments that went wrong, because that all contributes to the one experiment that goes really right.
Nico: Carter, you said your career has been relatively short in the grand scheme of things, um, so maybe these lessons are still fresh on your mind. But I’m curious if you have any lessons that keep cropping up for you that you might offer to a Dr. Carter Smith who’s just entering the field or a new practitioner who’s coming up in research ecology.
Carter: This probably goes back to my less-than-traditional background: all of the things that interest us [and] all of the things that are a part of our stories can help us on our journey. Thinking about the unique strengths that we each have and the way that that might be able to help us in our career. You know, if you are somebody that is super interested in something that doesn’t feel like it’s directly related to your research, then maybe there are ways that you can link those things and you can bring this unique perspective that you have because like you love music and you also love restoration! Like, are there unique ways that you can pull those two things together to create something that not anyone could do? Only somebody that sort of loves or knows those two fields could do.
Nico: I know as a yoga instructor there were times where I’d want to share what’s called like “Dharma” which is like the more spiritual talk that kind of offers some inspiration for your students. And I know you have a training in yoga as well. There were definitely times where I would share quotes that came from, like, Robin Wall Kimmerer, about restoration, about planting ourselves in the Earth again because there was that crossover of interests between yoga and restoration.
Carter: Totally! And you’re never going to take a class where someone’s like “how can we synthesize the commonalities between yoga and restoration?” But that’s a unique perspective that maybe it helps you think about a problem in a slightly different way. One of the joys for me of doing what I do—especially because it’s really applied—is that I get to talk to so many different people that have very different perspectives about the same problem. So, I love talking to ecologists and thinking about how theory influences the phenomena that I’m seeing! I love talking to students that are maybe not as well versed in the theory and so they’re not as stuck in that way of thinking, and they bring, like, incredible new perspectives to a problem that to me felt like it only had one answer. And all of the sudden, no, it has five different possible answers or solutions! I love talking to practitioners and just people that have grown up on the coast for many generations and they have a perspective that is so different than mine and so incredibly valuable in a different way. And so yeah, just the value of that interdisciplinarity and that collaboration…and I think that, for me, is one of the most beautiful things about science and about being a researcher is you’re constantly learning from new people around you and learning from their different skill sets and that’s just such a cool way to live life!
Nico: I completely agree. I think that’s one of my favorite things about this field too: getting to pull in things like policy, management, and stakeholders from all different backgrounds to talk about something like living shorelines, which at first you might think only has sort of a STEM focus.
Carter: And, can I just say so I don’t sound like I’m too idealistic…
Nico: Sure.
Carter: It can also be super frustrating and sometimes it feels like you’re talking ten different languages or like everybody has their own priority and they’re all in conflict, so that is not easy! That can be a major challenge, especially when you’re talking about coastal issues with people that, yeah, just have different priorities for coastal uses. So, I don’t want to make it sound like it’s easy.
Mariana: Something about the sciences in general, and a big trend throughout the years that is shifting now, is the sense that science is so isolated. In college, all of our teaching was very interdisciplinary, but I also went to a smaller liberal arts college versus some of my friends who also did biology work in undergrad. Theirs was very just [like] you’re looking at cells [and] you are looking at this and you’re not talking to other people. And I think that the sense of elitism in the sciences is still around, but I do believe that as restoration and work with interdisciplinary things keeps going, I think that we’re starting to see a trend the opposite way…of really collaboration with the humanities and with the arts and with sciences that’s just really wonderful.
Carter: Well, and can I just say because I think you’re hitting on something else that is important, is that I felt this way for so much of my schooling. That like, I took calculus because I had to take calculus. I took organic chemistry because I had to take organic chemistry. In addition to interdisciplinarity, especially from this teaching perspective, I think that project-based learning is really important. And so for students or for, you know, scientists that are learning something new, to learn by doing is a really powerful way to learn about something versus just trying to, like, absorb and memorize the facts.
Mariana: Yeah, so you said you started off teaching elementary schoolers. Is that what you said?
Carter: So, it was 4th through 12th graders, but it was just like a week-long marine science curriculum and so some of it was in the classroom, but a lot of it was like night snorkels and hikes and kayaking and picking up cool things and having them touch animals in the field.
Mariana: Yeah, do you think that that, in any way, impacted their sense of learning?
Carter: Oh, I hope so! I worked for this unbelievable company “Guided Discoveries.” They’ve got a couple of different programs mostly in California. You know, we got a huge range of different students and some of them had never been in the ocean before and so they went from like zero to sixty. And they were in the ocean like touching sharks and snorkeling through kelp forests and I can’t imagine that didn’t have an impact on at least some of them.
Mariana: Yeah. And so, in the Spring, you’re teaching your coastal restoration ecology class here at the [Duke] Marine Lab and I noticed that there is a lot more field opportunities this semester than when you taught it at main campus last year. Can you talk a little bit about what you guys are planning to do [and] how you want your students to interact with the environment?
Carter: One of the things I’m really excited about teaching…I loved teaching restoration ecology on main campus! It was really fun! I think to dive into discussions as sort of our hands-on component because we couldn’t just walk out into the salt marsh, but this Spring I’m really excited to teach it at the [Duke] Marine Lab because we can learn about a seagrass ecosystem in lecture and then we can go walk through the seagrass ecosystem and look at all of the different species and take cores to see what’s living in the sediments. The cool thing about this area is there’s so much active restoration research just right here in Carteret County that we can go and see different restoration experiments! We can see examples of restoration projects, hopefully get involved with some actual on-the-ground restoration with some practitioners that are in this area. And I also have big hopes of doing some kind of cool project where we’re actually doing some kind of restoration experiment all together as a class and so that we’re not just learning, but we’re contributing new knowledge to the field.
Mariana: Yeah, that’s awesome!
Carter: We’ll see…
Mariana: I’m sure it will be.
Carter: I think that interacting with coastal communities and restoration is vitally important. We need to be sure that we’re doing restoration in ways that are benefiting the communities that the restoration is embedded in. Something I think about a lot in my work with nature-based infrastructure is that maybe more than traditional restoration there are probably going to be trade-offs. You know, if you decide you really want to do a restoration project for the purpose of coastal protection then there may be trade-offs in terms of the biodiversity you’re going to get from that structure or from your accessibility to the water. I think especially when we’re talking about restoration that has these inherent trade-offs, we need to make sure when we’re designing these projects that we’re meeting the priorities of the people that are investing in these projects either financially or with time or emotionally and make sure that we’re serving the communities that that we’re doing restoration in. How best to do that, I don’t know. Liz Demattia and I are leading a Bass Connections project right now, and we’re really interested in this idea of, well so, “resilience” is like this huge buzzword right now. Everyone’s all about enhancing coastal resilience. I do it all the time, I use that buzzword. I’m not always one hundred percent sure like exactly what I mean when I’m saying it. We’ve assembled this working group to understand essentially, what do we mean when we’re talking about using restoration to enhance resilience? Most of the time the answer is that we’re talking about, sort of, ecological resilience or resilience to hazards. And we’re really interested in understanding how can we do restoration in a way that actually enhances community and personal resilience, in a way that makes people feel more positive about their lives, in a way that makes people feel more connected to their communities, so we’re just kind of scratching the surface of this topic. It’s something I’m really excited about right now is just thinking about how restoration can be used to really benefit communities and people.
Mariana: Yeah, that’s wonderful. Such a fun topic! No yeah, I also work with Liz for the Citizen Science Initiative. And we are looking at the whole personal resilience with ecological resilience and it’s such an interesting connection to look at and to really think about because major ecological events have such an impact on the way that we feel. You know, natural disasters are also personal disasters. In this whole field of resilience and what does resilience mean, what does it mean to you personally, to other people, it’s just so interesting. What we’re doing there is working with children, working with kids, and seeing, how does that impact them? How, as educators, can we improve their own personal resiliencies? It’s just so interesting to see how this is taking off, especially in a time when climate change is bringing everything to the forefront of everyone’s mind all about disasters and preparedness and recovery.
Carter: Totally! Something that I’ve read a bit about is just this idea of “ecological grief.” There are these really sad trends that even little kids are really devastated about climate change and devastated about the effects that that’s having on ecosystems. How can restoration be used as sort of an antidote to this ecological grief? As a way of saying “it’s not all doom and gloom,” but how can we use this as a story of hope to inspire people in a time when like there’s a lot to be sad about when we’re talking about the environment?
Mariana: We could ask a fun question.
Carter: Love fun questions.
Mariana: Like what’s your favorite animal: land, marine, imaginary?
Carter: Well, I don’t like birds, but I’ll take a glass-half-full approach and not just jump in with the animals I don’t like!
Mariana: Birds? Absolutely not.
Carter: Yeah, birds are out. I really like California sea hares which are—yeah if anybody doesn’t know what they are—sea hares are just marine slugs, but California sea hares are enormous marine slugs, so they get up to like the size of, I don’t know, I’m using my hands to show how big they are, but like way bigger than a basketball and they also have these like mating aggregations so they’ll make these daisy chains or these piles of like dozens of sea hares and they’re just these blobs of marine slug and I just I adore them.
Mariana: You gotta love ‘em.
Carter: Yeah.
Mariana: I also love uncharismatic species.
Carter: Yes!
Mariana: Or non-charismatic, whatever the term is.
Carter: Yep.
Mariana: Honestly the uglier, the better in the ocean.
Carter: Yeah, sea cumbers? I bet you like those.
Mariana: Love them. They’re so funny and everyone, like conservation, is all about really charismatic megafauna but like what about frogfish? Have you seen a frogfish?
Carter: Frogfish I feel like are kind of charismatic because they’re the wackiest.
Mariana: they can be kind of charismatic depending on the person.
Carter: Yeah, I like that. “Uncharismatic, like, meiofauna” I feel like should be my—
Mariana: Oh, that’s perfect.
Carter: Yeah, the smaller the better! If you can’t see it, that’s my jam.
Mariana: Gorgeous!
Nico: Carter, thank you so much for meeting with us today and talking a little bit about the field of restoration and your experience with doing research in this field. I’ve really enjoyed getting to talk to you.
Carter: Thanks so much for having me! This was super fun.
Mariana: Thank you so much!
[pause]
Mariana: Thank you for joining us for a glimpse into the mind and work of Dr. Carter Smith. We hope you enjoyed learning about the practice of restoration, the merits of its high failure rate, and the importance of bringing your unique strengths to the table, even when they seem out of place.
Nico: That was a great conversation, what did you think?
Mariana: I thought it was awesome! I really learned a lot about not getting too bogged down in “oh, my interests aren’t going to work in the scientific field” because in reality they definitely do.
Nico: Yeah, I really enjoyed when Carter spoke about bringing your unique skill-set to bear, even as a research ecologist. She’s very honest about her experience, so I really respect and appreciate that. I find this field of restoration so empowering because it reminds us of our agency to actually act on climate change and helps us feel a little bit less helpless in the face of the climate crisis, and so it really gives me hope for the future of our planet.
Mariana: Yeah, I completely agree, and I’m really happy that we had this opportunity to sit down with her and to talk about all of this stuff. And I hope that you guys—the listeners—benefitted from this as well. Thank you so much for listening and we’ll see you next time!
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