Ecoculture develops ecological restoration projects promoting a culture of conservation. The core of our process is scaling up restoration efforts with communities to achieve meaningful ecological and social benefits. In doing so, we develop networks that promote mulit-cultural exchange of ideas, technology, and collaborative opportunities.
Key Systems Focus:
We build regional networks to drive new partnerships, create entrepreneurial growth, and design large-scale plans for regional land management. Through this, we achieve our core goals of restoring landscapes and strengthening community participation. Components of our networks include addressing the values of the seven scaling principles: logistical, ecological, economic, scientific, social, cultural, and interactional.
Improved workflow, workforce development, increased nursery capacity.
Rebuilding biodiversity with communities and using citizen science engagement to guide adaptive management.
Working with foundations, grant-makers, corporate sponsors, and governments to build restoration capacity across our networks.
Research to improve restoration effectiveness for ecological and social goals. Genetics for future climates, social factors that catalyze innovation, multi-functional landscapes, and biodiversity ecology.
Volunteerism with schools and community groups, restoration training and education, and designing international field schools.
Promoting a culture of restoration through shared expression of our values towards nature. Designing parks and art installations.
Sharing stories, values, insights, and technology among our partners through art, writing, video, exhibits, and social media.
The foundations of Ecoculture began in 2008 at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona – a mountain community tucked between the Grand Canyon and Sedona. There in the Southwestern United States, degraded river systems, catastrophic wildfires, and rapid climate warming challenged our communities ability to maintain healthy ecosystems. We started by testing genetic variation in plant tolerance to arid climates. Regional networks testing dozens of species sprang up planting from between 4,000 to 20,000 trees per site. We implemented over 100 projects in the Southwest and gained an appreciation of the logistic and technical efficiency needed to plant tens of thousands of trees per day while maintaining scientific rigor. This led to our key work leading post-fire reforestation efforts in the region planting over 4 million trees and driving regional riparian restoration efforts with over 2 million trees planted and thousands of acres restored.
Through an understanding of the social, technological, and economic approaches needed for large-scale reforestation, we started a process of vetting projects across the globe with the US State Department and the US Forest Service International Program. This led to the development of reforestation projects and climate adaptation testing of plants in multiple countries, including: an 18 species genetic test embedded in a 5 million tree restoration project in Borneo; adaptation test of mangrove species in Puerto Rico within a 100,000 tree wetland restoration project; a key urban restoration project in major cities of Vietnam; Terai ecosystem restoration in Nepal.
We see all of our projects and the networks that have developed as a transnational opportunity to re-evaluate cultural identities in relationship to nature, contribute to creation of a citizenry that is resilient and participatory, while continuing efforts to heal degraded landscapes.
