Ripple: Learning to See

Exhale 

Breath mixes with space 

Feeling it until the end 

Inhale 

Green friend takes me in 

Becoming part of you 

Exhale 

Living atmosphere expands 

Sharing with the world 

Inhale 

Taking you in 

Muscles feel strong 

Exchanging breath 

Becoming more of me 

Me becoming more of you 

Together we grow strong 

The longer I stay 

The more I become part of this place 

Boundaries between us dissolve 

Until there is no you or I

This poem was written in a specific place, with a specific tree. But it describes something that happens, I think, in any landscape where you are willing to stop performing arrival and actually arrive. I was not thinking, in that moment, about ecology. I was not cataloguing species, assessing soil conditions, or considering which management interventions would be appropriate. I was breathing. I was present. And something happened in that presence that is hard to describe in scientific language: the boundary between me and the place I was standing in became less fixed. I became, for a moment, part of a system rather than an observer of one.

Ecologists call this autopoiesis, the self-organizing, self-maintaining quality of living systems. I call it what it felt like: kinship. Recognition. Coming home to something I hadn’t known I’d been away from.

I did not grow up planning to be a restoration ecologist. I grew up noticing things. The smell of particular soil in particular weather. The way certain plants claimed certain corners of a landscape. Which birds appeared at which times of year, and which habitats they preferred. These observations accumulated for years before I had the vocabulary to organize them, before I understood that what I was developing was ecological literacy. Ecological literacy is not the same as knowing the names of things, though names help. It is a way of seeing relationships. It is the capacity to look at a landscape and read it the way you would read a face, not just what’s there but what it means, what it’s in response to, what it’s moving toward.

When I began my master’s research on Nova Scotia lakes, this way of seeing became a formal practice. The lakes told their stories through their chemistry. One lake was clear, alive, productive. Another, just a few kilometres away, is nearly empty, acidified, depleted. The difference wasn’t in the lakes. It was in everything upstream: the land use, the bedrock chemistry, the history of acid deposition, the vegetation that filtered or failed to filter the water running into them. The lakes were reading their landscapes. Everything that happened in the watershed was written into the water. This is ecology: the study of how everything connects to everything else. Not a platitude but a precise description. Nothing exists in isolation. Change one element, and you change others. Remove a predator, and prey populations explode. Remove a decomposer, and nutrients stop cycling. Remove a pollinator, and plant reproduction fails. The web is real, and every thread matters.

The way I teach ecological literacy is less like a lecture and more like a walk. I take people to a field. I ask them to stop and just look, not to identify anything, not to classify, just to look at the whole, the way you look at a painting before you examine brushstrokes.

Then I ask questions. Where does the water go when it rains? Where are the darkest patches of soil? What do the plants in each zone have in common? What are the birds doing? The questions have answers. And the answers, taken together, form a picture, not of isolated features but of a system. A community of organisms responding to physical conditions, shaped by history, moving in a direction that succession is determining. By the end of the walk, people are seeing things differently. They will see things differently for the rest of their lives. The world becomes more textured, more relational, and more legible. Once you can read a landscape, you can begin to understand what it needs. But something else develops alongside the technical literacy, something harder to name. A kinship. When you spend enough time in a landscape, attending carefully, something shifts. It stops being scenery and starts being company. You are not studying it. You are in conversation with it. And a good conversation requires listening, not just speaking.

Stay tuned for Chapter 4

The teaching is free because the goal is enough people healing land that it becomes the norm. If it helped and you’re able, push the ripple wider.

Start free: The full document is in the library:

https://app.planethealers.org/