Reconciliation Ecology

What is reconciliation ecology?

Reconciliation ecology studies how biodiversity can be maintained and increased in the places people already use: farmland, gardens, cities, orchards, roofs, roadsides. Rather than treating nature and human activity as competitors for the same ground, it asks how a working landscape can be shaped so that many other species live there too, while it keeps doing its human job.

The term comes from the evolutionary ecologist Michael Rosenzweig, who set it out in 2003 in his book Win-Win Ecology and in a paper in the journal Oryx. His argument begins with arithmetic rather than sentiment. The relationship between habitat area and species number is well established: reduce the area of natural habitat by a given share and, over time, a comparable share of species is lost. Since protected areas cover only a small part of the planet's surface, and are unlikely to expand far enough, conservation confined to reserves cannot hold the world's diversity. Something has to happen on the rest.

Rosenzweig described classical conservation as resting on two pillars, reservation and restoration, and offered reconciliation as a third. It replaces neither. A national park still matters, and a ruined hillside still needs repair. What reconciliation adds is the recognition that the cultivated, inhabited, everyday landscape is not a lost cause but the largest unused opportunity in conservation.

The work itself is practical. Hedges and field margins that carry pollinators, ponds in farmyards, structurally varied orchards, green roofs and walls in cities, old trees left standing for the animals that need cavities: each is a modest redesign that costs the human use little and gives other species a foothold. Because both sides gain, Rosenzweig called it win-win.

How Terra Humana understands it

Reconciliation ecology names something Terra Humana was already doing, and it names it more precisely than the words we had.

Our land is not wilderness and has not been for a very long time. Sa Medada is a Mediterranean cultural landscape, shaped by grazing, terracing and olive cultivation over centuries. We do not intend to withdraw from it, and we do not intend to freeze it in a past condition. We intend to keep using it, to grow food and to teach on it, and at the same time to make it richer in life than it was when we arrived. That is reconciliation ecology in one sentence.

It also settles a question of language for us. Our work is active ecological restoration, and rewilding describes a different path. Yet restoration alone can suggest a return to a reference condition, which is not quite what a food forest is. Reconciliation names the part that matters most here: biodiversity and human use in the same place, at the same time, by design.

We find the underlying claim honest as well. It concedes that conservation cannot win inside reserves alone, and it puts responsibility where most of the land actually is, with the people who farm, build and live on it.

Reconciliation ecology in practice

At Sa Medada, near Jerzu in Sardinia, the olive terraces are the clearest example. They remain productive terraces. Between the rows we sow flowering legumes that feed the soil and the pollinators; the margins are left rough for insects, lizards and ground-nesting birds; old and hollow trees stay standing, because their cavities are habitat no young tree can offer. The grove keeps its purpose and gains inhabitants.

The same logic runs through Project Eden. A food forest is a human harvest system with many species and many layers, which is also a description of habitat. Deep-rooted support plants, standing dead wood, water held in swales and small ponds, and areas deliberately left unmanaged serve the wildlife at the same time as they serve the planting.

We document this rather than claim it. Which species return, how quickly, and in which parts of the land is exactly the kind of record a small foundation can keep well, and it is the evidence that decides whether a reconciled landscape works. This article is a brief introduction; the practice is measured in decades.