The sun scorches my back, and I feel sweat running down my chest. The hat shields me from glare, but not from heat. My cheeks radiate heat, they feel red, moist, burning.

I look at my blistered hands covered in dry, dusty soil. I bend down, and place my other hand onto the raised bed to keep balance while I try to pull out the weed, reluctant to let go of its roots. The soil is burning hot. My arms, covered by a cotton shirt, and my legs, hidden inside linen pants, are cooking, but it is my feet that are killing me. They are burning inside the barefoot sneakers I somehow imagined would be a good choice for farm work in early summer in Australia.

I straighten myself and feel the urge to place my hands on my lower back and give it a massage to ease the seeping muscle pain.

As I lower my hands, dozens of bush flies start immediately crawling across my face. They slip into my nostrils and ear canals, feed on the sweat of my forehead and cheeks, and settle in swarms upon my eyelids. They move along my arms and legs, tickling the moist skin as they, apparently, drink from it.

How did this landscape used to look like, when the first people arrived on this land?, I ask silently. How did the sun used to feel like as its rays filtered through the box-ironbark forest canopies and danced on the ground? How did the air smell like?

How did the water taste, when drunk directly from the rivers and creeks?

As I now stand here, on this land once stewarded by the Dja Dja Wurrung people, who inhabited and cared for this Country for thousands of years, I see no forests or creeks. I see pastureland spreading before me, neat rows of raised garden beds stretching behind me, and between them a dam, a shed, and a house.

The pastures are divided into slots with electric fences guarding heritage breed black pigs, 99 in total, named either Wilbures or Charlottes. These pigs get to live outside grazing for their whole life, and when they are slaughtered at an on-farm abattoir their body parts will feed CSA-members living in the nearest towns and proximate neighbourhoods.

I’m working on this farm today to help in establishing a market-garden on rent-free land offered by the settlers Tammi and Stuart, and run by Josh, a Ngarrindjeri and Narungga man, together with the settler Rex. Tomorrow I’ll be riding in the back of the Jute, climbing over electric fences with fifteen-kilo buckets of feed for the pigs.

Yesterday I took part in the butchering of three roosters, which we plucked and slaughtered, and which we’ll be having for dinner tonight[i].

**

On a journey east into the depths of Southern Karelia, I sit on the train and watch the landscape slip past. Agricultural fields bordered by tree lines, clearings and abandoned looking houses, granaries and barns sagging sideways. Trees in rows, trees in lines, young trees, younger trees, seedling plantations.  

Some five hundred years ago these lands were burning and rye grew from the ash that nourished nutrient poor soils. At some point the forest companies needed more wood, states needed more tax money, and population who had grown nearly sevenfold in four hundred years needed more land.

There was no shared consciousness of regenerative land use. Most people were just trying to survive in a land of white winters, mires, and bedrock.  

As I reach my final destination, I am taken to a local farm. Soon we stand on a small hill—behind us, a relatively new grain silo; in front, a landscape of flat fields. Juuso, the farmer, sweeps his hand across the horizon, left to right: “All these fields you see are ours, except those,” he says, pointing to the black, bare-soiled plots on the far left.

A strong wind blows off the fields, slipping under my clothes and stinging the exposed skin. My cheeks burn—this time from cold, not from the heat.

I hear Juuso’s words reach me through the wind. He explains how his neighbor, a milk producer, farms very differently; ignoring soil health and condensation. He points at a tractor ploughing back and forth and calls it a concrete example of degenerative farming: at this time of year, one shouldn’t drive across the fields with this kind of heavy machinery at all, he explains.

As the evening falls, the night sky fills with billions of stars. From the distance, I hear the steady hum and scattered clangs of Svetogorsk’s pulp mill drifting across the fields. These sounds, like the stars above me, seem to recognize no borders.

The next day we climb into a tractor and drive to an experimental plot, a carbon farming field. We leave the tractor at the edge and step onto the cultivated soil. I feel its weight beneath my feet. We thread through the turnip rape crop, deep into the field.

We walk on, watching the crops change appearances: dark to light green, short to tall, sparse to dense. On the way back, one patch catches Juuso’s eye: here, the weeds have mostly taken over.

“This part is a mystery,” he says. “I need to see how it evolves over winter, to know if I can harvest it in spring. Sometimes it’s better to crush the crop in the field than try to harvest it. But crushing is a threshold, because then the profits are lost. It’s good we came out here to observe”, he concludes.

**

Regeneration has many faces, I remind myself. To nourish the soils, one farmer brews compost tea, another stirs biodynamic preparations, and a third spreads a nutrient blend of industrial by-products with slurry equipment.

To make a living, one farmer is supported by a community of CSA members, another sells products abroad, and a third hosts volunteer workers in exchange for their labor.

To acknowledge the past, one farmer tends perennial gardens, another grazes heritage breeds, and a third focuses on improving soil health and sequestering carbon — a substance fundamental to life, yet something that cannot be seen, smelled, or held in hands.        

To regenerate is to look forward. Yet, it cannot escape looking back, restoring that what has been lost. But what does it mean to speak of ecological restoration when there is no fixed, original state to return to? How can we even imagine restoring farming landscapes when the lands we now inhabit are irrevocably shaped: forests cleared, soils turned, thousands of domesticated animals brought to pasture, entire watersheds reordered?

The word restoration carries the weight of storage: the word promises solidity in a world that has never stood still.

Ecologist and historian Laura Martin writes[ii], “[t]o understand both the promises and the perils that ecological restoration holds for the future of biodiversity, we must understand its history.” And history, of course, is never singular. Landscapes have been — and continue to be — shaped by many histories, layered, intersecting, and at times contradictory.

These histories teach us that caring for life is never straightforward. To care for one species often means to neglect another. Care, as philosopher María Puig de la Bellacasa suggests[iii], can do good, but it can also oppress. It implies control as much as it demands letting go.

Indeed, caring for biodiversity can harm people, especially those already pushed to the margins. As Martin describes, environmentalists have justified racist forms of protection, leaving behind up to tens of millions of “conservation refugees.” Even the earliest wildlife restoration sites in the United States were part of a deliberate campaign to erode Native American sovereignty.

Paradoxically, restoration can harm humans and other living beings as much as the destruction it seeks to repair. In the name of restoring, rabbits are killed to save endemic plants; animals are bred in captivity; prairies are burned; herbicides are sprayed from helicopters to clear space for the desired vegetation and push out the so-called unwanted, invasive species.

Restoration, in all its forms, reminds us that regeneration is never innocent. Indeed, I feel anything but innocent: just three days ago, my hand held the axe that ended the life of a mink to protect forest grouse whose eggs it preys upon.

Defined as “the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed,” restoration refers towards a better future. It calls us to help life return —  though to what form, and according to whose memory, remains open.

So, the questions remain: whose story do we follow, and how far back — or, how far into the future — must we travel to imagine what it means to regenerate biodiversity?

**

My journey across continents has led me to follow the stories of farmers. Stories of weeding and eating weeds; of losing strawberries to deer and the deer to the gun; of cutting trees to open forest pastures and the rooster’s head to make supper.

Stories of hard work, devotion, exhaustion, failure, and divorce.

Stories of hands thrust into compost to feel its heat, into a cow’s body to pull out a calf; of landscapes where grain sways in the wind, while Spanish slugs march like an army, devouring every root vegetable they can find. Of smelling the first breath of spring, fresh grass and melting snow.

These stories are rarely told, and even more rarely heard. What reaches the public are scientific reports that frame ecosystems either in their ruin or in their abundance.

They count the forests cut by human hands, the cubic meters of timber removed, and the countless birds and animals displaced as wetlands, meadows, and bogs vanish. They trace the catastrophic effects of rising temperatures on life above and below the waterline. They catalogue carbon: stored in soils and oceans, released into the air, circulating through living bodies, locked in the Earth’s crust, held by an ancient tree or a young sapling. Their pages brim with gigatons and ppm’s, percentages and degrees, years and chemical elements.

Don’t get me wrong. I am sure that the reports represent careful research and deep concern for life on Earth. Yet instead of animating the living world, these representations halt it. Movement becomes an inventory; sunrises become numbers in history books.

The paradox is that while biodiversity loss is described as the consequence of human activity, the human is strikingly absent from the representations of biodiversity. Humans, though as entangled in nature as trout, trees, or ticks, are removed from it.

Excluding the human perceptual world from definition of biodiversity is like returning endlessly to the same question: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? We can measure the vibrations and prove the physics. Yet, to whom does the sound matter if there is no one to perceive it — to feel the crack and trembling, to experience the tree fall?

**

The question of how to live well with other beings in worlds that are continuously unfolding, calls us to move beyond the disciplinary divides that separate nature from culture, mind from body, and the human from other living beings. The path is not simple, for the concepts we employ, the methods we use, the theories we construct, the histories we trust, and the questions we ask diverge like a free-flowing river from one held back by a dam.

And yet, there’s something fundamental that we all share — whether settler or enslaved, aristocrat or homeless, dark-skinned or pale, ancestor or a child not yet born. We appreciate the taste of good food; we enjoy beauty; we are captured by melodies we hold dear. We value life because we can sense it — because, if we are fortunate, we can feel, hear, see, taste, smell, orient, and perceive ourselves within the flows of life.

**

The clay soil packs under my rubber boots as I walk between the growing beds. It feels as if weights have been attached to the bottoms of my boots. Suddenly, the boot gives way and gets caught in the mud. I balance on one foot, trying to pull the boot off the ground without falling. I have to use my hands for support as I sink into the wet, cold and soft clay soil.

As I balance my way through the vegetable garden, it strikes me: here, species names lose their meaning. In biodiversity science, every species is counted as equally significant—yet in these fields, that symmetry dissolves. Not all beings matter equally to farmers. Few would mourn the vanishing of bush flies, Spanish slugs, or couch grass.

I also see that a pig matters more than a possum, a sheep more than a wolf. An apple tree holds more value than the spruce casting a shade over it.

What, then, does biodiversity become when perceived not through the eyes of a scientist, but from within the daily labors of those who live the land, in landscapes where relationships, not categories, decide who thrives and who is banished?

**

Let me end with a conversation I had with an ecologist, as we walked side by side through a landscape soon to become the ground of our collaboration.

We talked about biodiversity indicators, and he gave me an example. For decades, EU environmental policy in agricultural landscapes has relied on the farmland bird index as a measure of ecological health. It is composed of a mixed assortment of selected species: some that nest in farmlands, others that feed there only in passing. The index has been built to represent biodiversity in farmlands, rising when ecosystems improve, falling when they decline.

Of course, everyone understands that birds are influenced by far more than farmland alone: by wintering grounds, migration routes, climate, predation. And yet, this remains the best we can come up with: an index that guides our understanding of agricultural biodiversity.

But what if we built an index based on human preferences and valuations?, the ecologist wondered. Studies have long identified which bird species people value most, which they find most likeable, most dear. Why not let this knowledge shape another kind of index — one guided not only by physical presence, but by human perception: by the experience of farmers walking their fields, urbanites living in cities, birdwatchers following species through the seasons.

As I linger on this thought, I wonder: what if we went even further? What if we imagined beyond what can be counted, and learned to register what is felt, heard, and lived?

Could we trace the taste of life in flower, leaf, and root?

Could we reimagine indicators by telling stories of what the anthropologist Tim Ingold calls[iv] animals in their animaling, plants in their planting, stone in its stoning, and humans in their humaning — stories of beings balancing between control and cohabitation, caring and being cared for, moving within the rhythms of reproduction and decay?[v]

Such an approach would allow us to better understand the webs of care and predation, of attention and neglect, of imagination and forgetting. It would allow us to restory diversity of living and dying and of the ways in which life emerges, persists, and passes.

And in doing so, we might recognize that flows of life leave lines in the world— and that it is by the braiding of these lines that we will be judged by those who come after us.[vi]

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[i] Kallio, G. (2025). On Hesitation. Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 49(2), 60-89.

[ii] Martin, L. J. (2022). Wild by design: The rise of ecological restoration. Harvard University Press. [p. 6]

[iii] Puig de La Bellacasa, M. P. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.

[iv] Ingold, T. (2021). Correspondences. Polity Press [p. 7]

[v] Kallio, G. & LaFleur, W. (2023) Ways of (un)knowing landscapes: tracing more-than-human relations in regenerative agriculture. Journal of Rural Studies, vol 101, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2023.103059

[vi] Inspired by Ingold, T. (2015). The life of lines. Routledge, and by Wall Kimmerer, R. (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, First paperback edition. Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, Minn.