My grandparents’ house in Langley, BC was bookended by berries. Blackberries lined the driveway up from 68th Avenue (rural no longer), and a raspberry patch curled along the top edge of the property, framing it in.

I have no idea what lay beyond the raspberries. There was a small meadow of violets, and there must have been neighbours nearby, but that would have been unthinkable to me at the time.

My memory of the property is stretched like a funhouse mirror and glowing, as childhood memories often are, but it really was something special. It had a walnut grove, a small creek, cedars perfect for climbing from bough to sweeping bough, a buttercup meadow, and a massive fallen tree with its root mat perpendicular to the ground (fairy house).

My grandfather showed his love for me by transplanting shoots of brush into a circle, which eventually bloomed into a beautiful fort (also fairy house). And, of course, there were the berries.

Summer smells like sun-warmed blackberries. It’s my mother’s favourite scent, and mine too. It defines a season for multiple generations. Himalayan blackberries, specifically. Imagine my surprise as a young upstart at UVic, having newly declared my Environmental Studies major, finding out that my treasured summer berry was invasive.

Restoration ecology is a young, dynamic field. Ever since people recognized the outsized effect we have on the world around us, some have sought to right it.

From the outside, it appears that invasive = bad. Scotch broom chokes out brush and shrub, proliferating until the landscape is covered in gorgeous yellow flowers. Himalayan blackberry towers over its native trailing cousin. Tender native ground cover, much like the flightless birds of New Zealand, was helpless against introduced species.

But some species, once newly invasive, naturalize over generations and root themselves in the imagination of the people who live there. They become synonymous with a place, and we form attachments to them. Restoration is not as simple as it first appears. Ecosystems are not static. The moment change stops, life stops.

“An evolving species is adapting to another evolving species, since what we rather glibly call ‘the environment’… is composed of nothing but other lifeforms,” writes Timothy Morton in Being Ecological. “By definition this process cannot be perfect…perfection would mean the end of adaptation, which is functionally impossible as long as evolution, which is to say lifeforms, continue.”

Ecosystems evolve, just like their parts (aren’t we all just systems of varying scales, anyway?). Restoration (the process of restoring an ecosystem to a previous "ideal" state) presumes a fixed moment in the past when an ecosystem was at its best. Most diverse? Most stable? How do we assign value judgements to a system that’s constantly in flux? How can we view neutrally a system of which we are a part?

None of this means invasive species removal is foolhardy. We have a responsibility to steward the ecosystems we live in and to mitigate our effects on them. We just can’t pretend that how we do so is simple, black-and-white, or beyond critique.

I find this messy conversation so compelling. These were the ideas I was exploring while writing after the sun hit the roof.

Restoration ecology is where “clean-cut” biology faces off with human emotion, place-based imagination, and societal values. It’s so fraught! It’s so human!

Further reading (some of the books I read while writing after the sun hit the roof)

• A Once and Future World, J.B. MacKinnon

• Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, Emma Marris

• How Islands Transform the World, J. Edward Chamberlin

• Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis, Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky

• Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

UPCOMING THINGS

My album release is on November 21, downstairs at the Sanctuary Arts Centre in Dartmouth! You can learn more and buy tickets here.

My album is out now! Check it out here.