Restorative Justice is the tending of damage and violence through healing, accountability, and transformation. Often viewed as a social service within the criminal legal system, we see it as a social movement for repair, reconstruction, and returning what’s been stolen. Less about breaking a law when the law itself is often a tool of violence and waste, more about the harm to life and the relationships that feed it through circles of care and basins of relations.

So much harm and injustice stems from and grafts onto trauma and violence in our bodies and the land, accumulating and spreading a lot like toxins in the soil and water. That toxic load, and the dominating systems that leach it, earn the label invasive species far more than most plants, which is why restorative justice and restoration ecology are kindred spirits. Instead of pathologizing or eradicating individual species, a restoration ecology of justice cultivates conditions for right relationships to resprout, propagating healthy power rooted in love and living soil.

A restoring and transforming justice for land grows from questions, nested like the scales of a watershed:

• What’s happened and happening to land and the communities that care for it?

• What are the needs of those harmed and the responsibility of those who harmed?

• What’s the process we can participate in to hold ourselves accountable and heal?

• What are the root causes of the harmful behavior and structures?

• What are the structures and relationships we desire to thrive?

These questions change the shape of the stories we tell about our watersheds, about our work, about the possibilities for how we organize and sustain ourselves. They’re all a way of asking another question: how can we have communities and cultures that do not destroy but nurture the earth, that do not oppress but liberate its creatures?

Restorative justice isn’t about restoring a bygone past. Instead, as defined by the visionary People’s Agreement of Cochabamba, restorative justice is “the restitution of integrity to our Mother Earth and all its beings” and a “means by which all peoples – particularly those who are mainly responsible for causing [violence and waste] and with the capacity to correct it – can honor their historical and current responsibilities, as part of a common effort to address a common cause” that ultimately keeps everyone safe. We see the restoration ecology of justice like reparations: a world-tending effort in the present to grow cultures like trees, giving gifts and feeding life so all creatures have enough and can be fully themselves.