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The fastest way to lose the future is to forget the past, what the land already taught our ancestors. Granddaughter Crow sits down with Dr. Maceo Carrillo Martinet, ecologist, educator, and community restoration practitioner, to explore why climate change adaptation is as much about relationship as it is about data. His book Healing the Land Teaches Us Who We Are brings “hard science” into conversation with Indigenous knowledge, history, and cultural resistance, insisting that restoration work has to heal people and place at the same time.

We dig into how cycles and interdependence show up in both ecology and traditional teachings, and why linear “progress” can blind us to solutions that have worked for thousands of years. Dr. Martinet shares a powerful watershed restoration story from a legal water meeting where the default answer is bigger dams and bigger budgets, but the evidence points back to small rock dams placed high in the mountains. Those humble structures can slow runoff, increase infiltration, and bring back grasses, wildlife, and resilience, turning wounded land into a sponge again.

From there, we widen the lens to common lands, biodiversity, and the overlooked history of communal stewardship across the world, including Europe. We also challenge the words we use, unpacking how language can be a companion of empire and how even the word “nature” can carry separation. Along the way, we talk about listening to the land’s soundscape and why the “languages of life” matter if we want real ecological restoration, sustainable futures, and community healing.

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Bio: 

For over 24 years, Dr. Maceo Carrillo Martinet has been co-creating and implementing community-based ecological restoration and education projects across New Mexico and beyond. Helping communities restore land and water has been both his professional and personal passions and obligations since he can remember. His book: “Healing the Land Teaches Us Who We Are”, published by North Atlantic Books, is a culmination of his experiences working in community on projects to restore the land, but also attempts to situate ecological restoration into historical and cultural context in these tumultuous times. He received his doctorate in biology from the University of New Mexico where he focused on ecology, freshwater sciences and environmental education. Presently, he teaches a hands-on course at UNM on watershed and community restoration, and is planning to take students to do this work internationally.

https://maceocm.com/

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