ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to unsettle assumptions about the innocence of the ecological sciences. Ecology is founded in settler colonial logics. Ecologists invented and developed their tools and theories at the frontiers of colonial expansion and capitalism’s violent incursions on Indigenous lands. Decolonizing the ecological sensorium is especially pressing today as High Park, now named as a site of scientific and natural interest, becomes a site of intensive ecological restoration, where naturalists, ecologists, volunteers, and the city’s Urban Forestry team attempt to “bring back” the ancient oak savannahs that used to stretch out across these lands. Toronto’s Urban Forestry team has put up signs throughout the park to mark Monitoring Plots where they have done ecological restoration work. If traditional nature photography captures living bodies and turns them into objects of aesthetic and scientific interest, these kinesthetic images gesture to a different kind of account of the living world.
