Cultural Heritage
for Nature Restoration
Helping organisations and communities reconnect culture, place and ecology through living heritage, creative practice and place-based research.
Nature recovery is as much about our human relationships with the living world as it is about the practical work of restoration itself.
Lasting environmental stewardship grows from relationships with place — relationships shaped through memory, language, knowledge, creativity and everyday practice.
Culture and ecology are not separate. Music, songs, stories, placenames, traditions and local knowledge carry traces of how people have lived with and understood particular places across generations. They hold ecological knowledge, but also relationships, responsibilities and ways of paying attention to the living world. Cultural and ecological loss can be deeply entangled — and so too can their repair.
The UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) recognises living cultural practices as important resources for biodiversity and sustainability, yet they remain largely overlooked in the planning, funding and delivery of nature recovery.
As a researcher and creative practitioner, I work with organisations, communities and policymakers to explore the cultural dimensions of ecological restoration. Through research, facilitation, creative practice and strategic advice, I help develop approaches that are rooted in place and attentive to cultural memory, local knowledge, relationships and community agency.
I think of this work as ‘cultural darning and mending’ — finding threads of cultural memory and bringing them back into living practice. Rather than trying to recreate an imagined past, it asks what we might carry forward, repair and remake as we shape more hopeful ecological futures.
The long-term sustainability of environmental stewardship depends on emotional, ethical and cultural connections between people and place. Music, song, story, and traditional ecological knowledge offer a powerful means to nurture and renew those connections.”
This British Academy policy discussion paper explores how integrating Intangible Cultural Heritage can support place-sensitive nature recovery. Through two case studies from the Scottish Highlands it examines how placenames, creative cultural expressions and traditional ecological knowledge can contribute to inclusive, forward-looking, adaptive approaches.
‘Integrating Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in Nature Recovery: A Place-Sensitive Approach in the Scottish Highlands’ (2025)
