Dr Phumza Ntshotsho

In a nut shell, my work is about exploring a transdisciplinary path to evidence-based restoration.

The longer version is: In the beginning there was Adam and Eve. Now there are over 7 billion of us… and we’ve messed up planet Earth, big time. I am concerned about this, and I want to do my bit to ensure that my children and their descendants (and yours too) have a habitable planet to live on. So I went and studied conservation ecology, where I learned that humans cannot be separated from nature (i.e. the world is a big socio-ecological system). And that the answer to the current ecological crisis is in acknowledging that “we have used too much natural capital and that – for our own good – it is now time to ‘give back’ to nature and to nature's functions on which we depend (Aronson et al. 2006)”.

My research interests thus include looking at how to do restoration effectively, through the generation and use of evidence, involving traditionally divergent knowledge bases and ways of doing things. I have learned, with considerable humility, that “science” alone is not enough to answer the world’s complex problems. There is much value in incorporating other ways of producing knowledge and not marginalising some approaches because they are perceived as belonging to the “soft sciences”. Although I often call myself an ecologist, I regard myself as a transdisciplinarity scholar.