3 Ways We Heal Ecosystems Every Day

At Viridian, our mission has always been to heal ecological systems while making beautiful places for people. Recently, we’ve been thinking a lot about the “people” part of that mission — who we’re designing for (and with). This isn’t a pivot away from ecology, but a reminder that healthy landscapes support communities as living systems. So now in this post we want to talk about healing ecological systems. Because without that, neither “beauty” nor “people” will last long.

For us, healing landscapes always comes back to the fundamentals of soil, water, and plants. In a healthy ecosystem, these elements work together. That's not our rule — it's nature's. When we separate those elements, we lose the systems that make landscapes healthy. When we rejoin them, we create the conditions for healing.

This work happens in three major ways: enriching soil, remediating contamination, and restoring landscapes.

Enriching Soil

Most soil problems are really system problems. We see this constantly in new residential developments. Many were built on farm fields where contractors stripped and sold the topsoil. The subsoil that's left is nutrient-poor and infertile, upsetting owners of these expensive homes who can't understand why their landscapes won't grow.

The solution is to bring in amendments to rebuild topsoil with appropriate nutrients. Peat is a common solution, but a poor one. Peat is nutrient-rich decomposed plant matter—largely mosses—found in bogs that date back to the last ice age. It grows millimeters per year and sequesters carbon dioxide. Harvesting it undoes thousands of years of accumulation while decreasing future resilience. 

A more sustainable approach to keeping soil rich or nurturing it back to health is to use composted native plant materials and mulch. The key is to mulch like with like. Woodland gardens need leaf litter and fallen sticks. Meadow landscapes need their own clippings left in place. Plant material provides the nutrients. Water aids decomposition and infiltration into the soil. Plants. Water. Soil.

But sometimes enrichment isn't enough.

Remediating Contaminated Ground

On brownfield sites and superfund sites, where soil contaminated by industrial chemicals pose serious health and environmental risks, more extreme action is needed. Here are four common strategies.

Unfortunately, the most common approaches are the worst from an environment perspective. The first: remove the contaminated soil, truck it elsewhere, and contaminate a new location. Make it someone else's problem. The second: cap everything with concrete and build storage units or some equally anonymous, largely unoccupied structure on top of it.

A third solution is phytoremediation — literally meaning "plant correction" or "plants that restore balance." Phytoremediation uses plants to absorb, stabilize, or break down pollutants. Some plants lock contaminants in their roots. Sunflowers, for example, with their rapid growth and deep root system, are well suited for absorbing contaminants like lead, zinc, and cadmium. Phragmites, a common reed native to China, is often used for absorbing heavy-duty toxins.

These sound like great solutions, but phytoremediation is slow—it can take decades—and limited to the area immediately around the plant. And some of the most effective plants, like Phragmites, are invasive. Another issue: any plants that accumulate hazardous metals become hazardous themselves and must disposed of safely. So, it works…but with major caveats.

The fourth solution: do nothing. Fence the site, post warnings, and let nature do its thing. It’s cheap. It’s effective. And it's environmentally friendly. But it's slow. And not ideal solution at a time and place where real estate has such high value.

There's always this kind of give and take with remediation. Every project requires a specific solution that balances every consideration. 

Restoring Landscapes

Restoration reunites water, plants, and soil into functioning ecosystems with native wildlife. It’s not about asking “what do we add here?” or “what needs to be removed?” — but rather, “what used to be here?” This is the core of what we do at Viridian. There’s no single solution, scale, or scope for these projects. Landscape restoration can scale from a small garden that supports pollinators to a regional master plan that turns a cultivated landscape into a productive natural ecology.

Restoration requires knowing what came before. What was here before the disturbance? How did water move across and through the site? What plant community fits the soils that actually exist, not the ones we wish we had? This isn't about recreating some mythical pristine past. It's about building landscapes that function — that filter water, sequester carbon, support biodiversity, and give something back instead of just taking.

Whatever challenges a landscape faces, the principles stay the same: rejoin soil, water, and plants, and to heal ecological systems while making beautiful places for people — not just for today and tomorrow, but for long after people are gone.