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I was lucky to share the stage with Tom twice this summer, so this episode was recorded in two acts — first in a forest outside Brussels the day after we both spoke at the Love Tomorrow Summit, and later backstage in London following our talks at the EARTHED Summit.
We were sitting on a mossy log in the shade—two ecologists in festival wristbands—when I hit record. Yesterday we’d spoken at the Love Tomorrow Summit at Tomorrowland; today, we traded smoke machines for birdsong. It was the kind of setting that dissolves pretense. Tom Crowther looked around, smiled, and said, “Sitting around in this forest is even better.”
I wanted Tom to open Season 6 for a reason. Three and a half years ago, he came on the show to unpack the whiplash around his lab’s hugely influential “trillion trees” work. He called that moment the “best and worst week” of his life—electrifying public interest, fierce academic debate, and a tidal wave of misunderstanding that equated nature recovery with planting monocultures. Six years on, I asked him how it looks in the rearview mirror.
“The controversy was real,” he said, “but what’s amazed me is the consensus that’s emerged. Ten years ago, nature wasn’t in the climate conversation. Five years ago, it was—mostly as ‘how many trees can we plant?’ Now at COPs you hear: how do we protect Indigenous land, empower local stewards, and let nature recover?”
That shift—from counting trees to valuing ecosystems and communities—feels like the arc of our entire field. And it’s not just rhetoric. It’s practice.
From anxiety to agency
I asked Tom what he’d put on a billboard outside the next COP. His answer surprised me: “Enjoy the process.” He wants climate action to feel like the biggest, most thrilling fight of our lives—not a grim chore.
As an ecologist who spends a lot of time translating systems to humans (and back again), I feel this in my bones. If we build the movement on fear alone, we burn out or turn on each other. If we build on curiosity, connection, and the daily wins of restoration, we create positive feedback loops—the same loops that grow forests and cultures. Tom reminded me of the dwarf Gimli in The Lord of the Rings: “Certainty of death, low chance of success—what are we waiting for?” Dark humor, yes—but the truth buried in it is momentum. What if the path to climate sanity is paved with things that make life better now?
Restor: making the movement visible
After the “trillion trees” storm, Tom and collaborators built Restor—what he calls “the Google Maps of nature.” (Google literally helped build it.) Anyone can zoom to their place on Earth, draw a polygon around a site (from a backyard food forest to a national park), and instantly see open estimates for carbon, biodiversity, water dynamics, and more. Save it, and you’re a dot on the map—legible to neighbors, donors, buyers, volunteers.
What I love most: Restor flips the narrative from top-down mega-projects to bottom-up livelihoods. It’s not about a few glossy plantations; it’s about millions of local stewards, each with their own soils, stories, and constraints. And yes—despite assumptions I hear often—there are tens of thousands of urban (!) projects on Restor already. The pattern is painfully familiar: greener, leafier neighborhoods tend to be wealthier; poorer areas shoulder hotter temperatures, worse air, and fewer parks. The projects dotting Restor are trying to correct that—one pocket park, street tree, or urban farm at a time.
Tom shared one story from western Portugal where farmers have been trapped by a eucalyptus economy (great for paper, terrible for fire and water). One farmer ripped out eucalyptus, replanted cork oak, and hoped. A buyer committed in advance to purchase future cork; stability appeared; twenty to thirty nearby farms followed. Feedback loops, again—this time between ecology and economy.
The sound of recovery
One of my favorite sections of our conversation was Tom’s national-scale case study from Costa Rica. The government mapped every single Payment for Ecosystem Services site on Restor—radical transparency, you can literally zoom through. Then, students blanketed the country with bioacoustic recorders to listen for recovery: pasture → restoration sites → intact forest. In the episode, Tom lets us listen in to these, too!
On average, restoration sites recovered ~86% of the soundscape complexity of intact forests. You can hear the return of complexity, even the low roars of howler monkeys—signs of layered food webs, nutrients, and shelter. Tom’s team even analyzed the 100,000 most-downloaded songs on the internet (yes, really) and found they statistically resemble the spectral richness of intact forests more than degraded pastures. Maybe Lady Gaga is closer to a rainforest than we think. Or maybe we’re just animals who never forgot what health sounds like.
As someone obsessed with practical measurement, I find this thrilling. Carbon is easy to quantify. Biodiversity… not so much. Soundscapes aren’t biodiversity itself, but they capture an emergent property of living systems—a proxy humans feel. And we know the human side matters: studies keep showing that bird song and diverse natural soundscapes support mental health, immunity, and recovery. If health is the great equalizer, sound makes the case in stereo.
Models are wrong; movements are right
Tom is refreshingly candid about global models: “Every model is wrong; some are useful.” Restor’s estimates are exactly that—estimates. No one should build a project on a single metric. But blend multiple lenses (carbon, fragmentation, species ranges, water), and the composite picture becomes decision-useful—especially when paired with local knowledge. The model isn’t the forest; it’s the start of a conversation between scales.
And scale is where policy lives. Tom’s team is releasing work this year showing, country by country, where we’ve removed too much nature for agriculture—past the point where yields start falling because pollinators, microclimate buffering, and soil fertility have eroded. That’s the kind of analysis that can turn “nature vs. food” from a culture war into national optimization—and smarter compensation for farmers, like Costa Rica pioneered.
For the next generation (and the rest of us)
I asked Tom what he’d tell a young person torn between academia and action. He’s been asked to choose—scientist or activist?—and refuses the binary. His advice: follow what brings you real joy and find a mentor who helps you turn curiosity into craft. The rest follows. That resonates with my own zig-zag (ecologist, urbanist, storyteller) and why I started the Internet of Nature in the first place: to put the wonder back into the work.
An invitation to urban listeners
If you’re restoring a verge, schoolyard, vacant lot, church garden, rooftop meadow, community orchard—put your project on Restor. Draw your polygon. Click save. You might already know your species list by heart; still, add the dot. Visibility is not vanity—it’s infrastructure. It tells your neighbors (and their neighbors) that something living is happening here, and they could do it there. The most common feedback Tom hears from project leads? “I thought I was alone. Now I see the movement.” That perspective shift—like the sound of a forest returning—is how change scales.
Season 6 is about getting outside, literally. We recorded this episode under leaves, not studio lights. It felt right. If we’re going to “enjoy the process,” as Tom suggests, we have to keep our hands and senses in the places we love. That’s where the networks of nature become visible—and where the networks between us do, too.
Happy trails,
Nadina
