Margaret Wooster - Finding wonder and connection even in contaminated places while inspiring ongoing regeneration from Erie Niagara, Buffalo, New York

Awakening Lands

Margaret Wooster is a Buffalo native who embodies regenerative leading and weaving. She has used her PhD in English and Master's degree in Urban and Environmental Planning to teach at the local University at Buffalo, write 3 books about restoring waterways in Western New York, and to inform her life of advocacy. Margaret has been central to several efforts in the revitalization of the Erie Niagara bioregion. She was a founding member of the grassroots group, Friends of the Buffalo River, which eventually grew into Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper, the largest waterkeeper organization in the world, which provides community education and engagement, apprenticeship opportunities for young stewards, water quality and resiliency studies, and large-scale restoration projects around the watershed. Margaret was the Executive Director of Great Lakes United, an international collaborative of nonprofit and conservation groups from the United States, Canada, and multiple First Nations, leading the charge for funding and projects to protect and restore the Great Lakes Basin. In this episode, she discusses this work as well as her love of degraded landscapes, where she sees so much potential. From the oxbow separated from the Buffalo Creek to the de-industrializing of the Outer Harbor, to her focus on bioregional land protection through the Western New York Environmental Alliance, Margaret is championing the return to wilding in the post-industrial Buffalo, NY. And finally, Margaret, as an Ally of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, calls for uplifting Indigenous voices. She shares a bit of the recent fight occurring against the development of a manufacturing park threatening Tonawanda Seneca territory and wetlands in the area; the Big Woods.

And the four-word slogan Margaret wants to promote to shift the way people of the region think about restoration: "PROTECT FIRST - RESTORE SECOND."

You can learn more about Margaret by going to her website (margaretwooster.com) and can support her work by checking out and donating to:

• Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper (bnwaterkeeper.org)
• Buffalo Outer Harbor Coalition (ourouterharbor.org)
• Western New York Environmental Alliance (wnyea.org)
• Great Lakes Ecoregion Network (greatlakesecoregionnetwork.weebly.com)
• Allies of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation (alliesoftsn.weebly.com)

You can follow along as we continue to weave this story on our Substack at awakeninglands.substack.com.

If you'd like to support Anna and Benji to continue weaving stories through Awakening Lands, you can do that from our Patreon Page at patreon.com/awakening_lands. Please help us out so that we can bring you and our landscapes more stories from the leading edge of the regenerative movement!

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