Theorizing human impacts into ecological restoration is not a slippery slope, but a toehold for reaching social‐ecological resilience: a counter‐response to McDonald et al. (2019)

In their reply, McDonald et al. have misconstrued several crucial points from our article. In this counter-response, we clarify our concerns with the Standards as a document with global implications. We highlight our concern with framing preindustrial indigenous peoples' impacts as natural and the colonial connotations of such an assumption. We also discuss practical issues that arise from the Standards' conceptualization of natural variation and suggest avenues for developing frameworks that do not rely on a nature-culture dichotomy or naturalization of indigenous landscapes.