Ella Gatfield is a writer, interdisciplinary ecologist, and farmer living in the mixing zone—where the glaciated North Atlantic salt marshes meet the metaphor of the page. Her work is a practice of sustained, sometimes obsessive attention, rooted in the conviction that we cannot find compassion for a multispecies world we haven’t first learned to attend to.

From the Long Island coastline to the community food systems of the Bronx, Ella’s work is an iterative search for what it means to know a place. Whether restoring and educating about coastal habitats for Cornell Cooperative Extension Marine Program or co-directing the Food and Farm Hub at Riverdale Neighborhood House, she tracks the entanglements where ecology, ethics, and human presence collide.

Currently an M.A. Dean’s Scholar at NYU Gallatin, her research navigates the technical and the felt. She is researching fish eDNA in the Lower Hudson with the Hudson River Park’s River Project, while maintaining a year-long witness of an East End marsh—an inquiry into the space where scientific data and embodied observation collide.

Ella writes the Substack newsletter Another Way Home and the monthly column “Field Notes” for 27East. She graduated with a First Class Honors in Environmental Journalism from the University of the West of England and is a graduate of the University of Vermont’s Farmer Training Program. When she isn’t behind a desk, she is at the marsh, researching and observing species, hiking with her dogs, or tending to her garden allotment.