All around the world, there’s unfortunate news about the environment: reefs are bleaching, glaciers are cleaving, and superstorms are brewing. In the United States, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke doesn’t believe in climate change, which has derailed ongoing conservation efforts. It looks bad. But on the tiny Félicité island in the archipelago of the Seychelles, there’s a reason to be optimistic. The island is undergoing an environmental rebirth. This recalibration offers us an important lesson: If we work towards the restoration of the environment, and tend to our habitats, it might be possible to undo our damage.

Whatever newspaper you will open, you’ll hear the doom and gloom, but if you can find the few bright spots in the world, what a difference that will make.

But a battle is raging in this tiny nation that has bore the brunt of colonialism for centuries. The cultural markings of the brutal French (and later British) rule are deeply present — from the Creole spoken by the Seychellois, to the French-influenced cuisine, to the Moutya danced at parties on the beaches. But there’s another vestige of colonialism that has completely decimated Felicité at the ecological level: the coco plum.

“Since the French settled here circa 1770, [colonists] left a very heavy footprint,” says Steve Hill, the official ecologist of the private island’s Six Senses Zil Pasyon resort, pointing to a thicket of ground cover that has almost completely destroyed the fragile ecosystem of Félicité, one of 115 islands in the Seychelles. “Unfortunately, in an island ecosystem, this is particularly damaging, because these are closed ecosystems, so even the slightest intervention from outside causes maximum disruption and unforeseen circumstances, and a prime example of that, if you just look around us here, we have this horrible shrubby stuff called coco plum, or Chrysobalanus icaco.”

It’s an uphill battle, says Hill, who has been wrestling with Félicité for nearly 11 years now. Once the island has been cleared of coco plums, consistent clearing has to continue for two or three years before it’s certain that the plants has been eradicated. “Until the seed bank is exhausted, they keep coming back,” he says with a sigh, implying the need for a team of ecologists working with him to make sure the island is properly reconditioned. “This is the foolishness of man — bringing an alien species into an enclosed environment.”

Read more about the ecosystem fight in the Seychelles by Maxwell Williams at GOOD Magazine