As a contribution to contemporary discussions on land alienation and ecosystem degradation in Palestine, this paper considers emerging critical ecologies of the relationships among people, plants and landscapes, and offers future-oriented perspectives on the connections between contemporary agroecology and “traditional” local agricultural practices. It is often assumed that landscape and biodiversity research in Palestine was conducted primarily by Western researchers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, geography and geology, among others. But a parallel, and sometimes intersecting, line of land-based research has been carried out by Palestinians for more than a century. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in such land-based research and biodiversity conservation in Palestine, mainly due to the global climate crisis and local Israeli land appropriation. This work has been partly enabled by the establishment of several new research initiatives, such as the Palestinian Natural History Museum, and independent groups of specialists from the natural and social sciences, as well as artists, community organizers, and so on. Drawing upon theoretical perspectives that we have developed in our own research areas of contemporary agroecology and historic ecology, we suggest that the combination of Israeli occupation practices of land and resource (i.e. food, water) appropriation, Palestinian urban expansion, and the climate crisis are the major causes of ecosystem/biodiversity degradation. We argue that these food and resource-related crises have led to an increasing sense of land alienation - the detrimental effects on physical and mental health of individuals and communities induced by the historical and ongoing trauma of settler colonialism. These challenges to historical and ontological understandings of land, landscape and biodiversity are central to discussions of the real-world issues of food sovereignty and social well-being that are crucial to the maintenance of social ecologies within and between local communities throughout Palestine. In practical terms, we discuss how our current projects with communities in the West Bank can advance some thoughts for the future reconfiguration of local/traditional ecological relationships in the reality of Palestine’s deeply altered social landscapes. We show how recent local strategies are creating new systems of food sovereignty through the development of sustainable food practices and the strengthening of agroecological landscapes. These developments represent significant, resilient challenges to the agro-appropriation strategies of the occupation, and offer alternatives to the hitherto debilitating stresses of land alienation.