#GenerationRestoration

On June 5th I joined the Generation Restoration event hosted by Earthed, organized in connection with World Environment Day and the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Practitioners, researchers, and community leaders from around the world came together to share what they have learned from working on the ground with degraded land.

My presentation was called “Community as Catalyst for Restoration.” The core of it was simple: restoration does not work when it is imposed from outside. It works when the people who live with the land are the ones leading the effort. That is what we have learned in Cap Rouge over the past decade, and it was what I wanted to put on the table for that conversation.

I talked about syntropic agroforestry, the method that has shaped most of our design work in Haiti. The principle behind it is observation before intervention. You watch how the land moves, how water behaves, which species push through without help. Then you work with what is already trying to happen. As I said during the talk, the goal is not to control what nature does. It is to learn from it and follow its lead.

One of the most grounding moments of the event was listening to Dr. Jessica Hutchings speak about the Hua Parakore framework from Aotearoa New Zealand, a system rooted in Maori values that weaves indigenous knowledge directly into land stewardship practice. It reminded me that Haiti’s own traditional ecological knowledge, the ways our grandparents understood soil, seed, and season, is not something separate from modern regenerative agriculture. It is part of the same lineage.

The conversation that day reinforced something I already believe: the most important thing we can do is keep talking to each other across geographies, across practices, across generations. The problems are too interconnected for any single approach to solve alone.