Reconnecting Black Youth with Nature

Earlier this year I got a message from Anthony at EMPOCA, a Germany-based initiative working to reconnect Black youth with the natural world through their Black Nature Heroes cohort. He wanted to know if I would speak with the group about our work in Haiti.

I said yes without hesitation.

The conversation that followed stayed with me. Not because it was unusual to talk about land and regeneration, that is most of what I do. But because the young people in that room were asking questions that went beyond farming techniques. They were asking about belonging. About whether the land was somewhere they were allowed to be. About what it meant to find yourself in a forest or a garden when so much of your history says you were taken from one.

That is not a small question.

For many of us in the African diaspora, disconnection from nature did not happen by accident. It came through displacement, through systems designed to sever people from the knowledge of how to grow food and care for land. What EMPOCA is doing, helping young Black people in Germany find their way back to that relationship, runs parallel to what we try to do in Cap Rouge.

We talked about what it actually looks like to work with nature rather than against it. I shared what we do in the mountains of southern Haiti, the seed saving, the syntropic systems, the way we try to read the land before we touch it. And I told them what I tell everyone who comes to work with us: you are already part of the system. You have always been. The question is just whether you are paying attention.

What I took from those young people was their willingness to ask hard questions and sit with real answers. That is the starting point for any genuine relationship with the land.

Thank you to Anthony and the whole EMPOCA team for the invitation. The roots keep growing.