Published June 18, 2026 · Scientific context reviewed October 14, 2026.
After disturbance, plants that establish early can help cover exposed soil and add organic matter. Which species arrive depends on the site, the seed sources, and what happened there. Some decline as shade increases; others persist or help shape later growth. Succession has many paths. When I watch these changes in Cap Rouge, I think about how one stage can make room for another. That is the image that helps me understand our work.
Over the years I have come to understand our own work the same way.
Grown in Haiti plays a pioneer role. We arrive where the soil and the knowledge around it have been worn down by everything this place has been put through, and we help condition the ground again. We plant, we share seeds and tools, we work alongside families who are restoring their own land. The real measure of whether we are doing this well is not how much we grow as an organization. It is whether the land and the people can carry the work without us.
That is an uncomfortable thing for any organization to say, because organizations are often expected to last, expand, and stay at the center. For us, the question is when support creates room for others and when it starts to take up that room. If we position ourselves as the permanent source of knowledge here, we can stand in the light that belongs to the families who hold it.
And they do hold it. The knowledge in these mountains is older than this organization by a very long time. After every harvest, people share seeds, plantains, and breadfruit without a program asking them to and without a record kept. We did not introduce that. We are honored to be part of it. So when I say our goal is to step back, I am not describing a loss of knowledge. The knowledge was never ours to hold in the first place. We are tending a thread we did not spin.
There is one part of this that I think gets missed. The pioneer is changed by the ground it conditions. While we work the land, the land is working us. I have watched it happen over more than a decade, in myself and in the team. The patience to wait on a season, the way you learn to read a slope after a storm, the sense of when to cut and when to leave alone, none of that was in us before the land put it there. We grow as the land grows. The steward stands inside the cycle, moving with it. Andy, Frantz, and Kenya are not handing a finished thing to a community. They are growing alongside the same ground they tend, the same way it is growing the families they work with.
This is what makes the work regenerative all the way through. It does not only restore soil and trees. It restores the people doing it, and the people learning from them, in the same motion. Everyone inside the relationship moves.
So the aim was never to remain at the center. It is to do the early work well, to be changed by it, and to make room for what follows. The support a young tree needs changes as it grows. I want our role to be attentive to that kind of change too.
The land keeps the rest.
Sources and context
Early-successional ecosystems — Swanson et al., US Forest Service
