Growing up in California, every summer I watched the lush green hills turn gold and often wondered what these landscapes looked like a thousand years ago. Over time, I’ve come to see that what we call “natural change” isn’t really natural at all. Our ancestors stewarded these landscapes with animals and fire, cultivating resilience and abundance. What we inherit instead is extraction and dominion — the false belief that we stand outside of nature — and the scars of overgrazing, deforestation, and pollution. It’s the loss of biodiversity, and the elimination of vast herds of animals that once roamed, grazing and fertilizing in cycles. Our practices have decimated many keystone species, such as beavers, who slow down water, spread it across valleys, allowing it to sink in and keep landscapes alive. Layer on top of that the carving up of land by roads and cities, and the siphoning of water from where it’s needed to where it’s wanted. Across vast stretches of land, the trajectory is clear: we’re on our way to becoming a desert.
For the better part of a decade, I’ve been increasingly fascinated—borderline obsessed—with the idea of regeneration. When in the woods or in the garden, I’d feel my stress melting away, and I knew I needed to figure out how to spend more time working with nature. Growing up with dyslexia, words on a page often felt like a wall. But my hunger to understand how soil, plants, animals, and human health are connected turned that wall into an open door to a whole world of opportunity and hope. I’ve now read and witnessed enough stories of land rebounding to know one thing: the damage isn’t permanent. With care and support, even the most degraded ground can recover and thrive. Ecosystems can return. Pockets of biodiversity can spread outward, turning scarcity into abundance.
This isn’t about pointing fingers at farmers and ranchers. I’ve now seen firsthand how much they care about the land they steward, but they’ve been trapped in a system that extracts from them too, forced to shoulder the risk while corporations take the profits. They are judged not on quality, but quantity; their deep knowledge and skill have been commodified. They deserve to be at the center of the story of repair, not pushed to the margins.
I don’t believe in silver bullets or quick fixes, and most importantly, I don’t pretend to have all the answers; however, I do believe in long-term thinking, trial and error, and trusting my gut. I’ve seen the power of learning by doing. In design, we call it prototyping and testing. On the land, it’s about getting your hands dirty and letting the soil, the water, and the life around you be the teacher.
Time Will Tell was born from that belief. After over two decades designing for some of the world’s most recognizable brands and co-founding my design studio, Branch Creative, I chose to direct my energy toward something bigger than any single product: the regeneration of the planet. Time Will Tell is our long-term commitment to document the restoration of a single degraded property and to share the process openly through stories. Our hope is to make abstract data palatable through compelling visuals, and document actual transformation with fixed, time-lapse, and aerial cameras. Most importantly, we want to show you the before, as well as every step that follows, so the after is clear. In an era of eroding trust, process and transparency matter now more than ever.
We don’t know exactly what will work, what won’t, or what will surprise us. That’s the point. We’re learning in public, and we’re inviting others along for the ride. Will it work? Time will tell.