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. That annual transformation is part of California’s natural rhythm, yet it also disguises how profoundly these places have been altered and how far they are from truly thriving. We now overlook wounds carved by centuries of exhaustion and imbalance. Long before that, our ancestors shaped these lands with animals and fire, cultivating resilience and abundance. What we practice instead is extraction and dominion — the false belief that we stand outside of nature — leaving behind the scars of overgrazing, deforestation, and pollution. We’ve erased biodiversity and eliminated vast herds of animals that once roamed, grazing and fertilizing in cycles. Keystone species like beavers, which once slowed and spread water across valleys, have nearly vanished, drying the land further. Add to that the carving up of terrain by roads and cities, and the diversion of water from where it’s needed to where it’s wanted, and the trajectory becomes clear: much of California is on its way to becoming a desert.
Time Will Tell was born from a desire to reverse that trajectory. It’s a long-term commitment to restore a single degraded property and document every step of its recovery — openly, visually, and in real time. Our goal is to turn data into something visceral, to pair measurement with storytelling, and to make ecological repair something people can see unfold. Fixed, time-lapse, and aerial cameras will record the land’s evolution, transforming abstract numbers into a living narrative of change. In an era of eroding trust, process and transparency matter now more than ever — we want to show the before, and everything that comes after.
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.
About Me
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 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’re 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.
After over two decades designing for some of the world’s most recognizable brands and co-founding my design studio, Branch Creative, I chose now to direct my energy toward something bigger than any single product: the regeneration of the planet.
