About
Restoration leader, agroecologist, Capetonian.
I'm Chris Nash. I work at the meeting point of ecological restoration and human development: helping organisations and communities bring degraded landscapes back to life, and paying attention to what that work does to the people doing it.
From one burnt hillside to four countries.
The short version: after the 2018 Garden Route fires I spent years restoring a hillside near Kraaibosch by hand. Eight hectares of invasives cleared, 4,500 indigenous trees planted, a food forest of four hundred trees across fifty species. That work grew into the Pachamama Project, and the conviction at the centre of everything I do now: land and people regenerate together, or not at all.
Today I'm Head of Restoration at Greenpop, where I help run nature-based-solutions programmes across Southern Africa: forest landscape restoration, urban greening and agroforestry. Through those programmes and their partners, around 30,000 trees a year go into the ground, along with hundreds of community greening days and ten urban green zones across South Africa's major cities.
A flagship syntropic-agroforestry site and training centre, built to be replicated.
Bioregional strategy and restoration-economy value chains in a UNESCO cultural landscape.
Forest restoration and resilience around Africa's southernmost forest.
Inner & Outer Landscapes
Every restoration project I've been part of has taught the same lesson twice. The land recovers through soil, water, species and time. The people recover through meaning, connection, capability and each other. Neither holds without the other. Inner & Outer Landscapes is my name for practising both restorations as one, and the fortnightly letters are where the method is being built in public.
"Collaboration is the cornerstone of effective community development."
Hands in soil
Permaculture and syntropic agroforestry practice; years of restoration fieldwork from seedling to canopy.
Delivery at scale
Multi-country programme leadership: strategy, partnerships, monitoring and the unglamorous work of making restoration stand up to time.
Cities and community
Urban greening and community-led development across South Africa's major cities.
The inner dimension
Theory U, the Inner Development Goals and nature connection, woven into how teams and communities do the work.
Bioregional thinking
Baseline assessments and strategy that start from the whole place: ecology, culture, economy, governance.
African-rooted, globally fluent
Working from Cape Town, across Southern and East Africa, in conversation with the global regeneration movement.
I'm most active on LinkedIn, where the field stories land first. For speaking, collaboration or consulting conversations, email chris@chrisnash.earth. And the best way to follow the work over time is the letter.
One letter every two weeks. Read in five minutes. No noise, no selling, unsubscribe anytime. While the list is being set up this sends me an email and I will add you personally.