1. Live with me

Yesterday, on the ferry to island, I found myself watching the water and landscape pass by, the forests standing on the shores, quietly moving towards them, expansive in their knowledge and I felt a deep sense of gratitude. A reminder of how much there is to witness when we allow ourselves to simply be present.

I am entering the land, moving on man-made roads, the gravel and logging roads open the forest, but did we ever asked if we were welcome? What are we bringing to place, not exstract? Walking here makes my body feel European, my design context Eurocentric, the forest teaches not about how to design differently, but to live differently. To leave the designer behind and consider first what it means to be human. The forests speak to deep time, deep relations, deep wisdom and a depth of scale that is not a practice for one, but a deeper understanding who the community in place is.

I am on the land of the Hupacasath peoples, who lived with these forests since time immemorial. These forests hold a quiet teaching. When living-with, standing with her, you can start noticing. The yellow cedar grows slowly in harsh coastal conditions, compressing its life into density rather than speed. Over centuries, its trunks began to spiral as response. A slow negotiation with gravity and the subtle forces of a rotating planet.

The forest holds a quiet intelligence, fibres reorient, roots communicate. What we call forest is a long conversation between many, exceeding the individual body of one organism. Life exists because of many, the diversity of the roles she takes. She composes time. Not everything moves at the same pace. A forest is a choreography between urgency and patience, a dance of responses.

Live with me is not a quick check-in, but a returning practice of listening, care and engagement. Situated practice is not a fix as if we have to prototype something, it shifts from transaction to relation. It requires time. it is not optional but foundational. It is less about fixing and more about staying in relation long enough for something real to emerge.

And so a question begins to form: If a forest forms itself through centuries of adaptation, what does it mean for design to be temporary, situational, and unfinished? What if design is not an outcome, but an entry point into ongoing ecological negotiation and emergence? Not something to fix and control but something enter into.

2. Learn with me

The Mount Underwood wildfire was significant not only for its scale, but for the speed at which it moved. The dry forest floors shown how human and ecological timelines collided under climate pressure. Standing in place, seeing the scale of destruction make the pain almost embodied. You can breath it when you can stand there.

Mount Underwood was once a forest of grandmothers: trees shaped by generations of place, carrying deep, adaptive knowledge in their DNA, holding diversity as something continuously generated and maintained. The canopy, the variations in soil, the microclimates, these were not incidental. They created the conditions for multiple forms of life to emerge and coexist. This was resilience. A long conversation, sustained over time.

Now, much of her body has been removed. The grandmothers have been logged, and young trees stand in their place. These are not kin grown through generations, but nursery-grown, displaced from the conditions that once shaped them. They do not carry the same situated intelligence. What was once learned over time is interrupted, burned, extracted, and fragmented. The childern will never grow older then 15 years and will be logged again, as policies fractured any ecological restoration. Knowledge is cut before it matures
Her soil lies exposed. Logging industry leave large debries, burn them in piles. It dries and burns through summer. Species migrate; relations unravel. Ecological time is disrupted and replaced by accelerated economic cycles that do not allow life to return on its own terms.

A new relational intelligence is required to find entrypoints for life, to weave together broken systems. What remains is not simply loss, but a break in continuity. If life is to return, it will not come through replacement alone, but through the slow reweaving of relations.

This asks something different of us. Not how to fix or restore from a distance, but how to enter into relation with what remains. To see the firemoss return and repopulate, its spores travel through the air, and it can grow in bare, nutrient-flushed soil almost immediately. It’s bright, visible color is almost a symbol of recovery. Microbes begin reactivating soil life, re-establishing the invisible networks that make future growth possible.

The forest starts, slowly, to reassemble complexity.
The forest is not just recovering. It is a living learning system, situated, adaptive, and responsive to place. Knowledge here is not abstract; it is produced through relation, time, and exposure to conditions.

What, then, is our role within this?
Not to accelerate what cannot be rushed. Not to impose restoration as a solution.
But to stay long enough to be changed by what is returning and start supporting new relational capacities. Notice the fragmented responsibility across systems. Redesign relationships of governance across time and stakeholders.

Regeneration is not something we deliver. It asks us to be in conversation and take responsibility for the conditions we have broken.
If we understood ourselves as forest-like; relational, reciprocal, dependent, we could not continue as we are. So the question is not whether we care. It is whether we are willing to change how we live in relation.

When you build relational practice, and really learn and listen, you move beyond first readings. It learns to stay with place, rather than interpret it quickly. It begins to understand both context and self as something co-evolve over time. Situated learning is not just about understanding sites more deeply, it is about being changed by them.

Forest processes do not align with design timelines. They unfold through delay, interruption, and return. The forest is not a metaphor for design or an inspirational backdrop. It is design as a living, relational system.

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