What Does it Look Like When People Believe They Can Make a Difference?

The Andes are getting their trees back. Across the high-altitude landscapes of Peru, communities are planting Polylepis by the hundreds of thousands, rebuilding a forest type so specialized that it exists almost nowhere else on Earth.

These trees hold fog in their bark and release it slowly into the soil below. Watersheds that feed entire valleys depend on this exchange. When the forest disappears, the water follows it out.

Acción Andina now counts over 1.1 million native trees under restoration across eleven projects in Peru and Ecuador, working alongside the Priceless Planet Coalition and a long list of corporate and conservation partners.

Just this planting season, 155,000 native Polylepis trees went into the ground at the Aquia landscape in Peru, with 124,000 of them expected to survive five years of monitoring and reconnect high-altitude habitat critical for endemic wildlife.

A tree planted is not a tree restored. Restoration means monitoring, replanting failures, and waiting years to know if the work held.

The wildlife started answering back.

Researchers have identified twenty-one individual Andean bears within the restored corridors at Q’ero, Peru, including three mothers with cubs, confirming active nursery habitat.

Two critically endangered endemic bird species, the Royal Cinclodes and the White-browed Tit-Spinetail, have been documented breeding within the same corridors.

A bear does not return to a landscape that cannot feed her. A bird does not nest where the canopy cannot hold. These are biological verdicts, delivered by animals that have no reason to lie.

Further south, in Challabamba, a smaller but equally deliberate project has been running since 2022.

Conservación Amazónica-ACCA reported over 350,000 native plants in the ground by May 2024, with 115,000 native trees added by January 2025. The communities doing this work farm the same land they are restoring. Their stake in the outcome runs deeper than any grant cycle.

They have told researchers that Andean forests and reforestation efforts have improved water quality and quantity in their communities, largely through aquifer recharge and better water retention. Polylepis and mosses acting as living sponges, catching fog and drip-feeding it into the ground ahead of the dry season.

This is the part that gets buried under the celebration: the region planting all these trees is also losing them at scale.

Peru lost an additional 147,000 hectares of tropical forest in 2024 alone, driven by subsistence agriculture, cattle ranching, logging, mining, and drug trafficking operations that carve through protected land as easily as unprotected land.

Reforestation and deforestation are running in the same country, on the same mountains, at the same time.

The women leading this season’s restoration work deserve their own paragraph, not a footnote. Women took on central roles this season, leading patrols, seedling maintenance, and biodiversity surveys across the Cajamarca and Pichincha landscapes, drawing on their position as primary managers of local water resources and keepers of traditional botanical knowledge. I give it to them here.

Ancestral knowledge and modern ecological science are doing the same job here, side by side, neither one waiting for permission from the other.

None of this happens by accident or by good intentions alone.

A hectare restored today needs someone checking on it in year three, year four, year five. A seedling survives because a community organized itself to make sure it would. Land ownership, environmental education, and community structure decide which restoration projects take root and which ones quietly fail after the cameras leave.

Peru’s mountains are proving, tree by tree, that the second outcome is not inevitable.

The bears are back. The birds are nesting. The water is returning to the lagoons. None of it required a miracle. It required people who stayed and believed their individual efforts can make a difference.

I am taking a Substack Hiatus so that I can learn financial skills to bankroll environmental startups and become Peter Thiel’s antithesis.

Confused? Start Here: I want to be Peter Thiel’s Antichrist

The accelerating pace of the world has me stumbling to keep up and I’ve been struggling the maintenance of keeping these articles alive. I started to cut corners and use AI which feels hypocritical being a Climate & Environmental writer.

I hope to come back when I have the space to actually articulate my ideas, not have Claude take my thoughts, ideas, connections and vision and make my words for me.

I’m sorry…

In the meantime, I’ll be getting back to my roots and writing The Good News According to Enoch, the first section you can get free until the series is finished.

I’ll Be Back to Substack! (like the Bear to Peru)

Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

Sources

1. Amazon Conservation Association, “Recent Study Highlights Effective Reforestation Efforts in the Andes”

2. Global Forest Generation, “Over 1.1 Million Native Trees Under Restoration in the High-Andes: Wildlife Already Returning”

3. Wikipedia, “Deforestation in Peru”