The forests of northern Europe provided Tim Christophersen with his first education. As a child in rural Germany, he followed his grandfather on long walks among the trees. Fishing trips and mushroom hunts instilled habits of observation that shaped his later career. Today, after decades in international negotiations and corporate boardrooms, he still returns to nature daily, tending a regenerative farm outside Copenhagen. The rhythm of that farm, he says, reveals the “flywheel” of ecological balance: Diversity begets resilience, resilience produces abundance. The contrast with industrial agriculture—built on simplification, fossil fuels, and fragile yields—is stark.
This dual perspective, part diplomat and part farmer, underpins Christophersen’s views on humanity’s entanglement with the natural world, explored in his book Generation Restoration: How to Fix Our Relationship Crisis with Mother Nature. He argues that the crises of climate, biodiversity, and pollution are not external threats but symptoms of a broken relationship with nature. Repairing it, he insists, is not optional. Unlike a failing marriage, humanity cannot simply walk away. Without functioning ecosystems, civilization itself is imperilled.
Yet his analysis is not bleak. Christophersen stresses that nature is an ally as much as a victim. Forests, peatlands, and mangroves can store carbon at vast scale, buffer coasts from storms, secure water supplies, and rebuild soil. Even amid accelerating loss, restoration can succeed quickly once diversity is re-established. The evidence, he suggests, is there for anyone who dares to imagine landscapes not as they are—dry, degraded, denuded—but as they might be if given space to recover.
Imagination, for him, is central. He worries about “shifting baselines”: the gradual amnesia that blinds each generation to past abundance. Overcoming this requires both science and storytelling, to remind societies that scarcity is neither natural nor inevitable.
Christophersen’s years at the UN taught him the value of diplomacy, but also the limits of policy without capital. At Salesforce, he now channels corporate resources toward restoration, from mangrove coalitions to AI-powered tools. He argues that ecosystems are infrastructure—no less vital than roads or energy grids. The sums required are vast, but the costs of neglect are larger still.
The Amazon’s looming dieback, coral reefs under siege, and thawing permafrost remind us how little time remains. Still, Christophersen insists a “century of ecology” can follow this UN Decade of Restoration—if societies learn to see economy and ecology as two expressions of the same root idea: The management of our common home.
Food, he says, is the daily expression of nature on our plates. Asking where it comes from, and what ecosystems sustained it, is the simplest starting point for reconnection. Nature, after all, is waiting.
