EDITOR'S ARMCHAIR: A Global Land Ethic Comes Home at Dr. Bronner's Headquarters
- 19 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Tony Gurnoe, for Let's Talk Plants September 2026
A Global Land Ethic Comes Home at Dr. Bronner's Headquarters
Since my team started to collaborate with Dr. Bronner’s there has been one pattern in conversations with other people about that company. Some kind of quizzical mention of their far out labeling followed by an expression of how much they like the soap! If Dr. Bronner’s is known for anything beyond their suds, it would have to be their words (we’ll get to impact later). Their numerous and profound words, but have you ever really evaluated the message at the core of this internationally praised but locally headquartered company? There’s a critical thread shared between those words and all of the gardening that we do. I bring up words in part because they’re often regarded as cheap but nobody should make that mistake when it comes to Dr. Bronner’s.
The heart of this article is to showcase horticultural projects, but for there to be any meaning in discussing our work I have to make sure you’re a bit more familiar with theirs. It gets beyond soap really quickly so check out their blog and social media if you want to learn more but allow me to simply say that Dr. Bronner’s is one of the most thoroughly environmentally and otherwise considerate companies of any that I am familiar with. I promise you nobody is paying me to say this. It’s just as clear as it is unfortunately rare but they continue to do their part, if not more.
Over many years Dr. Bronner’s has invested immensely in not only revolutionizing supply chains from bottom to top through movements like Fair Trade but also a morally derived emphasis on good care and stewardship of the land and people who produce the oils and aromatics that ultimately become soap. Starting from the soil just as the best horticulturists do, they have done the deep, self-reflective work to make sure that each step they make will produce sustainable, bountiful livelihoods - the same as we all want for and from our gardens. Beyond the earlier days of Fair Trade being a new and unfamiliar thing showing up on packages, Dr. Bronner’s has remained consistently engaged in the political realm, advancing more recent initiatives such as Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC) among things less horticulture related. Let’s just say they serve as a model company in the way they treat the world around them, including being among the few “good guys” in the thankless political lobbying realm. All of these remarkable achievements in social benefit and yet some of the employees working right here in San Diego noticed a tiny blind spot, which starts to move us into how this all ties into my work in horticulture.
The headquarters of Dr. Bronner’s is located in Vista, by the way. I find that many people are surprised to learn they’re a local company. Early in the development of that site, the company created an elaborate plan to make it the best that it could be in terms of things like stormwater management and energy sustainability. One obvious example is the massive array of solar panels used to shade their parking lot and charge people’s electric vehicles. Before that was even the cool thing to do. Way in the back, though, where their property started to bleed vaguely into one of the beautiful remnant native canyons that had been fortunately preserved from development, a little place had escaped that usual attentive analysis. That’s when a grassroots few from within the employee ranks decided to get into some gardening themselves. It started simply, to at least alleviate the invasive species pressure and erosion issues. Every gardener among us knows, though, that installing one plant leads to a dozen, or perhaps hundreds in this case.
Slowly and with much sweat equity, that oddball easement adjacent to Dr. Bronner’s main production facility came to be known as the “Regen Region,” an ambitious initiative by people like Ki, Liz, and including their colleagues in bigger efforts like company-wide Earth Day planting events. Still, they struggled to find enough time and energy to shift the momentum in the way they hoped. It was nobody’s job to care for this space, after all, but that was the intention.
What is Regenerative? Other than just another word on a label? Well, if you read my previous article about how composting brought me to horticulture - it turns out that I had been doing regenerative gardening the whole time because of my ingrained emphasis on cultivating soil and complex biological systems rather than just “growing plants.” Things like synthetic chemical inputs are eschewed in favor of pursuit of ecological entanglement and biological richness. For me it all started with wanting to grow healthy food, but it turns out that same ethic applies beneficially to a more holistic and indigenous framework of land stewardship. Food, native plants, pollinator habitat, engaging people with a landscape, gardening in a way that is intended to benefit future generations - this sounds like a perfect project for us!
Somehow I popped up on their radar. Liz’s in particular, and she reached out to me about a presentation I was scheduled to give about the future of San Diego’s trees, a precursor to the presentation I recently did for the SDHS. Down the road I got a tour of the site as we talked through what they hoped to have happen. Weeds - out! Native plants favorable for local pollinators and wildlife, effective at erosion control, and durable to drought - in!
Not particularly favorable gardening conditions with heavy clay soil on a very steep slope but my botanic garden exhibit design brain could only see the rich potential for this space to become a showcase of all of the important practices that go into not only caring for a piece of land but improving it. Restoring it, but to a future vision rather than romanticization of the past.Gardeners so often struggle in their efforts to exclude the outside world. The bugs. The birds. The volunteered seeds. This effort would ideologically flip that paradigm and embrace the return of our fellow living beings to an enriched landscape.
Still, I’ll admit that it can be annoying to show up to water plants and find your hose all chewed up by coyotes. Those tricksters!
We can spout words all day but it was time for us to get into action. Chopping out castor bean (Ricinus communis), tamarisk (Tamarix ramosissima), and other tenacious weeds. Hours in sessions of weed whipping down annual invasive species. Yard after cubic yard of compost and wood chips to condition the soil, reduce weed pressure, and preserve critical moisture needed to give the new plants a chance in this world.
There’s a nice circular benefit of being able to sustainably dispose of organic waste from other parts of their property in the form of mulch so we removed an Acacia stenophylla tree that was shading and crowding their food forest to return all of its embodied nitrogen to the soil where we want it. No hauling compostable materials to some commercial disposal facility. No importing of high-carbon footprint soil inputs. Just using plants to enrich the soil so that we can grow more plants to enrich more soil and so on into seven generations from now. People tend to talk about regeneration in terms of agriculture but I am insistent that native habitat restoration and agriculture are only artificially segregated. I’ll write more on that at another time. It’s important for us to be in our landscapes, and that was the foundational goal here. To help create a place that is welcoming, peaceable, beautiful, restorative, and energizing for all beings!
As the heat of this humid summer glares, I can’t say that we’re quite there yet but it’s a work in progress like all of the great gardens. After wrestling with heavy weed cover, my team and Dr. Bronner’s staff collaborated on planting a rich mix of both new and nostalgic species native well adapted to San Diego. It’s always an encouraging sign when we see things first start to grow and then bloom.
Based on the progress evident in the Regen Region, the company also decided it was time for us to spruce up their food forest. This project would bring my team out of the deepest corner of the property and right up to the face of their company, a welcome environment for an ex-public gardener like myself. One day after another, we extricated weeds, pruned established plants as needed, added nutrients and biological complexity to the soil, and filled in any empty spaces with plants that encourage local bird, bat, and insect pollinators.
I’m going to tease a little bit at the end of this article and not show off the current state because my hope is that SDHS members might have the opportunity for a tour of Dr. Bronner’s headquarters as part of our Sharing Gardens program. Our collaborators at Dr. Bronner’s had done a great job of setting the stage for a type of plant work that I thoroughly enjoy and hope they’ll keep me engaged with. I mentioned they stand as a model company in many ways and if our partnership perseveres, in the same way that we hope these young plants make it through this tough summer, over time Dr. Bronner’s headquarters could also become a model of how corporations can get the most out of the landscape their operations occupy in a way that seeks to return as least as much as is gained.
