Some plant seeds. Others rewire systems. He does both.
Ten-year-old Ebuka Eze doesn’t see a ruined schoolyard. He sees a problem no one else thinks is worth solving.
In near-future Ottawa, his fight to save an unauthorized garden becomes the first test of a mind that looks for leverage inside rules, algorithms, and institutions. Over the next decade, Ebuka and his closest friends turn that instinct into Future Footprint, a grassroots movement built on a simple conviction: technology should serve the people it too often overlooks.
But change creates enemies. When their investigation of industrial contamination along the Rideau River draws the attention of corporate titan Howard Sterling, Ebuka learns that solving a problem can threaten those who benefit from leaving it unsolved.
Years later, working beside brilliant researcher Maya Kurup, Ebuka helps create La Vue, a climate-prediction engine designed to reveal connections conventional models miss. Then La Vue detects something in the Arctic data that should not exist.
The discovery could change what humanity believes possible. Revealing it too soon could place that possibility in hands Ebuka does not trust.
Now, the boy who once fought to save a garden must decide what kind of builder he intends to become—and who gets to shape the future he is trying to grow.
The Gardener’s Awakening is uplifting adult speculative fiction with solarpunk sensibilities—a story of technology, friendship, stewardship, algorithmic equity, and an Igbo-Canadian family’s faith in the future.
The most enduring systems are not simply built. They are grown.