 Hi, I'm Oliver Gauchet and I work as the Restoration Coordinator for Ecosystem Restoration Camps as well as the host of the Abundant Edge Podcast. In today's presentation, I want to give an overview of just a few of the many ecologically regenerative solutions that have been tried and tested all around the world from the most wild ecosystems all the way to inner cities. And I hope you find some of these examples as inspirational as I have. Alright, so let's take a very cursory look at many of the options that are available for ecosystem restoration, from wild habitats through agricultural environments all the way to the urban zones. Alright, before we dive in, let's get to know a few of the terms that sometimes trip people up because I'm likely to be using them often on and somewhat interchangeably throughout this presentation. So what are the difference between sustainability, restoration, rehabilitation, and regeneration? Essentially, to sustain something is to keep it up or to prolong it, keep it going. Somewhat breaking even, you're not going outside of the range or going below it, it's continuing. To restore something is to bring or to put it back to an original state. Now it helps to know what the original state is, and from there we go into rehabilitation to restore to former capacity or a condition of health and constructive activity. Again, the definition needs to be established by a baseline which we'll look into. And then to regenerate is to restore to a better, higher, or more worthy state. And if you don't really have a lot of reference to what the original state is, this is often where we're working from, just trying to make things better from the information that we have about it. So what is holistic or whole systems thinking, and what does it mean to think or design holistically? Well, so thinking or designing in terms of entirety is what we're aiming for here. We're looking at complete systems, rather than with the analysis of or treatment of or the dissection into parts. We're not analyzing individuals. We're looking at how they all interact and relate to one another. Permaculture is a design science that we're going to be using in a lot of these design or holistic analysis processes. So it helps to know what we're talking about. What is permaculture? Well, it comes from two words, permanent and culture or permanent agriculture sometimes. And this is based around the fact that it's usually applied to agricultural systems or management of ecosystems. And it's essentially a set of design principles that are centered around whole systems, like we just mentioned, and they're simulating or directly utilizing patterns and resilient features observed in natural systems. This is biomimicry, essentially, at a systems level. And one of the quotes that I really like comes from a well-known permaculture educator named Larry Santoyo in the LA area of the United States. And he says, permaculture is about the beautiful simplicity of taking away what cannot be. Decision-making and problem-solving protocols based on the patterns of nature. And when we're talking about what cannot be, we're talking about systems or processes that cannot be sustained. They are unsustainable. They are moving towards entropy, destruction, and waste. So if those are not available to us, if those cannot be for any certain period of time, then we move into what is resilient, regenerative, or at very least, sustainable. And this is really where we get to focus on energy, connections, and relationships. It is possible to create elements in an ecosystem, but it's much more efficient to foster the energy, the connections, and the relationships and allow nature to take over the creation of elements and players themselves so that they can do most of the work. We are really just facilitators. So before getting started on any project, it's really useful to have your main restoration objectives defined. And these can be all sorts of different things depending on the context of your project. But there are some common ones that I've identified in a lot of the projects that I've worked with and seen around. And these are revegetation, increasing the plant life in an area, water management, which can be either in an ocean or a river context, but it can also be water that falls on a landscape and how it is used and how many times it is cycled through systems before it leaves. Ocean restoration, which is an ecosystem unto itself, so we'll look at that individually. Agricultural productivity, or the output of the land, obviously for business reasons and for sustaining populations. And then regenerative communities and infrastructure, when we're looking at the built world in the human zones where we've manipulated the environments to our own microclimates. And I put soil fertility and increased biodiversity in here because they're very important, but they also tend to be emergent properties of accomplishing the others. So you'll see soil fertility and increased biodiversity come out in pretty much all of these techniques that we mentioned, and they're kind of a foundational part of most restoration or regeneration efforts. So let's start with revegetation because this is one of the restoration efforts that is often the easiest to see. These changes over time are very visible. On the left in the picture, you've got an image of a time lapse over the restoration of the Los Plateau area in China, which is a dry arid climate, which does not mean that it cannot support a lot of vegetation, but it means that it's a more brittle climate that can easily be destroyed if not managed correctly. And John DeLew, the co-founder of Ecosystem Restoration Camps, was involved in documenting this restoration effort. And the transformation over time has been incredible and has meant a lot to the population of the people who live there and who cultivate that landscape. At the top right, you'll see an image of a barren area and a valley, and this is in Brazil. And in the course of 18 years, as you can see from the years below, they completely reforested this area and undoubtedly have attracted a lot more wildlife and better cycling of nutrients, energy, and water in that ecosystem. And then the last one at the bottom is an example of an eroded slope that was held back by biological methods and replanted with the Miyawaki tiny forest method. And you can see in just 10 years how that vegetation has exploded and completely reforested that hill. To give you some examples, I'll refer to the work of Alan Watson Featherstone, who is the founder of Trees for Life, a non-profit institute in the UK, whose goal is to reestablish the Caledonian forest in Scotland. Now people have been living and interacting with that ecosystem for a long time, but there were some big shifts in the last about 200 years where deforestation really started to take over. And the problem with that is that much of that land is in private ownership and has been kept in sort of a deforested ecosystem stage that is not able to bounce back, partly because there are deer in the area that pretty much eat up any kind of vegetation that comes before it can get established and really start to reproduce. And so he's taken on a couple of different methods, one of them being passive and just sectioning off portions of land that the deer are not able to come into and graze down and remove the vegetation so it has a chance to get established and reproduce. And others are more active in going around and collecting seeds and saplings and germinating them in a nursery and actively planting them in areas where there is nothing to reproduce. This is a great image of the difference that you can see from a fenced off area and one that was available for grazing by the deer. Now let's look at a tropical example of reforestation. So John Button helped along the reforestation of Mount Arunachala in India and this was an incredible project because this is a sacred mountain to the town there and it's been part of a ritual in which they burned it each season and completely inhibited any kind of succession from taking hold and allowing it to revegetate, reforest over time. And by taking a more active approach of going up there and planting trees he has been able to kind of reestablish the health of that ecosystem along with the help of the locals in the area. And it's taken some innovative approaches including building up these berms on the downhill side of those slopes because there is a wet dry cycle to the tropics of that area. That means about half of the year is dry and half of the year is wet and in order for these saplings to survive the dry period they need to hold on to moisture better than that they're able to do in these uh revegetated states and by helping to sequester and infiltrate water into the soil with these small earthwork methods they were able to survive the dry season, grow large enough to start to reproduce and have had major impacts on the recovery of that ecosystem. Another small-scale example of reforestation in a very accelerated way is the work of Dan Blitrad in the tiny forest in the Netherlands. And what he's helped to do along with the guidance of Shibendu Sharma of A Forest in India is to expand the Milwaukee forest method from the image that I showed before of quickly establishing mature forests that have all the necessary levels of a established and mature forest. And there are multiple layers. You've got the canopy layer at the top, your regular tree layer down below, the subtree layer which are smaller trees all the way down to shrubs and these will be present in just about any mature forest. And so what you have to do is identify the native species in your area that occupy each of these levels and plant them in the appropriate density and amend the soil so that they can get established and from there it needs very little maintenance. The growth is accelerated for being so tightly packed together. They're competing for light and the ones that grow taller will shoot up all the faster and those that are comfortable with a certain amount of shade will occupy and suppress weeds and keep the ground layer covered shaded and mulched so that it can hold on to moisture throughout the entire season and continue to enrich the soil for better health of the entire ecosystem. Here are some examples from India and some of the work that a forest has done in just five months they were able to re-forest this area from the image in the top left and you've seen the one before the 10-year transformation of the degraded slope has turned into a thriving and lush forest there in Japan in just 10 years. Oftentimes a very important element of even getting the vegetation established to begin with is improving the management of water on the site and as we well know there are many waterways that are terribly contaminated and in need of restoration and this is an example of a polluted river in India but is indicative of a lot of polluted waterways that I've seen around the world. Let's take a look first at the case study of Biomatrix Water which is a company helping to restore fresh waterways that's based in Scotland and does work all over the world and one of their primary approaches is through floating wetlands. As you can see the installation of a floating wetland in the left hand picture that's being implemented into a riverway and the root systems in these floating wetlands act as biofilters in the water underneath providing habitat, creating biofilm, sucking up contamination and excess nutrients in the waterways, allowing them to grow and expand and continue to mature over time and increase their filtration properties. Now this is so effective that they've even managed to turn wastewater treatment at a municipal level into a biological process and you can see on the right hand image where they're using tanks to cycle and aerate water through concentrated floating wetlands that take out the contaminants and the excess nutrients and can cycle that water back through living human systems. Here's a little diagram to show some of the benefits and the activity of what's happening underneath the water as a cutaway for these floating wetlands. There's increased waterfront value by giving it more physical appeal and attracting more wildlife. You'll get stronger fish stocks because the biofilm in the roots helps to protect the skin of the fish, the scales of the fish against things like sea lice and other parasites that can otherwise bother them. You'll get improved water quality because of the filtration from the roots and it can also provide habitat like for birds and other creatures. One of the main advantages of this system is that because they're floating they don't die off or get destroyed when there are surges in the system. Since rivers can go through flood cycles and droughts where the water level drops or rises significantly, they are anchored in place at the base so that they can rise with or lower with the water level during different seasons and still remain intact and useful. Here's an example of some pictures of the succession of growth with the floating wetlands just at the bottom of the wall on this river here. You can see it start to take shape as the plants begin to grow and all the way to the end where it actually merges with the wildlife on the banks and continues to filter water down at the lower levels and provide wildlife habitat. Now water management is all the more important in dryland areas so I want to take a look at the context of Niels Backman's work on the Albeda project in Saudi Arabia to see how he's brought vegetation back to a very harsh desert landscape. One of the primary techniques of his work is putting silt traps and water traps on contour in line with keyline design in order to slow down and infiltrate the very small amount of water that is available in this landscape so that it doesn't leave the site cause any erosive effects and is allowed to infiltrate into the soil for plants and the creation of more life even during the dry season. You can see in these pictures how all the silt and the sediment that would otherwise have been washed away is starting to pile up behind these rockwork dams where the water is still able to move more slowly but deposits its nutrients on the back end where they're available to the landscape rather than being washed out to sea. And you can see the results here in 2019 though obviously this isn't going to grow into a dense forest or anything they're still it's still at best going to be a grassland ecosystem. The transformation and vegetation available there has been incredible. Now keyline design and earthworks are a technique that has been embraced by cultures for thousands of years. Here you can see the rice paddies in Southeast Asia and also the terraces much closer to where I am that are being used for vineyards and grape cultivation mostly for wine and this is either in Spain or in Italy but there are landscapes like this close to where I live as well. Some of how this works is an example of a swale. Now this is a dit stuck on contour or just slightly off in order to capture water on its way downstream as it's being pulled by gravity and to slow it and spread it across the landscape in order to allow it time to infiltrate into the ground and be used and available for plants where it's being held much longer in the ecosystem than just the rainfall events themselves. On the downhill side there is often a lens of water that's created underneath the soil that is available for all kinds of plants and can be planted with trees or vegetables or really anything else. Here's an example of a swale that has just been dug and covered over with some straw to prevent it filling up with sediment or anything else that would start to undo the work there and the idea is to plant them as quickly as possible so that they don't start to erode in on themselves and remain effective as long as possible. Now digging soils is not necessary in all context. Here's an example of what's called subsoiling or ripping where again we're following key line patterns of contours on the landscape but rather than digging out a trench we're using a subsoiler to break up the earth especially if there's any kind of compaction or hard pan on the soil surface so that water can infiltrate lower down and so can plant roots to keep it open even after the work is done. And you can see an example of Yeoman's plow here how the shoe at the bottom helps to break up soil at lower depths and decrease compaction and facilitate those plant roots growing down as deep as possible. Now as I mentioned before we're going to focus a little on ocean restoration because though it doesn't get nearly the amount of attention it deserves oceans make up a huge amount of life on this planet. More than 70 percent of the earth's surface is covered by seawater and obviously we have been contaminating and degrading these ecosystems for a long time as you can see in all the trash in this photo it's not uncommon around the world. As I mentioned in a previous presentation climate change has largely been mitigated by the fact that over 90 percent of the heat caused by global warming has been absorbed by the oceans and up to 25 percent of the co2 as well. Sea level rise, bleaching of coral systems, toxic algae blooms, loss of habitat, acidification of the water and the decline of fisheries can all be attributed to these climactic changes. So let's take a look at the work of Enric Salah and the Pristine Seas project that he founded along with National Geographic. Now Enric advocates for a more passive approach more conservation approach towards the regeneration of ecosystems in the ocean. He claims that the oceans can regenerate themselves if we give it the space and the time to do so rather than having to go in with active methods and repopulating fish stocks or planting coral or whatever else the situation might call for. Oftentimes the best that we can do or the most effective thing that we can do before any active methods is to remove the damage or the contamination so that we can start from at least a point. Hi I'm Oliver Gauchet and I work as the restoration coordinator for ecosystem restoration camps as well as the host of the Abundant Edge podcast. In today's presentation I want to give an overview of just a few of the many ecologically regenerative solutions that have been tried and tested all around the world from the most wild ecosystems all the way to inner cities and I hope you find some of these examples as inspirational as I have. This is to conserve these areas that have been degraded through destructive fishing methods or through pollution and she does so in a unique and artistic way. Through the installation of these different sculptures that are designed with community context in mind perhaps representing some of the cultural heritage of the area and seated with coral it offers an opportunity not only for those coral to to take root and start to populate the area but there's a lot of tourism potential as people go in there for diving and it gives economic value to an area that may have been preserved or reserved away from fishing in order for it to be able to regenerate on its own and that's one of the big challenges in these contexts is that if you lose the income from fishing it has to be made up from another source and tourism has been a great way to initiate the protection of these areas so that people can continue to derive livelihoods from the space. Here's an example of one of those sculptures that has been seated with coral and started to bloom so you can see how these start to mature and grow over time. Another way of taking an active approach in the regeneration of ocean ecosystems is through ocean farming and Joost Wouders the CEO of the seaweed company has come up with innovative ways of farming the ocean by propagating seaweed and kelp which have remarkable value on land in all sorts of applications from nutraceuticals to supplements regular food plant fertilizer animal feed as well as biofuels the potential is pretty incredible. A little about how this works is that they're anchored down with ropes which are seated at the seafloor and the nutrients already exist in the water it doesn't require any fertilizers or any inputs of fresh water and it creates habitat that is great for the revival of fish stocks and other crustaceans and wildlife in the seafloor. So let's take a little bit of a look at how this works there are so many great things that can come from the cultivation of kelp and seaweed which are some of the fastest growing biomasses anywhere in the world so the turnaround is quite quick they can help to mitigate pollution provide habitat for other sea life support fish populations and reduce local climate change impacts all while producing high value goods for consumption on land. Here's some cool pictures of just what that process looks like harvesting kelp and seaweed from the ocean and how it grows in those long lines under the water. So let's take a look now from an agricultural perspective because we can't just transition all our land back into wild and conserved spaces we still need to derive a livelihood and all of the food necessary for a growing population. I really like this image because it shows just how there are other players in an agro ecological system that are not just the humans themselves here you can see the cattle the chickens mushrooms and even insects playing a vital role in the work that it takes to manage an agro ecosystem. One of my favorite examples of regenerative agriculture is from the author of the book Regenerative Agriculture himself Richard Perkins the founder of Ridgedale permaculture farm here you can see an overhead shot of his market garden up in northern sweden and he showed that even in a challenging climate with a short growing season like his own it can be very profitable and create epic quality food by managing the landscape regeneratively. Richard has been a pioneer of market gardening techniques along with many others that reduce the inputs of fossil fuels and outside fertilizers or other management techniques through efficiency careful business planning and care for the soil the base of the fertility of that ecosystem and here you can see him demonstrating some of the hand tools that they primarily use to manage those garden beds. But what are we going to do about the large-scale farms the ones that are currently industrial managed with large machinery and the main consumers of fertilizers and pesticides and fungicides. Well Gabe and Paul Brown of Brown's Ranch have really pioneered a way of caring for the soil on large acreage. Their ranch of over 4,000 acres in North Dakota is an incredible example of biological methods for increasing soil fertility depth tilth and percolation. Here you can see Gabe demonstrating how the root masses of some of his cover crops or green manure has been essential to feeding the soil food web and increasing soil aggregate which has all kinds of effect for sequestering carbon holding on to water in their notorious dry seasons in North Dakota and increasing the overall depth and quality of the soil over time. He also uses other methods like rotational grazing which we'll go to in a minute. So let's take a look now at the work of Precious Peary, a holistic grazing educator trained with the Savory Institute in Zimbabwe. Now she's helped to promote rotational or holistic grazing methodology among the people of her area and across the world. So this method is often called holistic or rotational or mob grazing, but essentially what it is is a way of managing the movement of catalana landscape the way that they would the large herds naturally over different cycles throughout the different seasons. Now normally they would be moved by predators to keep them from staying on a single place for too long, but in our case we've got to move them and keep them in certain small areas with electric fencing primarily. And what this allows is concentrated impact on the land where they're eating a certain portion, they're trampling another portion, and they're fertilizing another portion with their droppings and with their urine. And this is exactly what would happen in an intact ecosystem with a concentrated impact in a short period of time where they move on to another area and impact it similarly. And this works perfectly with the life cycle of the grasses. As they're being trampled fertilized and eaten down they accelerate their regeneration process putting roots deeper down into the ground. Those root exodus are feeding the soil food web and just about the time that they would otherwise kind of die or start to oxidize the cattle are moved back around where they're eating and the process happens all over again accelerating the succession and feeding and building the health and the fertility of that soil. There are plenty of examples of before and after pictures that I encourage you to go and see because the transformation is incredible. Even in dry lands where there isn't any increase in rainfall over the seasons just by managing the land with your cattle or with your grazing animals in this way it's very powerful method of increasing the health of the soil and revegetating an area all without having to bring in any added inputs just moving your animals at a specifically timed and managed rotation. Now cover crops and rotational grazing are all fantastic for grasslands or pasture lands but what about areas that should naturally be under forest cover? How do we manage those for agriculture? Well here we'll look at the work with Patrick Worms and the World Agroforestry Center in promoting agroforestry methods around the world. Here we have a beautiful example of multiple methods being implemented here there's an overstory or a canopy of rubber trees and an understory or shrub layer of coffee and you can see they're also planted on contour to make the best use of the water on the site so that it's slowed and sunk into the ground for a longer period. Coffee naturally likes to be under about 60 shade as I remember from working in Guatemala we worked a lot with coffee there and here you get multiple products but not only that the ecosystem is feeding into itself by keeping the lower levels vegetated they benefit from all of the biomass that drops onto the forest floor turning into humus and into compost that feeds the soil. Here's an example from France where wheat is being cultivated in between tree rows. Now these trees were not planted to provide a specific cash crop but rather for all the ecosystem benefits that they provide this is habitat for other animals and it also shades and increases the amount of moisture in the ground to help them get past dry periods which are common in this area of the world. As you can see with how densely and tightly they've been planted it barely takes away any land out of cultivation from the wheat and the benefits from having the trees there far outweigh the small amount of land that's been taken out of cultivation. Here's another example of wheat being grown underneath trees and in this case they're growing cabbages in between rows of bananas. There are a lot of applications and configurations that this can take. Here's one of my favorite examples of agroforestry and this is from New Forest Farms by Mark Sheppard in southern Wisconsin. Now this is a challenging ecosystem because it's not far from where I grow up I know it pretty well it gets very very cold in the winters here and the rain cycles can be really heavy sometimes even to the point of flooding. As you can see these rows have been all cut on contour to make the best use of the water. The forestry rows are planted on the outside of the interior which is planted with asparagus. The asparagus being the primary cash crop which can bring in an income for the farm until the trees mature and start to give a crop of their own. And this has been favored with hazelnut and I believe chestnut as the primary cash crops that are able to withstand the conditions of the harsh winters of the area. So let's take a look now at the urban and our built environments and these are the areas where humans have had the largest and most concentrated impact. Even though we've also dominated most of our agricultural landscapes and gotten rid of a lot of our wild spaces cities and suburban or peri-urban areas are where our most dramatic and concentrated impact is really taking effect and causing a lot of challenges. One of my favorite examples for urban solutions is the work of Mark Lakeman and his team at Communitexure an architecture firm that's working on regenerative solutions for urban planning. Now I've got a number of different drawings that him and his team have come up with because I find a lot of inspiration in these and a lot of these designs envision these tighter living quarters that are necessary for the density of urban areas but configured in a way that promotes connection and interconnection communication and closer living in a way that is beneficial for the people rather than overwhelming due to the density much like you would find in high rises. These communities envision interactions between natural spaces, food production, energy production, and the well-being and interactions of the people who live there. Another project that he's involved with and that I've worked with as well when I lived back in Portland, Oregon is the city repair project which brings together communities for public works and art expressions that promote cohesion, interaction, and community in those spaces. Here are just a few examples of the public spaces that they've created through workshops and volunteer events. There's a cab bench and a bus station and members of the community getting together to plant gardens in public spaces. It's something that I've been really inspired to see firsthand. Another great example of healthy and natural construction is the work of Daniel Valdiveso Jimenez of the Navi Village in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Here you can see the beautiful forms that natural materials and healthy construction are taking on this landscape. The use of earth-based plasters, stone from the local area, wood, and other biological materials go to make these incredibly beautiful living spaces. Aside from just the physical beauty of the spaces themselves, these buildings are designed to be benefits to the ecosystems in which they reside, cycling energy, water, and waste all on site in order to prevent any unnecessary contamination and to create beneficial impacts such as compost and secondary irrigation water for the landscape. There are tons of examples of beautiful natural structures. In the top left you'll see the bamboo guest house in Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, which has been the site of where I used to teach natural building workshops when I lived there. Now of course none of this is new and all of the oldest buildings around the world have been created with materials found nearby the site and designed in such a way to accommodate the lifestyles of the people there and the climate in which they were built. One of my favorite images to share with people is the city of Shibam in Yemen, which is the oldest example of high-rise structures and these residences are 9 to 11 stories tall all made from mud brick and plastered in lime plaster, that beautiful white that you see there. Now one of the biggest challenges in urban environments is bringing in enough food for the population density that they hold and we can't always keep relying on food sources from far away being imported into these population centers. So Rishi Kumar of Sarvodaya Farms in the Los Angeles area has come up with a fantastic method of bringing community to regenerate abandoned land and produce lots of healthy food for his community. Here you can see an example of what the land looked like before they got started and within two years you can see the abundance of plant life and food that can be grown in a space like this if you're willing to care for it and steward it and coax the abundance out of the space. Primarily by using lasagna gardening and importing compost onto the site they were able to improve the soil to the point where they could grow so much healthy food and are mostly sustained by a CSA model or community-supported agriculture where they sell boxes of fresh veggies to the community members around them. On top of that they've also donated a ton of fresh produce to the area around them. So remember that this is just a very brief overview of some of the myriad ways that you can restore and regenerate degraded sites wherever you are whether you're in the middle of nowhere and working with wild environments or in the center of a city where tons of buildings and microclimates are all around you. The most important from all of this that I hope you take away after this presentation is that human impact can be just as positive as it can be destructive. There are viable and proven solutions to ecological challenges. The examples are all around us they've been proven they are not too difficult to do you can get started right away. You also don't need to be an expert or to be wealthy to create change and everyone can contribute to earth restoration no matter where you come from your background your personal abilities everybody's contributions are essential your skills your experience your talents are all useful in moving this forward and helping us build a regenerative future. So if you want to know more about the specifics of the methods that I've highlighted in this presentation pretty much everybody that I highlighted here are co-facilitators on the ecosystem restoration design course that I helped to teach with Gaia Education and ecosystem restoration camps. If you want more free resources on these types of projects and how to do this check out the Abundant Edge podcast which has new episodes every week on Friday and over 160 episodes from innovators and leaders in regeneration around the world. And of course don't forget to check out EcosystemRestorationCamps.org where you can join the movement as a volunteer and directly help people on the ground or donate to our nonprofit to help us grow this movement. Thank you so much for taking the time to learn about restoration and the potential that you have to participate. I hope to see you again soon.