 The reason that I decided to take the ecosystem restoration design course was because the world desperately needs people to restore it to the way it was intended with all the natural balances and cycles in place. The biggest insight I've had so far from this course is that over a very large range of topics I found out that all the knowledge basically is there, all the techniques are there. Basically, nature does all the work. We just need to solve the human factor. How do we align everyone to to apply the knowledge that we have and that basically is deep inside us since a long time? I am going to try to apply this knowledge by making a tiny forest in my hometown of Amsterdam and in a bit of concrete jungle of 1,000 square meters together with other students and local stakeholders. I hope to make a beautiful forest where animals and birds and plants can feel at home again in the city and remind us that the world is not ours, but we are part of the world. Hello everybody that's watching and was with us today. My name is Ashley Brown and I work for the Ecosystem Restoration Camps Movement and I'm joined today by three colleagues I suppose and I'll explain what that means a little bit later and we have all been collaborating on something called the Ecosystem Restoration Design online course which is an online course that teaches you about ecosystem restoration of natural ecosystems, agricultural ecosystems, urban ecosystems. It also looks at business models to fund ecosystem restoration and regenerative agriculture and then the last module looks at how you can create a design, a restoration design, an implementation plan and a business model canvas for an ecosystem restoration project that you create with a group. I initiated the creation of this course because I wanted to empower as many people as possible to be able to go forward and restore an ecosystem that they love. It could be their local park, it could be their local stream, anywhere really that that is degraded and damaged. I wanted to give everyday people the skills, the knowledge, the expertise and the connections to be able to go ahead and get started with restoring that piece of land and that was why the course was created. It spans over five modules like I said and it's starting on the 20th of September or the classroom opens on the 20th of September and I'm joined by Celia Gregory who is the founder and director of the Marine Foundation and they are doing incredible work around the world restoring coral reefs by building these beautiful structures of goddesses that they then sink into the ocean and coral grow out of them. So thank you for being with us today Celia. Then we have Will Crombie from an amazing project that is called Tree Range Chicken and it's an agroforestry system that has chickens roving around underneath the trees and he sells the the crops from the trees and the meat from the chicken as well and he's featuring on the module about business cases and then we have Sylvia and Sylvia is from the Gaia Education Organization. Gaia Education is the partner that the ERC works with. Ecosystem Restoration Camps works with to run this course. So I would like to hand the microphone over to Sylvia now who's going to introduce herself and her role in the course and then give you a little bit of background about the logistics of how to register and that sort of thing. So over to you Sylvia. Thank you Ashley and happy to be here. So as Ashley mentioned this is a five module course. You can take the five modules where you can take three to graduate. We highly recommend to take all the five modules because all the different modules talk about different ecosystems and the fifth module is where you can present a proposal and work in a team to design a project of restoration in your community. So the way the course is organized is each module lasts for four weeks we have two weeks in between each module so so you can rest or catch up with the materials and you know have some break in between and so it goes from September 20th where we have two weeks of orientation on to the material on the platform welcoming everybody and then on October 4th the facilitators join the program. You will be assigned a facilitator for each module and you will work with that facilitator through all the program until the end and at the end like I say in module five you had the opportunity to present your proposal you go through a selection process with your participants your classmates and you will be able to work on that proposal as a design. How to register well you can go to Guy Education website and select the option that you prefer whether it's the five modules sold together or three modules like I say if you take three modules you still get a certificate you can select one module from modules one to three which are different ecosystems and different approaches but module four and model five are mandatory for the certificate you can always take just one module to explore and then decide whether you want to continue. I think I cover everything regarding the course and registration actually but if there are other questions you can ask via the chat and we will be able to respond here thank you over to you Ashley. Thank you Sylvia yes if you have any questions about the course in terms of the content I'm here to give you all of the answers that you need as well as Celia and Will and then if you have any questions about registering paying any of that more logistical stuff that's why Sylvia is here and this call we are here today to answer any of the questions because I'm sure there are many of you out there who are considering taking the course but you're not quite sure so we are here to persuade you and I'm now going to pass over to Celia who's going to explain what her lesson is about and what what you'll learn when you take her lesson so over to you Celia. Gosh well my next lesson is about marine conservation so the focus is on the marine environment specifically we focused on coral reef habitat although these ideas can be applied to any ocean habitat and specifically we're working with a kind of ecotourism interface that's you know potentially where the the economic model is kind of integrated with so you know the areas where we're focusing on is the restoration of areas where people can enjoy the habitat either through diving snorkeling or you know they can also receive the benefits of it on land as well because actually there's implications for if you restore your marine habitat you're actually going to see the benefits on the land as well but yeah it's very creative program my approach is very creative it kind of came out of the fact that I felt like a lot of conservation work was very kind of scientific orientated and this didn't really help just the more you know day-to-day ways of how we can interact with it so yeah there's lots of layers to how this model works how you can support it how you can enjoy it and how the techniques we create artworks but the artworks are being created using scientific data and scientific techniques it's just that we're applying a kind of more creative aspect to how these techniques are implemented so yeah it's um yeah it's just an interesting idea of how this can be applied and and the results around the world have been very successful and continues to be inspiring new people around the world to create essentially marine sculpture parks really so we're taking marine sculpture under the ocean these these areas become marine sanctuaries i.e. we implement the idea that you can't take any fish out of them you can't do anything destructive you know you have to stop the the destruction before you can start to restore and then these areas become an inspirational place for us to swim around in but also for the fish and creatures to live safely. Yeah indeed and the reason that I know Celia is because one of my friends actually went and did a photo shoot pretending to be a mermaid swimming alongside one of the one of the sculptors in Belize I think. Yeah she did she did she did a few with us and you know that was definitely part of it about creating very beautiful visual images um you know I started this um organization at the beginning of kind of Facebook when we were really starting to see this new wave of visual content and this new way of of moving information around the world and creating like a kind of global network you know and clearly there's um you know they there's that saying you know an image can tell a much bigger story than words so that's kind of definitely she was part of that and she had a lot of fun and it was it was great and these images are beautiful so yeah and maybe I can speak a little bit about the structure of the lessons so each module has four lessons and there's five modules and then within each lesson each teacher such as Celia has three or four or sometimes five videos that are around 20 minutes to half an hour long each and the the general structure is that the first video is sort of an introduction to that person and their project um and they're the context of which they're working in the second video talks about the techniques that are used to do the restoration of work kind the teachers talking about the third video looks at the problems that the teacher has faced and then the fourth video looks at how those problems have been overcome and solved which means that you get a real uh insight into the worlds and experiences of some of the top people that are taking part in the restoration of our planet and you literally travel all over the world with them and get to really understand what it what it is that they're doing what's working and what's not um and yeah that's exactly how Celia's lesson goes to is there anything else you'd like to say Celia before I move on well we would just um I don't know if you're going to ask me this later but one of the questions I saw was just why I think this course is so important I don't know if you're going to ask me but I would like to just comment on that but yeah I definitely think this course is really important because I think we really need to reinvent and explore our relationship to nature and business um you know I think it's we only think about how nature provides for us at the moment and we have a very very extractive model in how we um you know interact with it and and we see it as just this kind of wonderful endless source of bounty for us but really we need to be addressing how we can we can serve it and and rather than just take so I think this is a really wonderful um you know course in the sense that you can really as you say see people that are doing it see how people have there's a lot of challenges but how they face those challenges and really starting to see how we can create you know beautiful businesses that um you know provide something wonderful for us but at the same time aren't destroying the planet that we basically all completely rely on and we're completely interdependent with you know I one of the reasons I use do goddess is not the only reason I do goddess is but I'm a great um devotee of the old mythologies you know where human beings pre kind of Christianity used to just be completely interdependent and knew that nature was so important and didn't think that we could exist without it or without looking after it so I think the work that's being done here is really important amazing if anyone would like to look into Celia's work a bit more her organization is called the marine foundation the marine foundation so yeah there's quite a few pictures I'm sure that you can find um on the internet of her goddesses and her work and yeah read up read up about her support her and come along to the course if you like what you see and you'd like to learn more from her so now we'll move on to oh thank you very much Celia will will Cromby will and I met at the restoration camp in Mexico and we had a wonderful time together and I now consider him to be a very close friend even though he lives on the other side of the world and he is teaching about his brand tree range chicken which I mentioned earlier is agro forestry system with chickens running around uh underneath I would love you will to introduce yourself um maybe tell a little bit about your work and yeah then answer the question that Celia did about why this course is so important right now yeah and I'm happy to follow you Celia I feel like I'm upstream from your work we really need that to we need to restore the oceans we need to restore the waterways and it's so important that we focus on all of our energies and it's great that that that you're in the course and then there's other people in the course talking about land-based practices because as we know it trickles down right it trickles down into the ocean it's really important that we take care of our land so I'm will Cromby and I'm a farmer and a businessman and an entrepreneur and I'm you know I'm humbled to be here on 40 acres in southern Minnesota in the Midwest U.S. and I'm a marketer and a filmmaker so somehow I've gotten involved with this with this movement to build more regenerative food systems and build healthier food and food brands and what we came across with working with Ray Hinaldo Hazlett Motokin who's my business partner and some of the work that we're doing here in the Midwest and what he's doing with the regenerative agriculture alliance is that the chicken is a very powerful place to start if you look at it from an indigenous indigenous concept if you look at it from its its origin story of being a jungle foul and we really have a great need for more perennial production because we we moved away from that we moved away from you know relying on fruit and nut crops and perennial crops in our production system and replace those with things like corn and soy and we you know we really industrialized those those systems and now they're very chemically driven so there's an opportunity in business and I think what the the module that I'm involved in is the regenerative business model or module four right Ash what what what are we calling that one yeah it's module four module four and what's the title of the module the business models okay so business models for restoration yeah I'm one of the the models that's featured in module four for business models because we have our tree range chicken brand and um and because I'm a farmer that has this this agroforestry brace based production model so in the module that I'm a part of I take you through that journey I take you through in that course I take you through what we've been doing to build tree range as a brand and what I've been doing to implement this concept this agroforestry based civil pasture based concept on my family's land um and it looks like we got a hello popping up on the screen hello I really hope that this interests you um I'm just a humble farmer and marketer here trying to build a better world a regenerative future and I'm happy to be aligned with this team I'm really excited about the ecosystem restoration design courses the way that it's threading through the fabric of of how we're all united and and giving all these great examples of the work that we as individuals can choose to do because we we all have power to build up our communities to build a more resilient food system to honor nature and to work within you know the confines of of you know taking care of the environment and building these these systems around our lives as as humans you know we are we aren't separate from nature but we're part of it and and we've we've our modern society has really driven us far away from it we need to get back to that so honor the goddess in the ocean you know build the coral reefs work with perennial crops tree crops and you know put the animals back on the landscape where they belong and try and localize our lives work in community work you know and and the more that we can you know produce our own food and take care of the land and and and work with the land the more the more we the life is so much so beautiful and enriching when we have that connection to our food when we have those connections to our community when we work together collaboratively when we don't rely on the big box stores or agor business or or our governments or our policies to to guide us as individuals so i think that that is something that i bring to the course and that is something that tree-range chicken brings to the business world and i think it's very important that we start to learn these skills and apply them in our own businesses or just apply them in our own backyards it doesn't matter what scale you're at or where you're at in your journey you're going to learn something from this course or wherever you decide to get your information from so thank you gaya you know thank you to to the work that both of your organizations are doing to just bring this course to people and that that no that i think that is very important do you think you could give the people watching a very brief overview of of what tree-range chicken is and and why it is a really good example of a regenerative business in comparison to other business models well it's it's not a confinement operation it's not you know packaging i don't like that word livestock right it really separates us from our our food production so it's it's putting the animals back on the land it's integrating them into a forested canopy and within that forested canopy there are all sorts of different layers which we can also create food food from whether it's fruit and nuts or or or the chickens themselves as as food that we can consume that's what the business model is doing it's recreating natural systems but you know giving it a product giving it this production mindset so that way we can produce food for our communities in a more regenerative way and there's so many layers to that work and you know i hope i did a good job spelling it out in the course that i put together for you but bottom line it's putting it's putting chickens back where they belong and it's you and it's building industries and building you know markets for perennial crops and for a poultry you know for chicken that is more that is raised not in confinement and often i should warn you and we probably most of us probably already know this the labels that you're reading when you purchase you know chicken at the store or exit the store there's a lot of false claims behind those when you see free range or when you see cage free or organic a lot of it is still if it says organic it's still confinement operation there's there's a lot of issues and a lot of greenwashing going on in the industry and i think i would encourage people to get to know their their farmers and to get to know these perennial based practices to to really bring about a new industry a new age a new food revolution thank you so what's exciting about this course um where business models are concerned is like i mentioned in the introduction once you have learned from the teachers who are talking about natural ecosystem restoration such as temperate forest tropical forest deserts and coral reefs you then move on to the second module which is all about how to restore agricultural land and looks at different techniques such as permaculture and holistic grazing seaweed farming and agroforestry the third module then looks at urban restoration such as the restoration of urban waterways such as rivers and canals how to build houses that restore degraded ecosystems that's a really cool one um and then we move on to the fourth module which looks at business cases the first lesson of that module is led by an organization called common land and common lands uh they specialize in creating new businesses and essentially they want to create an ecosystem restoration economy and they use a business model canvas which is essentially a map that you use that you can have on a kind of a one piece of paper where you map out all of the different areas of your business plan so it's like a business plan but but much more simplified and then you learn from these amazingly regenerative and real businesses such as wills and then when you get to module five with your group you have your ecosystem that you're restoring and you're creating your plan for it and then you fill out this business model canvas for a business idea that you can use to fund it with the intention of you being able to go out into the world after the course and implement that restoration plan because you have all of the skills that you need to fund it so far we've run two iterations of this course and we have welcome around 350 people in those two iterations and those people have created around 60 restoration projects so that just goes to show how effective this course has been in achieving its its goal um yeah so i would say that big big us up a little bit whoop whoop and now we're going to go on to the questions uh question and answer answer section of the webinar i can see that people are writing questions now so Sylvia how should we do this i'm a bit unfamiliar with stream yard are the questions are in the comments section right yes they're in the comments section and Pedro will put them up i would like to address some questions that came before this one there's somebody asking about the waterways in module three but before that there was a question about the learning space and and and also the learning pace and i would like to address that so the learning space um in terms of you know how that is a structure as i mentioned before you are going to have a facilitator and you're going to have around 20 or 25 people in your same cohort the full course may be 100 and something people but you will have like a smaller groups with your facilitator you're going to meet with your facilitator usually twice per module plus you will have at your own pace you can watch the videos with the presenters the presenters are you know what we call teachers as well who are presenting about their project their particular projects and how they are approaching the restoration and their own communities so you watch the videos and you will have a forum where you can post comments you know discuss post questions and you will have a question and answer session every week for responding to specific questions to that week for example if you if you are watching you know Will Will's module and you have questions after watching all the videos you can share your questions and will be in a question and answer session where he can address those particular questions so that's how it is structure so if you go away from the module for one or two weeks you may be able to catch up but it still is a little bit you know difficult to catch up with all the sessions however the courses stays open until the end so you can always go back you know and watch videos and you know do things that you haven't done before you will have to finish the modules in order to get into module five which means you know for module five you if if you haven't finished the previous modules you will have to finish them otherwise you won't be able to get into module five so that's about the pace and the the space how is the space in there there's a question about the TOT the TOT is not related to this call so I suggest Pedro you can put you know briefly the page for the TOT TOT is a train of training trainers and is something else that we run at Gaia education you can always communicate with us send in an email and we can go to the other questions so there are interesting questions there actually I don't know if you can see them one is about can you say more about waterways in module three by Jerry then there is another question about well there's a comment about the chickens and so I don't know if you want to address that one we cannot hear you actually you are you probably are mute yeah the amount of time I've spent online doing these sorts of things I still forget to unmute myself um yeah so the the lesson about restoring urban waterways is part of the third module and it's run by a woman called Lisa from the organization Biomatrix Water and they are based in Scotland but they have projects all over the UK and they have also done projects in places like the Philippines and what they do is they create floating ecosystems using uh how would you describe it kind of like tubes that float and then they plant into them and the the the tubes are covered in a biodegradable sort of organic matter-esque coconut skin husk stuff you can tell I'm not an expert you should definitely sign up to the course if you want to actually understand this and then you plant the plants into the tubes with the coconut husk on and then the whole thing basically turns into a floating uh bed you know like flower bed or whatever they've decided to plant they plant it up with uh native plants and then these floating ecosystems become habitats for aquatic birds the roots come down through the bottom of these platforms and uh they oxygenate the water which helps to helps it de-pollute that's not really a word you know what I mean um and it also then creates like breeding grounds and hiding places for fish as well and uh if you check their website out Biomatrix Water you can see where they have been doing these there are some in London there are some in Manchester they're all over the the UK really in cities um and what the lesson does is it essentially teaches you how they work and why they're so amazing and then what the how to build them and what the challenges have been with building them and how to overcome their challenges so I hope that answers your question Jerry maybe you can give me a thumbs up or something if that's that's possible thank you Ashley there is another question um somebody's asking whether they can volunteer at the camp while following the course technically speaking yes you can I don't know about the volunteering at the camp can you respond to that Ashley yeah so we uh we're getting on for 45 camps now all over the world and they all have different requirements and are looking for different levels of help and support so the best way to find that out I mean the short answer is yes the long answer is you should get in touch with the the camps who are interested in visiting and see if they are looking for volunteers right now and if so does your profile fit what they're looking for and the length of time that you want to stay there for etc but seeing as there are so many of them it's it's very likely that you will be able to do the course and volunteer at a camp at the same time especially if some of the camps are quite new to the movement and would benefit from having someone volunteering with them who is doing the course you could then feed the new expertise and information that you're learning directly into that project so yeah when you're writing to them I'd recommend saying that you're you're thinking about taking the course and that you'd like to share what you're learning with them and maybe even take a piece of their land as your restoration project for module five that would be really cool yeah thank you Ashley so there's a question about how many hours of a study per module I can respond to that so that depends you know that depends how deep you want to go into the materials we recommend between five and ten hours at least for watching the videos responding and posting and you know in the in the discussions and also coming to the Q&A's so that the minimum that's the minimum and if you want to go deeper there are many many different materials that are provided through all the different lessons where you can study deeper and there will be things that you may want to actually you know explore a little bit more because remember that we what you are watching in this course is something that is already being done so so you may want to come to the first two modules and actually explore more about you know ecosystem cycles and and explore a little bit more about what is the foundation that you will need for all the modules the modules are delivered once a week but you as I said before you can always come back so if you arrange your life to be there for when the module is open on mondays and also we try to do the Q&A's in different times of the week and different days to accommodate for everybody everything is recorded so if you cannot attend you can always revisit the recordings so there are some other questions I don't know if you can see them Ashley did you oh okay there is one about international candidates yeah I'm not sure if I understand the question but yeah obviously you know this course is open to everybody the restoration needs to happen everywhere and you know as will you know Anseli and Ashley have said this is a really important course a really important I would say that the main thing that we need to do in this generation to restore you know the planet to something that is a place that we can all share with all the beings not just human beings so it's open to everybody there's no requirements and there's no I would say the only requirement is that you understand English good enough to understand the lessons so for now it's only in English but who knows maybe in the future it will be in other languages as well if there aren't any other immediate questions coming in I could discuss some of the frequently asked questions and then give the answers to those so one of the frequently asked questions is being able to pay an instalment which is possible so rather than paying for the whole course up front which I understand is you know quite a lot of money for a lot of people you can pay module by module maybe Sylvia you'd like to explain a little bit further about exactly how how that works yes so there are two ways one way is that they can register you know you can register for the full course upfront and select the option that you want to pay in installments which allows you to split the payments you know through the course another option is that you register to module one now and you decide on the road that you want to take all the other courses that you register to the different courses as they sorry the modules as they come we do have a deadline for certain modules just because some of them are mandatory to receive a certificate so you may not be able to register for example for module four or five if you haven't registered previously for at least one module between one and and three so apart from that you can pay in different ways and always approach us and there is an email Pedro I don't know if you can put up my email in there or Jan's email so they can ask questions if you have any other questions about your situation we can accommodate we also have groups that's another questions I don't know if you want want to answer a little bit about that or you want me to respond some people like to register as teams or groups so we do have special discounts for groups just approach us and we will look at the situation that means that you can have your own project as a group from the beginning and we will consider a special fee for a group I don't know if you want to add anything else there Ashley no no I think you've covered all of it where groups are concerned we yeah we would love to welcome organisations for instance that have the desire and the interest to start doing ecosystem restoration projects and would like to train their whole team for instance that's very possible and we've had inquiries about that before and this time round we have a solid plan for how to make that happen so yeah if you're working for an organisation you're considering that then get in touch with us we'd love to hear from you another frequently asked question is what if I need to drop out because I don't have time to finish the course you can take any modules that you weren't able to complete in this iteration you can pay a fee of £45 to cover the admin costs of moving you to the next round of the course which we are planning to start in April 2022 so that is very possible for anyone who has some sort of big life change and means that they can't complete the course um what are some of the other frequently asked questions that we get well one of the questions refers to the facilitators which are they are different from the presenters so the presenters are the experts in you know their own restoration projects whose videos you're going to watch and the facilitators that we hire and will be with you through the course are also experts some of them are permaculture teachers such as myself and you know I'm not one of the facilitators but all of us have background in different areas like permaculture restoration there's one of the facilitators who's an expert in cobb design so they're the facilitators also have a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience you you will draw not just from the experts presenting or the teachers presenting in the videos you will also have a full community that's one of the most amazing parts of this course is that this is not just a course it's not an online course and that's it you have a community a full community of practitioners who are all passionate about this another really nice thing about the course is that the the teams that are ecosystem restoration camps or have been welcomed into the camps movement as a camp but haven't really yet started their work they often take the course and then you have the ability to join their team and then if it works you can travel to the camp and help implement the restoration design that you've worked on for module five so it doesn't just have to be an abstract thing another frequently asked question that we get from people is I don't have any land of my own can I still take this course uh yeah big yes to that question because so few of us are lucky enough to own our own land and like I said at the very beginning the reason that I created this course in the first place was because I wanted people to feel empowered enough to walk past their local you know municipally owned council owned government owned land or whoever owns it and have the skills and the know how to be able to approach that land owner and take part in restoring that piece of land because we're not going to restore our ecosystems if only the people that own land can do so and so no you do not need to own land to uh to take part did see me I want to say something yeah I just think that's a really fascinating point that you just raised there as well because I think part of the other element of this course is regaining a sense of power as an individual and that the problems that we're facing are very overwhelming and and I feel that definitely I mean it actually government owned land I mean theory aren't isn't the government working for us anyway so I think it's a lot of it is about shifting this idea of that somebody else owns something left I mean the government if they own it we own it I mean we pay for it but I don't think the average person feels that and there's an increasing sense of disempowerment increasing sense of oh well what's the point so I just think that's fantastic what you say that you know a real sense of you know that the health of our environment is something that if we land through this course there is something that we can then participate in and actually improve for the future for ourselves and for the future generations so I think that's a lovely point and now it also seems like for for approaching landowners as well because because when you start to implement these types of practices there's so many different layers of restoration capacity or enterprise capacity on even just small acres of land like what we're doing with the with the chickens is just an acre and a half that's all you would need to set up one of these poultry units so you know getting underserved communities access to land through these you know enterprise capacity on say farmland owners or just raw land vacant you know land that people that someone owns not necessarily a government or a corporation somebody owns that land and there's so much opportunity to restore it or create an enterprise enterprise on that land too while restoring it indeed yeah and there's there's so much farmland as well that that can be rented or can be leased uh the camp in Spain we are leasing um a plot from a farmer for five years so yeah all of these things are indeed very doable and getting access to land doesn't have to be as difficult as you think okay are there any more questions that have come in or if you have one now is your moment I don't see any um but I would like to add to that um a question that comes usually around module four or five when people had to present their proposals is what happens you know if I don't have a proposal so if you don't have a proposal that's okay I mean we encourage everybody to have a proposal even if the proposal doesn't get to module five because then you practice you know what Ashley was mentioning about you know being empowered and about dreaming about what can be possible in a place that you um you know you live or you share with others however you can always join a project so there are many many great proposals we actually received 54 proposals this last time and we had to do a a lot of work you know very hard work selecting which ones will stay because we didn't have people for 40 54 proposals so we ended up with 30 something proposals all of all of them amazing from very very small spaces to huge you know areas from private property to you know public property so you can always join a project so don't worry if you don't have an idea or a proposal or access to land right now because that's an option as well so I know that we still have maybe 10 minutes left before we round off but I think if the Q&A's finished early oh okay there's another question coming from budget I hope I said that right how can you attract more volunteers I have a field to restore and for education well uh that was your very question is the reason why we one of the reasons why ecosystem restoration camps was set up to create connections between people who have land and are looking for help to restore it with people who don't have land and want to learn how to do that restoration work so uh if you're considering taking the course fantastic and then also if you'd like to apply to become an ecosystem restoration camp you can do so via our website uh in the top drop down menu there's a button called camps go down to the bottom where it says new camp application and uh yeah once you filled that in we'll get in touch okay how do we feel about rounding off a little early yeah I don't see if there are no more questions we can end it earlier um if anyone would like to write to me and ask me a question about the course content feel free to do so uh Pedro do you know my email address because you put it up on the screen it's ashley as h leigh at ecosystem restoration camps dot org feel free and then also on our website they're on the online course page there's a kind of live chat function which you can uh fill in and I will be on the other end just in case you forget my email address that's another way to uh ask any questions that you have um so the course starts on the 20th of september doesn't it but that's the start of the two week introductory period where you the classroom is open but the lessons haven't yet started and that is where you can go introduce yourself start meeting your fellow students and um read the the pre-reading resources that we and videos etc that we have created for you that will give you an insight and an introduction into things like earth cycles and different regenerative practices just to give you a bit of a foundation before the course begins and what's the date that the actual course starts module one starts october yeah it's october 4 but we um we keep um registrations open until october 11 that will be the second week of the actual module one we also will have um uh we call it orientation circle or opening circle for everybody during those two weeks we will announce that in our website but um it's open for everybody who is already registering the course and obviously for the presenters and facilitators to come together and just you know kick it starts there is you still a bit of time left for you to sign up if you're still uncertain uh or you need a bit more time to find all of the pennies etc there's no real rush for the 20th of september but that is the best time to register if you want to give yourself as much time as possible to get fully orientated and uh yeah do all of the homework so yeah i think we'll we'll draw to a close now you have everything you need to get in touch with us further if you would like to thank you so much everyone for coming i love this course so much i feel so immensely proud of what we've all created together um and yeah i would love to meet you on the course and hope that it will really help you to achieve your restoration goals and ambitions and for us to together achieve john dilu's vision of uh restoring the earth as the great work of our time so thank you all um there's one last thing that's come up our thanks for the info you're welcome Igor it's been lovely to see all your names and your enthusiastic and encouraging emojis makes us feel good thank you very much thank you everybody goodbye bye everybody the reason that i decided to take the ecosystem restoration design course was because the world desperately needs people uh to uh to restore it to the way it was intended with all the natural balances and cycles in place um the biggest insight i've had so far from this course is that over a very large range of topics i found out that all the knowledge basically is there all the techniques are there basically nature does all the work we just need to solve the human factor how do we align everyone to uh to apply the knowledge that we have and that basically is deep inside us since a long time um i am going to try to apply this knowledge by making a tiny forest in my hometown of amsterdam and in a bit of concrete jungle of 1000 square meters together with other students and local stakeholders i hope to make a beautiful forest where uh yeah animals and birds and plants can feel at home again the city and remind us that uh the world is not ours but we are part of the world