 Hello, everyone. My name is Peter, Peter van der Gaag. I am with the team that supports the global ecosystem restoration communities movement. Probably in the next few weeks, a few more will actually be added to the movement. It's a continuous growing group of initiatives that are physically doing what John has just said, providing hope, I think, for people worldwide and a future for the generations that come. Briefly today, it's a fireside chat. We do these months. I shall unmute myself again. I think I'll blame cast for muting me. If you could mute yourself and maybe even turn off your video because some people around the world do not have the bandwidth that many of us are afforded with. And if there's a lot of videos going on, those people will not be able to see what we are what's happening here or hear what we're talking about because it will be jumpy installed or even break down. So if you could turn off your video, if you're not speaking, that would be great. And also your sound. Then we can, then we can continue. There's still people coming in and cast the home music me and I will never forgive her. She, she will continue to let those people in. So don't worry about that. If you see those people arriving in the waiting room. I'm usually we start with a with a PowerPoint with all the stuff that's happening because but because it's so early in the year, not much has been planned yet for the rest of the year. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to invite you to come to our website. ERC dot earth is the quickest way to type it in. If you want, if you want to full URLs, it's communities.org dot earth, but ERC dot earth works to and then go to the participate part of the website. And check that regularly regularly you'll see what each of these ERCs is organizing that you could participate in yourself. More long term volunteer roles, expertise that's being requested. It would be great if you visit or tell your friends and if you know experts to tell them to come and visit that website so that they can become involved in the work of this growing community of initiatives. Today. I think I still need to see. Am I still allowed. I wish you a happy 2024. Someone said it's not 2024, but 2020 more. Not more of the stuff that gets us all depressed and down, but more of the stuff that gives us hope and a future that we believe is worth working towards. For all of those that all of us that live on this planet. And that's not just humanity. So happy 2020 more of the good stuff than from me. And that's all I have to say. We have john, who is going to briefly sort of reflect on what he's been thinking about in the last few weeks and he already started a bit. And then after that is the, the, the keynote if you could say that around a fire side around a fireplace. It's key. From the future all the way in Brazil. In a wonderful location, right on the point where the Pantanal, the Serado and the Amazon come together along the Uruguay River. And he's amidst many of the newly emerged soy farms there in the past 10 years trying to form this beacon of sustainability regeneration and restoration. He'll get most of the time today. If you and after that will open the floor to everyone here, because it's a fireside chat and it comes from the idea of camping together, trying to restore this planet. And then after we're done after a hard day's work we light a fire, we sit around it, and we go a little bit deeper in who we are and what we're doing, and what's motivating us and trying to learn more from each other. And that's what these fireside chats are about in this virtual online world of zoom, but it is supposed to be as informal as that so please feel free to come in with whatever you wish to come in with. If the energy is done, asking questions or present something yourself, we can have a conversation. We usually try to end around 730 my time in the evening, wherever you are in the world it's currently 611 or where I am. But if it continues to go on longer, we keep the zoom open, people can continue to have conversations if you have time and if you have the energy for that. Some of us will have to go and cook dinner, I have one of those people. Anyway, that's all that I have to tell you about. I'd love to give it back to John, who has just visited the last plateau, which is basically the, if you want to use that term the match that lit the fire of ecosystem restoration I think around the planet. John. Thank you. Thank you, Peter and happy new year to everybody. I think if it's possible for everyone to mute, if they're not speaking it would be very useful at this time. And it's, it's really great to see this movement continuing and growing, because we have the ability now to really do something and we're seeing that mass, a mass collaboration and mass participation is the way forward. And that this is working everywhere in the world that everywhere in the world needs to restore all degraded landscapes on the planet and that it does. It basically, when we're facing these multi multiple crises. It's wonderful to have a solution that solves them all. And ecological restoration really gives us purpose. And it gives us something to do that's really not simply for selfish purposes for ourselves. Or even just for our families. It's about caring for humanity and caring for life and caring for the earth. And when we really understand it, we can see how this relates to food security to full employment to health, physical health, psychological health, all of those things. So I have just come back last night from the list plateau, where I was meeting with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The Institute of soil and water conservation. I have a lot of friends there and there's a lot of new young PhD students there. And it's, it's pretty good fun to go there and see my friends and the new colleagues who are joining in this work. We have done really good work. And we were joined by the director of the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River Commission, who were the was the implementing unit in the list plateau watershed rehabilitation project which I documented most of you know about my films. You can watch them I'll put some links into the, into the chat but if you haven't seen them. And it's interesting because this year, 2024 is the 30th year since I first went out there and began the documentation by create, beginning to create the baseline study for the World Bank for this. This, this massive project. And I have to say, it really transformed my life because I had been a journalist covering the news. And I had covered some really big stories China rising from poverty and isolation and Tiananmen and international terrorism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But when I went to the list plateau. After 15 years of journalism, and I saw the importance of ecology, I, I had this flash of intuition that ecology was just much more important than anything else I'd ever seen. And it's been 30 years since then, and I was, I was 40, early 40s, and now I'm going to be 72 so it's really throughout this period of study and observation and documentation and communication about this. I'm more convinced now that I was when I had this first impression that human impacts on ecological systems needs to be understood. And today, we're going to hear from our colleague, Guy in Brazil, and this is truly wonderful. What he's doing and it's truly important because this is a what I what I've started to realize and see is that there are acupuncture points on the earth. And these places we need to understand what is the role I mean every place is important I wouldn't say that there's any place that's not important but there are certain places, which are of extreme importance. And we can look at them in basically two ways, they're either functional, or they're dysfunctional. And if they're functional, then that means that they're there in balance, so that the oxygenated atmosphere, the water cycle, the soil fertility and the biodiversity are intact. And the more I've studied this the more I've realized that these biological processes are what altered the physics. So, if we want to understand climate change if we want to understand the weather, we want to understand extreme weather, we want to understand many of the disasters that we're seeing now. And one of the things that we're looking at, because of some parts of our camps and communities. For instance in California the first camp in the United States was in Paradise, California where the giant fire was. And now we're talking with with Maui and other other places because we're seeing events that were impossible before. There's massive fires, and when you start to understand that these massive fires are not accidental, they're actually not natural disasters, they're unnatural disasters. That we're human impact is causing by disrupting the natural systems that regulate humidity and temperature and wind speed, wind direction and vortex activity. And now we're even seeing like fire tornadoes, where the, the, the systems are creating their own weather and something that was unheard of before is possible. So, I just want everybody to know that we, each of us, and all of us together have a duty to restore the landscapes because if we do this, it's, it's going to change the course of human civilization. It hasn't yet dawned on all of human civilization that this is the answer, but it will. Or we will fail, but I don't think we're going we can't fail humans when we understand this. We're forced to do this. And so, we all need to be part of this we all need to figure out how we can collaborate with one another, and how we can encourage mass participation on a planetary scale. So, what's happening in Brazil is also happening around the world in different countries. So it's lovely to hear what's happening. I was on an earlier call with he and it's just fantastic what he's going to tell us. So, enjoy this. And afterwards, let's talk. Thanks so much. Yeah, I won't, I won't get in between kids. It's all yours. We did see it for a second key and then it disappeared again your PowerPoint. Okay, I mean, almost there. Okay, there we go. Can you see and hear me well. I can. Good. Yes, from Beijing. Yes. Good. Thanks, John, from the introduction. Thanks, Peter and Kev for the opportunity to be here. We really had a very, very powerful and inspire conversation last week. That made me work a little bit more in some slides to try to help me put the ideas together. In order to talk in maximum of 20 minutes with all of you. We're going to be talking initially from my, my personal transformation process in the beginning. We're going to talk about the three main principles that drive us as a form of the future projects. What make us wake up happy every, every day. We're going to talk about the seven dimensions that makes part today of what we call our governments and developing model of the form of the future. I would like to spend some some time on the designing of the landscape, the territory and landscape design and how we as a team are working on this architecture to go from a conventional farm to a farm village or to a farm of the future model. So it's important to point that I come from a huge city in Brazil. I come from Sao Paulo. I was born in Sao Paulo. I was graduated there in business. I still have as my main cash flow business a consulting company that works with collaborative networks. So what we see here back in 2015, it's a first meeting of a group of companies that makes part of the agribusiness in Brazil. Starting to work together to build a new future. So my consulting company in Brazil, it's called value builders in Sao Paulo. We started to make this kind of collaborative networks inside of the business corporate people to promote a new way of thinking. So that was basically the first step that I made to start talking about nature to start talking about regenerative process inside of the big corporations. And that was back in 2015. In 2016, I really start the project of the farm of the future here where I'm living now. I'm located in the southeast of the Amazon in a very beautiful river called Iwaraguaya, which is basically more than 2000 kilometers from Sao Paulo. All this process from 2016 until now, it's a pretty good walk with a lot of challenges. We had two very big fires in the last five years, the last one in 2021, which burned almost 70% of the farm, which brings us always with a challenge of search for new energies to restart on cycles. So it's always a good walk to make this transition. Talking about the three principles of the farm of the future, all the projects that we work that are kind of related with the seven dimensions. They need to keep the forest standing and productive. That's the first principle. We need to community building in a variety of ways and third to promote the individual development. So every project, we make this kind of questions to see if we're going to keep the forest standing and productive, if we're going to build community and trust beauty, and if we promote any how the individual development. Well, from 2016 until 2020, we closed a cycle, what we call a first cycle of the farm of the future, where on these four years, basically, we took a lot of people to camp. We did not have a hotel structure, elegant and simple as we have today. So we had a camping very simple in the middle of the forest structure and we took basically almost 300 people in more than 35 groups to camp and talk about the future of the territory. So with all this conversation, we kind of registered this seven dimensions. All the things that we talked about the future, they would fit in one of these seven dimensions. I'm going to pass through quickly, but we're going to pass through those seven dimensions. The first one is the fourth school, the second on the regenerative agriculture. The third one is the network entrepreneurship, how we make business together on a collaborative culture. The fourth dimension is the bio a bio regional based ethnotourism. Number five, the building and connection of biodiversity corridors. Number six, spirituality. And finally, the dimension number seven, renewable energies. So the forest school is basically the most important dimension that we started to move in 2016 and 2017. Which is bringing our education or learning process inside of the territory. This picture here shows young people from farming schools in the state that I'm living that comes to the farm to have courses on agroforestry system, for example. So we have partnerships with local schools to bring young people to really make their practice of learning in the forest school. And the forest school is not just related for young people, but it's also working a lot with the families in the surrounding areas. And with elderly people putting everybody together in the learning process. Here's one of the pictures that was in our, in our ecosystem restoration communities. Instagram two or three years ago, we are here, we were here studying soil fertilization quality of the soil. The second and very important dimensions is how we're dealing with the regenerative agriculture. We are in a very tropical region. So everything here really regenerates very fast by itself if you just let nature on on on their own speed. But we need to implement some logic to produce food using technologies that respect nature cycles. So we started basically with two main projects in the regenerative agriculture perspective. One is the agroforestry integrated system with no animals. So where you can see here the pictures where we we plant different species in the same area with some some techniques and logic. So each species has a role to play in this integrated system. In the second one is a very important methodology of Brazilian cattle raising, which combines the cattle with the forest component. So it's, it's, we call here ILPF, it's integrated system with cattle forest and also the agriculture also in the same area. So here you can see pictures that those pictures were from two years ago. These pictures are from last week. So we can see the difference. You can see the girls here hugging the trees on the right side. And then here you can also see on a small proportion but you can can see that the call under the same tree two years two years after the picture on the other slide. So those are tick. It's, it's a tree originally from the Asian area from it's the sacred tree of India. And it grows really fast combining with the pasture and heavy a lot of opportunities to produce, for example, also the honey. It's a very good flower to produce honey. So that's the second model of the regenerative agriculture that the third dimension. It's what you call the network entrepreneurship. I bring that with a lot of energy from my 20 years of consulting on collaborative networks in in Sao Paulo. And the first step was to establish a cooperative a local cooperative with more than 25 local families to try to produce together by resources together and mainly to have access to market in the in the left side we have our store, which is called curaui natural then the same name or as the cooperative that we founded and the cooperative today helps local people to do projects together, mainly on family family agriculture and local basic community tourism, since we are located in a very, very beautiful area. The cooperative also started to look for project basic projects. We felt that we had a very hard water problem. So here we see Maria and her husband on this on their land. Our on land of 25 actors, they didn't have any water anymore. So the cooperative started to help. So we started to work with the same pump for 20 families like helping a group of families to share the same project of having their own water so they could produce after that. The fourth dimension is the bioregion based national tourists. We are working with three different tribes in that's are located around us to bring to put us together to learn with each other and to receive people from outside to experience how are the, the indigenous, Brazilian indigenous life here in the Amazon in the token chains in the Aragwaya river. Here we see pictures of the crowd, the crowds, they, they are really known for their ability to celebrate to sing and dance. They really reach a high frequency dancing celebrating and singing, and they are already coming to the farm of the future and we are already coming to their, to their, their village to exchange knowledge and to start doing good things together. Well, we're talking about the main dimensions, spirituality, renewable energy and biodiversity corridors, we can talk in another opportunity. But now I'm going to jump in, in this, in an important model which talks about how we are making our design, our transition design, our landscape design. So here we can see the map of the firm of the future. It's like a rectangle with 500 actors. So we have like five kilometers long, one kilometers wide. On the left side, you can see a beach. This beach has it's in the Aragwaya river beach. This beach has like almost two kilometers of length. And in this season of the year, it's all underwater. The river goes up, up to 10 meters every year, up and down. So during rainy season that we are right now, all these sand beach they are underwater, and we have a lot of, we have like the biggest floated Amazon forest in our, in our regions, in our place, the place that we are. Here we started to, we took half of the farm, and we are, we made that legally, permanently preserved. There is a legal model in Brazil that you, as a owner of the land, you can protect it forever, independent on sales, sale of the property to another people in the future, independent on having my daughters leading and running the farm in the future. Half of the farm, it's eternally protected. So it's the blank area where you see the other areas that we have squares. That's where we are developing a model with 10 actors, each one of these areas. And we call that agroforest islands. In these areas, we're going to have three different families living together on these 10 actors. And before having the three families, we have a project designed. So we now are working on a variety of different projects that are really connected to the territory. To what the territory has as its natural resource. So we're designing different kinds of projects that goes to from agroforestry system to honey productions to be architecture to cattle raising a lot of different varieties. Each kind of project has connection to one or some specific agroforest islands. Again, 10 actors each one. On the left side in the middle is my daughter, my older mob daughter that lives in Amsterdam nowadays. Well, actually she's back to Brazil, the youngest still living in Holland. Plinio is my great brother and partner that helps me in this project activities. And on the left Maria, which is one of the first child that's already living in the farm of the future with her family. I'm going to talk about two specific, specific islands. The one that I call River Island is where I'm living right now. So I am the first family living in this in this first island. I moved it definitely from Sao Paulo to to the Araguaia River during pandemics in 2021. And the first movement that I made was basically to to build on this area that we call the the area do Rio River Island. We started to to make the hotel the jungle lodge project. So here's where I live it's my cottage we call that the oca lodge. On the left side was when was when we started to make the construction in 2021. It took one year to have this oca lodge and other nine lodges, ready to receive people. So we started in this island to focus on the regenerative tourism dimension. So it's one of the multi business value building a format that we have and the hotel, the jungle lodge, it's one of the business that we are we have running nowadays in the farm of the future. And I'm the first first family living there, working on this project with Raquel, my wife, and we are waiting for a second and a third family to help us to run this business. As Satish Kumar likes to say, it's, it's human scale business. So we have 10 cottage 10 lodges, and three families can take a very, very, very close and good care of the guests that we're going to be receiving to be in our hotel guests that that are going to be paying to stay and guests local guests that already are working on local projects, using our hotel to get together to celebrate to design new projects and to build community. So that's the, the island of the river island where we have the hotel as the main project, and we're going to have as I told before three families in working together. In the middle of the this we call the cooperation island. It's like a shared service island that's going to support the 24 other islands to with with with process like education so we're going to we're going to be having a structure of the forest school in this area. We're going to have our nature hospital. We're going to have the hospital on this area. We know that since the school when the hotel. They're going to, they're going to be very, very, very different than the schools and hotels that we have today and and hospital that we have today. But we are starting to make first movements efforts prototyping to wait for people to come and together with community built the hospital and the school for for instance, and this area also, we're going to have our library, our part of spiritually center, our art craft area. We're going to have also an area that we've gone across the food processing to produce and add value on the foods that organ foods you're going to produce in the farm. So that's the unique island where we will not have three families but we're going to have up to 30 families working on this shared service area. That's a picture that I met with the cows in just five years ago and I when I was the first time with them. I felt that that's the design that we are going to have on this collaboration island the shared service island. So that the crowd was they built their house around this big circle. And, and that's where they connect to the sky. They have the connection with the big energy or the great son, they call that the papa. So our island of the, the shared service is going to be called the papa island and the cows are working with us already to to make it the rituals that is going to start this area in the form of the future. I'm going to send you can send you afterwards the architecture product that are inspiring us to build this central area, the papa, the shared service area. We already made some first celebration and rituals with with people local people with tourists and with indigenous that are visiting us. Here was the first scratch that we made from this, this, this central area. So science technology, arts and is speaking spirituality, spirituality, connectivity connected with the, the north, south, east and west area so we have this designing going on. And finally, we have this challenge to work in three different levels of collaboration. So that's very important that that what's helping us since the beginning to create a collaborative culture to work together on a bio regional perspective. The first level of collaboration. It's the family level within agroforestry island. So we can see one of the islands, it's the summa island where these islands gone produce milk on a very very natural and combined with forest to eight, but the first level of collaboration will be among the three families that are going to be living there. The first family, it's like the agroforest you have a pioneer space so the first family always is a family that has technical expertise and competence and energy to start up the project. The second family could be a combination of learning and helping. And the third family can be a learner family that can. You'll be in the future the family to be the leading family and and process and make it make the succession process going on. So the first challenge is how three families live and work together in how in different houses, 50 matters 50 meters to 100 meters a house for each other, a common area. So the first challenge to regenerate collaborative collaborative culture within one of the islands with three families. The second level of collaboration will be among the islands. So the 72 families, three families for each 21 of the 24 islands, plus 30 families that are going to be living and working in the cooperation area in the Papan Island doctors and nurses teachers artists and so on. So that's the second level and where that that's where the cooperatives is already working. We have a lot of projects each islands, each island developing or planning one kind of projects that requires resource requires expertise requires future vision. And that's where we think the second level of collaboration inside of the farm of the future inside of our 500 actors territory. And finally, we have the collaboration among the farm of the future, and other farms in the region, and other other human settlements that already exist in our state from almost 2030 years, we live in the in the newest Brazilian state. So Can Chins has 33 years old, and was a very, very poor area. So a lot of people that has no land, no roof, they was settled in our state. So we have already a lot of territories with 100 families, 150 families 200 families, living together, but struggle to be there struggle to keep their life and the young people in contact with the field in contact with the, the rural area. So the third level of collaboration. It's gonna, it's already happening among territories inside of a bio regional area. So those are the three levels of collaboration. Yeah, we need to take a walk a white a wild walk as one. Now we need to synchronize our way to walk to make your transition to dream together, but really focus on the territory and in practical way to make things happens. So, I would like to thank you for for this time and opportunity. And let's keep on our conversation. Thank you so much to unpack. Well, everything you've said. And the approach you've taken, which is obviously quite holistic, as they would say, trying to combine forestry, major conservation, food production, but also healthcare education. And providing a place where people can live in our preparatory call you talked about this new province in Brazil and that many people were sort of moved there. I guess to be out of the way or to be in a place where you could try to do something yourself. And now you're trying to combine that into this new approach on your land splitting it in all these little islands where families can start to do their own businesses. If you want to call on that, living together in these spaces. I think it's a fascinating idea and it comes to really it's really interesting from the perspective of how we as humanity can continue on this planet on the land that is available with the numbers that we will be in. The fact that you as a private property owner are opening up to all these new families to come and form a community I think is, is fascinating. I'm sure I'm not the only one if you have any questions to get if you would like to get it more clarified a little bit better understood. He's here. So this is your chance and otherwise will I'll have some more questions but maybe first to the floor. If you haven't, you can you can use chat. If you're shy, but we're sitting around a fire. We all know each other. Virtually speaking. So do feel free to just raise your hand. I'm happy to give you the floor and we go from there. Sorry zoom is asking which language I'm speaking. I did not know it was that difficult to understand. Anyway, please feel free to ask something to or to reflect or to to he's open to criticism. I see Andrew or Liora who we know. Well, I don't know which one it's me raising the hands Andrew go ahead Andrew. Okay. Great to see the project. Very interesting to see that you're following the pattern of 100 or so families occupying an area really like that. I'm a veteran of intentional communities lived in a couple of those. And one of the things that I know pops up on a regular basis is conflict. And I'd be really interested to know what strategies you might have on board for dealing with conflict in your communities. Good question Andrew and thanks for asking. I would say to you that the main strategy not to avoid because we can see the conflicts very healthy when they are handling the good matter. They are important, right. And we are shared that we're going to have a wide diversity of people there. And we will have good conflicts. But the main conflicts that I figure out in 20 years already working with and knowing different projects around the world. I've been a couple of times to Israel to try to learn a little bit about the people's process and why there's a lot, there's just five of them alive today, at least two years ago. And one of the main things is to take the property out of the table. So to be part of the project, you don't need to buy anything. You don't need to have money to buy. And since you're not going to buy anything, you're not you're not owner of anything. You have long term access to be there and working together with other families. We would need some more time to play that in details. But I'm working on the legal issues to guarantee that as a family comes and start working with no property security depends on the term of the project. It's a short term or it's a long term. You have the guarantees that you're going to be harvesting or have the returns over the investment that you have done. But it's making a lot of sense for us to take property out of the table, including myself. And we're working on a project that I don't want to be the owner in 35 years in 40 years. So I need to getting out of the property as the community anyhow started to have a co-management system without being owner of a specific piece of the land. Did I answer your question, Andrew? I think you answered part of it. Okay. And maybe maybe there's a longer conversation to be had a different time about what happens when people move into a place of I've heard it called non-trivial reactivity. I would love to learn from you. Non-trivial reactivity would be when someone is so upset with someone else that they have lost their ability to think in a constructive way and just go into an obstinate place of seeking revenge. That would be an example of non-trivial reactivity. Were you the one or no? I want to ask. Hello, Miguel. Can you hear me? Yes, Miguel, I hear you. Okay. I thought your presentation was extremely interesting. Thank you. I've never seen the sort of an ecological project sort of like framed this way with so many components on like that you're trying to incorporate. But I have a question, you know, how does the process of like onboarding these families into your land work? Like how do you recruit them? And how do you ensure that all these families are there to contribute to the cost rather than just to find an alternative for housing? Because it seems like they've been displaced by the government from some previous region and now they're in this new region. And it's a tough situation for them, of course. And they might just see the land as an opportunity to find somewhere to go live. So how would you ensure that you're recruiting people that are actually there with the intention to contribute to your project and what the community's project, not your project? But yeah, that's my question. Okay. At the beginning, I thought that I asked my example from Sao Paulo, from a huge city, starting a dream to be living again in Armenife Nature. I thought that that kind of families would be the main focus. People from bigger cities that wanted to come to live in the farm. Since we started the project, we felt that there's a lot of local people that they leave there for many years. They have great local knowledge. And they also want to be part of community, but they have a lot of fears because they have 30 years of fighting or conflicts. And they need the time to trust in a new process. And what I figure out, it's not like a recruiting, selecting recruiting process. What is happening, we are making the projects grow. We are giving visibility to the projects and then we are receiving people that comes to be in the hotel as a regular tourist. People that comes with corporations to make their immersions on regenerative leadership, on all the asses, on circular economy. We are opening the hotel and the farm, the projects to local schools, to cities on the neighborhood. So since we are working on the projects, giving visibility on them, opening the space to have people coming, we are always listening to people that want to know more about how the project works. So it's a slow-moving process. And I believe that we need to be really careful in general, as I would say, to work on this onboarding, on this first commitment to be working and living together. And we need to have a very easy way out, very easy. So if you want to go, it's pretty easy. Since you don't own anything, it's easy to move or to pivot. So I would say to you that we are not recruiting. We are giving visibility and provoking interaction situations to be talking to each family or each couple, each people. How can we make the project together? And we have a structure, internal structure, which is not a business accelerator. It's a biobusiness cultivator. So we have an internal project area that starts helping the farm and the family to talk about the projects and about the investments, about the goals, about the technique, the technologies used, about the resources needed, and then to find how the project's going to move. Today, the model is the farm itself built the house. It's a very simple and elegant house made by local material and made mostly with local people that are learning to build how we build houses in the past. So the first idea is when you are a family that come, talks to the farms, defines a project to do, defines a 10 years first cycle to work together and live with the farm, and the farm builds the house inside of this project. And you have part of the project result goes to pay a kind of a condominium or a rental. So that's the way that we are working right now. Okay. Understood. Thank you. Thank you for explaining. Very interesting. And thank you for all the information you've shared with me. Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah, do talk to Andrew because Andrew and you are living in an eagle village. I think things could emerge key that you need to be aware of. There was a question in the chat from the soil region guy. I very interesting regarding the social aspects but could you also describe the plans for restoration? Like, is anyone managing the restoration project itself? When we define the 24 Island, each Island of 10 actor has, we will have two actors of agroforestry. So we started to work in an island with 10 actors of agroforest. So we have one island all covered with the agroforest system. It's the business of this island that the river Island is the hotel, the business, the agroforest Island has 10 actors of agroforest system. And we already started four to five years ago. So we are learning a lot with this system and we are. And in every new island we have two actors. That's the basic of the concept. We have two actors of the, of the, of agroforest system. Besides the, the, let's call the root sales, the root system of the agroforest with no animals with no cattle raising. And the other system which has more, more economical and logical way, which is the one that I showed with the cattle and with the tick trees. We have four islands with that model with, with some 40 actors of this prototype. Since the trees are already 40 years old and 10 meters high, we are already working with the animals making, making their role in the system. So all the projects that we have in the, in the farm, half of the farm is natural, natural reforestation. It's a protected legal area, as I mentioned. The other half, we're going to have 30% of that productive productivity area with productive forests, which will convert in 70% of our area of forests. But I remember in the conversation, the land was quite degraded. You said in the beginning of your presentation, this is the tropics, just letting go and it regenerates itself quite fast. Is that, is that what you mean with the natural areas? There's no active restoration there other than letting go and allowing the Amazon forest, I guess. Now, half of the farm, it's, it's, it's a natural, it's already preserved. So we have the farm that already forests that are basically native forests that are having problems with fire every other year. We are now surrounded by sawing being huge farms. It's, it has created this equilibrium on the area. So fires are coming more frequently now. This half part of the, the fire, it's a native forest that we need to protect it, not make anything else. So we are making all those big with tractors to try to avoid the fire to jump into the forest. The other half of the farm is, as I mentioned, we need to have techniques and use technology to speed up production with natural restore resource and no chemical dependence. Yeah. And so you're, you're, you're basically building fire buffers. If the fire come from the soy farms, you're trying to slow it down by making these corridors and anything you're doing, particularly focused on the pesticide pollution coming from those farms. Or is that, does nature take care of it and where you are? You know, we, until now, the waters are really clear on our rivers, but we starting to have chemicals from the soybeans reaching the subsoil and reaching the river. So we still have time to work. We are working on that too. We created a public committee to work with those big farmers to show them how the chemicals that are reaching the water. So we're working on that and we still have time to recover or to avoid a bigger problem. Okay. So region guy again, are the two hectare agro forestry areas islands? Or are they continuous contiguous in some way connected with corridors? I did not understand well the question. So is the, are the, that's the required two hectares of agro forestry on each island? Are those areas connected with each other in any way, or are the islands within the islands? I guess they are first step island within the island. Second step in the division of the islands corridors connecting them. Okay. And then a big question from Harry. You're using teak trees that are endemic to India. How do you protect against invasive species that are unbalancing ecosystems? Some plants might be fine on a small scale, but disastrous when scaled up. It's not the idea to scale up. It's not a monoculture. It's just part of the system. So the teak, as the eucalyptus, as we can have the soy being organically produced, it's not monoculture and not to scale up. So doing that, we are all taking care of balancing diversity in species inside of the model. All right. And then in the chat, Frank Holtzman is offering some, I guess some, some experience or expertise on water remediation projects. I'm going to try to get in touch. Thanks Frank. I'd love to talk. One point that I think it's important to mention is that when we see the farm as a business, it's not a good business. When you see the hotel as a hotel, it's not a good hotel business. When we see my consulting company for 20 years as a conventional consulting company, it's not a good business. But today, combining a hotel, a farm, and a consulting company, we're starting to see an integrated, sustainable business with future perspective. So that's really important because since I did not took the decision to have soybean monoculture, I have great costs. I have a lot of new variables to deal with. And I don't have the productivity that the agribusiness has. So I don't have a business as usual on a very well. It's not a good farm when you look at the conventional business as usual way. The hotel itself, our plan to do hotel is to have the hotel book 20% of its time with people from the corporation that comes to make their immersion 80% of the time it's community working and trust building local process. So we're not looking for, and we're going to have three families making this business running on human scale basis. So we do not compare ourselves to conventional hotels that need to have 70, 70, 80% of booking that needs to be fighting against pricing on booking our Airbnb. It's not the way that we see things on that way. So that's important when you combine a multi business and multi dimension value building business with a consulting company that it's where the money the main money still coming from the consulting, but gradually converting to the hotel to the farm and to the families that are generating value, leaving and working together there. That's a very important perspective to have. Yeah, yeah, it's it's the this is what I remember from our conversation. The project itself is built up out of so many different value creating exercises that it becomes economically viable. And none of them need to be doing great for the project to survive. That's basically what you were saying right. The sum of the whole and each individual part is not good enough will not be valued will not create enough value to maintain the entire system it's the, it's the combination of everything together that will make a system that will flourish. That's how you describe it right. I think that's a fascinating idea. So, you've inspired Hannah that her dreams are possible Hannah your dreams are possible. And then so region a guy again. It's an interesting question. Is this a true ecosystem restoration community. I'm not even sure as director of the foundation that supports them if there is a definition, or is it an eco village that you're creating which is I think what Andrew and your their experience can inform you a little about that's that's an interesting question. That's, that's the combination of both right. It's integrated system that integrated integrated the product the production in harmony with nature in the community building around it. So that's the, that's the good combination how can we produce in harm with nature in nature, using good technology, how you community building and integrate human as part of a big system again. Restore include that there is a social restoration on going there, our main, our main challenge in my region. It's not the environment degradation it's the social degradation. So it's, it needs to be a combination of social eco village with a restoration and production plan. Maybe, maybe, sorry, there's an interesting question about spiritualism spirit spirituality, but and correct me if I'm wrong you're Andrew. I'm standing there to be some form of joint governance of the, the 500 hectares or is there not an intent to have government just you talked about shared services. And then there's these 24 islands where people basically run an agricultural business or anything else they might be wanting to do right next to the two hectares of Agroforestry. So are there a way that you envision decision making taking place amongst the 25, you know, what is it almost 100 families that are going to live there. That's that's one of the basics to search fall for decision making and governance process which is collective. That's that's the basic of the model that did all the decisions and governance need to be decentralized. We are, we are, we are studying in the business of the consulting business networks with all these methodologies of open organizations with your democracy, sociology and all these lean technologies, and we are sure that we need to use a distributed network governance model. But we're going to be working on that model as people arrive in and with with short cycle of learning and practice, but towers that direction Peter towers to a decentralized and collective governance model. Okay, there's some interesting examples from the Netherlands on decentralized food networks collaborating around cities. And there's some interesting gamification theories being developed by an organization. John has also worked with called amped that you might find interesting to look into. It's, it's, it's not, you know, we're so used to governance being a sort of a council coming together and making decisions. There is, there is decision making but it's decentralized things happen from sort of a gamification type of approach to things like, you know, 17 year old 16 year olds playing a game together. On the global internet and coming to decisions without sitting down to make decisions. That's the type of thing you're interested in. Yes. There you go. We should try to connect. I think I can have some gen body spirituality. There is a question about please say a bit more about the dimension. Okay. So, since the beginning, we started to make rituals of silence of meditation of circular dancing of walking in the forest that trying to really be a quiet walk in connection with nature. My mother is a, is a meditation teacher for a lot of years so she sometimes bring groups of elderly to be to be in quiet and silence experience with us. If from from three years, three years ago, we started with the indigenous of the Akri and Peru, we started to make this ayahuasca rituals. So they take place with with the, the, the, the, they take place every three months, we have closed groups to 20 up to 20 to 25 people. The indigenous that make this, it's a tea made of two herbs, one that comes from the masculine energy and the other one for the family energy. And we make this ayahuasca rituals during a week every four, three to four months. So that's another example of spirituality development. And now so we are using for two years, not to the calendar, the Gregorian calendar, not the mechanical way of deal with time. We're using the law of time, we're using the lunar synchronary as way to deal with time deal with a more artistical and natural time and less and economical and linear time. And we do consider all these law of time and sync lunar synchronary to deal with with time, a base of the spirituality and reconnection develop and young. That's from the person who asked the question. Visible in the video. There are no more questions. If you have something you'd like to discuss a concern you have. Marcus asking about amped. I'll put it in the chat. I'll look for their website. Mark amped. It's they're they're in Utrecht. Marcus on the other. So he knows where that is. I'm working on local food networks and trying to figure out how to make them much more effective without strong central governance systems. Building cooperatives or, you know, the way food currently works is there's a central buying organization and that distributes. How can you decentralize that stuff and make it much more sustainable. Fascinating organization amped. Anyone else have questions or something you would like to bring in. Or shall we put out the fire and come back next month. Yes, Eduardo. Welcome by the way to the. Well, I'm from Brazil also, and I have exchanged a few messages with me and I hope we can further contribute to this. The ERC projects in Brazil. But I'm starting also project in. In near brazilia. 60 kilometers from brazilia. We call paradise on earth. And it's 800. Actors. We plan to build education on research project. We already have quite developed institution there. But what I would like to ask the army is how technically how people that arrived in form of the future. What's the relationship between form of the future and the people that arrived since they don't own the land. Do you have any contract that no binds people to the place or how do you keep them in the land. Because no, it's not very nice. I felt this knowing our own farm and people arrive with their train, and then they go away when they have enough knowledge. So what kind of relationship no business relationship to have with the families that arrived and want to work in the land. I think the first is to have a entrepreneur entrepreneur relationship. And basically we are we are generating value together, working projects together. So the main contractor it's it's entrepreneurship or business or value generation contract. So if you come to the farm to produce honey, because you're an expert on honey you have heard about the farm of the future. We do have two islands there, 20 actors that are located in a area that has a lot of flowers during the whole year. So we can start working on a project. It can take months or years to be well developed well designed at the honey projects in the island that Eduardo is going to be the pioneer. And there's a lot of interaction among us between us doing this process. So we build trust, we design a project with a common future vision. We define our roles and responsibility with the project. You are going to be make the movie and I really do want to leave here. And then we're going to sign a contract in the case of this example of honey production. It can be a five years contract because we can start producing less than one year. You can start producing honey different than a long term project as for example, cattle raising or forest. So the first contract is entrepreneur entrepreneur contracts. And then there is site contracts that regulate some some activities for example, the range that you're going to pay for the house. It's not a regular rental because it's attached to the business and project main contract, but it's a rental project. It's a rental contract. So that's the way we are doing. So we don't have any, we don't want to keep anybody. You want that me and the other people want to be part and want to be here because we want to be here. That's why I mentioned that to get out needs to be really easy. Really careful to come in really easy to get out to exit. When you build a house, for instance, who is investing in the house? The person who is arriving or do you have a joint venture like you invest part of the money in building the houses or any other facilities in the farm? Both both can work by now. Since you are on a organic developing process, the farm is being able to as the family arrives, we have some principles of bio architecture. So we have like that one list of 10 materials that we're going to use. We already have the architecture plants that are modules and variations, but there is a kind of a standardization with a lot of options. If you are a couple, if you want to have kids, if you're already a family of five or six people, if you want to have to work with the hotel having receiving guests in your property in your house. So there is a lot of possibilities, but inside of a list of materials inside of some predefined plants, because it's very costly. We are more than 1000 from 1000 kilometers from Brazil. The logistics here is very, very, very expensive. So if you need to bring construction material from outside, that's why we're using the TIC. The TIC, we have a farm one hour from here in Pará that we buy the TIC that is not good. We buy the TIC that is not going for exports and we produce our own walls using the TIC. And then we planted the TIC tool in 20 years, have own local material to produce the house. So by now we are being able to build the house as the family arrives. But I feel that we can have a partnership with some company, H3 company, that works with bioconstructions and wants to help the farm to accelerate anyhow the constructions of the house. We may do a partnership with the family. It's open for that too, but I don't think it's a good decision because the way the better decision is to focus the investment with the family in the value generation and not in costs. Okay, thank you. You're welcome to do any other question. The only reason John's still here, it's 2.30 in the morning almost where you are. And I think someone else from China is here also still. Heroic efforts. Anyone else have an idea, a question or something that I saw. John, you know, if you're from this area, it's young, but it's from somewhere else is John. Comparing that to Plum Village, what you're trying to achieve with a piece of wisdom from Henry George about private property in the chat. Can I can I speak I'm so slow at writing. Go ahead, please. We're at around a fire. I'm just so, you know, I'm delighted. And the, the beauty of the mandala that that the spiritual mandala the medicine wheel. I think it's all medicine wheel. It seems and to give everyone that autonomy that wonderful sense of, wow, there is something greater still that we're turning to we're not trying to make it all happen ourselves, you know, we were releasing to the beauty of it all. And so I just feel that that's the joy in the beauty. That's a lot of the message in the Plum Village tradition and inclusiveness and diversity and da da da. And their way of governance is based on how well they speak with one another deep, deep listening, and then wholesome speech, encouraging speech. Yeah. Was she from Plum Village? No, no. I just have visited I I'm not monastic or 100% there. You know, I do. I see there. I was trying to say something. I have a hand raised by Sue, but Jan, just a shameless plug. This is exactly what we're learning at ERC. This letting go is crucial. And if you have time, I did it. I was privileged to do a TED talk, TED X talk here at the university, maybe Kafka share the link where I indeed talk about the formula and how fast things can then progress towards that better path. Sue H. from Portugal. Hello. Thank you. I'm very grateful for all the information and knowing more about the project. A few years ago, the government of Brazil, I think I may be wrong with this committed with a local company to put electricity into the Amazon. And when we visited, there were lots of electrical wires going across water. And often the walk these electrical wire fell during storms and, you know, electrocuted, whatever else. Are you, are you planning so are you even going to use electricity? How does it work? I'm just curious about both electricity. Intelligent construction. And practical things about food for families. How is all that going to work? Thank you. You're muted. Sorry. Like Sue, one of the dimensions is renewable energy. The farm itself, it started the projects as a carbon positive farm. So everything that we do, we make some possible calculations to keep the farm on a neutral or carbon carbon positive. For an example, on the cottages on the lodges that we have, we have no walls. And since there is no way to put air conditioning there, because we don't have air conditioning, we use the air conditioned by the forest. So we made a project where the cottages, the lodges, the bungalows are located inside of the forest. They are building on a techno way or the air circulates a lot. Is it very, very, very fresh? No, it's not very fresh. Is it very hot? It's not very hot. There is no walls, but we don't have air conditioning. We don't have electrical shower. It's very, it's a very good experience to take shower on a natural water. So we are avoiding to use a lot of electricity. That's the first, the first step. Today we are using, we are on a very, on the area that the energy is very, very expensive, a very, very poor quality. So we use, we have a lot of problems of burnings equipment because there is a lot of oscillations. What do we have today? It's a prototype in one of the islands using lithium lithium batteries with solar, solar panels. So we are making this prototype to the, the, the, the, the lithium, the lithium batteries, they have pros and cons to us. But you're using that to move also the batteries in can have the energy moving to every island of 10 actors and three families may, may be living with 20 solar panels and two, two lithium batteries. We don't have that much wind here. So wind is not an option for us. And the rivers that we have where I am, they, they, they cannot have even that small turbines. They, they, it's not an option to use the water as an energy source. So we're, today we're looking for the solar and now so probably these projects using methane gas that comes from some process internal process. It's another issue that we're starting to study the methanol produced for natural process to produce energy. I was wondering what that was. I thought you had a big fan next to your face, but apparently it's the natural flow of air. Your hair was moving. All right. Carol, did you want to say something because you were on music for a second. You're muted now in case you're wondering. No, I guess not. I see no more questions. I think there's a few people who started ERC initiatives around the world listening probably with great interest in how you're trying to organize a new community. And some relationships with indigenous knowledge there. I just can't help but notice our last speaker, Sal is here. I was also trying to work with indigenous knowledge then in the South Southern Dakotas, the Black Hills of South Dakota, right, Sal. Thanks for being here again. We're going to put out the fire, but I see John turning on this camera. So maybe a few final words at 230 in the morning from John. I guess it's just a pleasure again to see everybody and thank you so much for sharing your, your work in Brazil. It's exciting and interesting. And I think that what we're seeing is that all over the world, there's just kind of different responses. But on the other hand, they, they fit with with the place. And I think this is, this is correct. We can't expect to have ideas about some places. You know, from elsewhere, we don't need to have centralized thought and say like we're going to homogenize all the, all the places. What we really need is for the people to, to who understand their environments and are looking at principles to apply these principles everywhere. And so this is exciting and interesting to see this and, and I think on the, the other thing that comes to mind is that this sort of, you know, unhappiness or whatever's happening in the, in the, in the world today, there just seems to be so much trauma. And, and, you know, we really need to counteract this, this kind of unhappiness for ourselves and achieve some sort of lightheartedness going forward because we need to, we need to be happy. We need to find joy. So one of the things that I've been looking at and a lot of the places where we're working closely together with different groups is the idea of cultural stages where you can have music and theater and poetry and dancing and movies and lectures and so on. This also ends up attracting people to the place so that, that they come to learn about ecological restoration. And it, it, I think we need to figure out how to celebrate. And another thing that the Native Americans have been talking about is ceremonies. Somehow we need to kind of think about this, like the Native Americans often were talking to me about the loss in some sort of modern cultures of like things that had been transitional moments for young people as they as they grow up and, you know, there needs to be really some celebration of this and it's kind of gotten lost sort of in things and people are not really talking in many cultures about this, but it seems to be a huge loss for people and they're kind of losing their way. They don't really know where they are in their lives. And certainly I have to say now looking at 72, I'm going to be 72 in the new Lunar New Year. So I'm 71 now. And in the new Lunar New Year and I, I think that something has happened to me because I used to seem I seem to have pretended that I was never going to get old for a long time. And suddenly I'm unable to do that. I don't know, you know, like my knee was hurting the other day and I'm like, Oh my God, I've never had that before. You know, this is ridiculous my knee is hurting. And I think that suddenly I have to, I have to just like take take more awareness of the fact that, like, God, it's great to be alive. Every moment is precious. And, you know, we're here. We're alive. We have a chance to do things. We're called to do something now if we're if we don't understand. You know, I kind of I like comedies. When I look at movies because I really can't take some of the some of the violence and other stuff so I just like to watch these comedies. I'm looking at this one and they said it's a hilarious film with Jim Carrey. I don't know if you like Jim Carrey movies but he's he's he's looking he's into spare and he's saying I need a sign. I'm like, how many signs do you need, you know, like if, if, if, if a hurricane takes out an entire city. Is that a good enough sign, you know, or if there's, do you need, do you need to have an undersea earthquake that creates a tsunami that takes out multiple nuclear power plants. That's not good enough, you know, I mean, like, oh, do you need, do you need fire tornadoes I mean you know what, what is it going to take for humanity to grasp where we are in human history at this moment, and we're called now to to really understand what we're seeing. This is serious that we can understand this. It's not. It's not an impossibility to understand what we're seeing. And what I what I've been talking about with the Academy of Science and the Yellow River. Commission is that we can see from this one example that if you lose the vegetation, then you're you've altered the physics on the planet the surface temperatures are are increased. The wind direction vortex activity altered all of this. And when you reverse this, and you see that in evolutionary time, the, the bio biology, self organized to alter the physics. And now it's up to us to understand that we can restore the vegetation and restore the soils and protect and increase biodiversity. And in doing that, we're restoring the the balance that helps mitigate and adapt to human induced climate changes that helps to restore the natural equilibrium which we have enjoyed throughout our lives which created all the the life support systems on the earth and you know the purpose of life I've said this repeatedly for a long time is not to go shopping. The archaeologists who who come in the future are going to be looking and saying, what were they thinking about. How can we go to this particular strata in in in our core sampling, and there's just a toxic layer of trash, you know, like, what are we thinking. I'm afraid, you know, we need to understand this quickly, so that when the future scientists look back they say that was the moment that they understood and and restored the balance not that that they carried on and just created huge toxic layers. So, be happy that you're all part of of this this transition that we're required to do you know and and celebrate it and help the young people see that their future is dependent on this understanding. And that mass collaboration and mass participation means we don't have to sit around waiting for governments and international agencies to somehow do this. And, you know, having just gone to the 28th convening of the parties of the United Nations framework convention on climate change I do not hold your breath for for those institutions that have actually been created to maintain the status quo to somehow transform themselves into into into something else. Humanity is going to have to do it. Everybody is required to understand this and to participate. I think you guys are all early adopters, and we just need to play more music, have more dances, and, you know, get everybody out there celebrating this, because there's no other way further than this we're looking at terrible violence now. It's it's Stone Age activities. Anyway, thanks so much for having me. And I'm very happy to stay up. Next month again then john if you're still in China. I'd like to do a sort of a formal closure so we could also formally end the video, but feel free to continue the conversation. My family is waiting for me to join them in dinner. I'd like to point out I'd like to thank you for the presentation, but also for all his insights, thoughts, ideas and and and trying to find a pathway in the place where you are, which I think is is incredible and the complexity of everything you thought through is is enormous so congratulations on that key. And thanks for being here. I'd like to point out that there is a donate button to geese project on our website. He calls it positive energy. I call it hard euros and us these he needs them still because so much of it is still in development. If you can't don't worry about it. It's, I hope he at least inspired you and that you can do something with that inspiration. Next month we'll be back. I don't know with whom yet, but we'll figure it out in the next few days. And more inspiration to follow every single month. Thanks for staying up late or getting up early if you did. And see you next time.