 Hello everyone to the fireside chat. I'm sorry you didn't get to hear my amazing guitar playing but another time. So today we're going to go all the way to Borneo and Chan is going to tell us about his camp and I hope we'll all learn about this and I have been to Borneo but on the other side so I think he's about a thousand more than a thousand kilometers on the other side of the island from where I was but I can tell you that it's really seriously impacted there by palm oil plantations and some of the things that I've learned about this are really quite challenging. I'd also like to tell you that I'm in in Mexico. This is a beautiful place, Rancho La Puerta in Tacate just across the border when you come south from San Diego and it's just a beautiful place been here more than 40 years. It's similar I guess in to second in that but today of course it's all Borneo so I'm going to turn it back to Erin who will then introduce the thing and I'll be here with you the whole time. Thank you John. So as we to give you a little framework for how we organize our fireside chats we'll ask you to hold your questions until after Chan's presentation and we would love it if you asked your question in person by raising your hand either on your video and we'll try to capture you in the speaking order there or by raising your hand virtually on Zoom. The session will last about an hour and free field is feel free to stay afterwards for an open discussion. Some quick updates about what's been going on at ecosystem restoration camps generally. Camp Acura in Australia is one of our partners who has been recently impacted by severe flooding in their region. They are safe but the roads around them have been badly damaged and they've been experiencing landsides and trees down. Our partners at Camp Chokaya in Bolivia found volunteer to start their baseline study for understanding the impacts of their restoration activities and they will be collecting data in March and April. At Camp Altiplano in Spain they've been planting over 8,000 trees this winter and by the end of March they plan to reach 10,000 trees. We also want to send our congratulations to Camp Keti in India for satellite hosting the Fifth World Congress on agroforestry. Some upcoming events that you might be interested in a place near or far away from you. We have several camp experiences coming up in March in Brazil, Mexico and Uganda. In April our camp partner Green Pop is hosting a reforest fest as well as our partners in France at Camp Vier-Soulet will be having a camp experience in April. So if you have space on your agenda and are able to visit one of them in person it would be wonderful to have you there and now without further ado I will introduce Chan and we're very happy to have you here Chan. I'm going to make sure please make sure you take off your mute so that we can hear you and we can see your video great and then I will go ahead and advance your slides. Yes, should I start now? Yes, please go ahead. Basically Camp Doku started based on the advocacy that we had regarding bamboo and vertebrate grass to mitigate climate change. This journey started in 1995 and it proceeded to 1999 when we started a large-scale civic culture design of bamboo plantation to study in depth and this was a project sponsored by the government to recognize the challenges of climate change. You have the next slide. So in 2020 we managed to secure a piece of strategic land. This piece of land that you are seeing now used to be a timber camp. It's a logging camp about four decades ago and it has been in this use for more than three decades and we were very fortunate during this time of crisis that this piece of property came into the marketplace and we were fortunate to have secured it. The significance of this piece of land for us to develop Camp Doku is that there is a small rainforest on these 10 acres of land which comprise about six acres and of course the four acres which was depleted and more or less cleared. We have basically designed it using permaculture design to establish it into a camp setting whereby there will be a food forest and also a kitchen garden that will provide for the campers when they come here. So we're now in the process of putting in the infrastructure. The beauty is that on this piece of property you can walk straight into a rainforest and you can experience a rainforest with all its biodiversity with all the species of trees and fauna and of course the extensive microbial life that live within the soil system. This is very unique for us because it is on the private property, a small private property but it sits in a huge, huge land base where there are what we call wildlife reserve center, forestry reserve center plus a lot of degradation and destruction for the land to be converted into use in terms of plantation and agriculture. So what we have been doing through this piece of land, actually more than six years ago we have been here advocating to the land owners to sign up a sustainability pledge to work towards restoration of this beautiful piece of rainforest that is basically a badly so-called chop and cut and so it's just like a man with a bad haircut, but you still get good sightings of all the beautiful rainforests. Next video. So these are, because of the deforestation, as you can see the places where it has been cleared the land is already degraded and compacted and what you have left is basically clay, hardened clay and no fertility. So if you look behind in this picture at the back where the rainforest is, you see that top 10 inches where the microbial life still exists. So on the side of where we have developed all this water catchment area to basically be run off from the mountain slope and also the collection of rainwater. Next slide. So our mission is to recharge groundwater assets and to basically create the microclimate to restore degraded landscape and ecosystem. So the advocacy for us is for use bamboo and vertebral grass which began in 1995. The bamboo that you see behind us is called Bendro Calamus Gigantius. It was planted in our forest research institute more than 100 years ago by a renowned botanist. It was planted by default. The botanist was in Burma near the Indian border collecting bamboo samples for documentation. He fell sick and had malaria and was rushed over to Malaya in those days to recuperate. While he was recuperating, he did most of the drawings by hand of the species of this Bendro Calamus Gigantius. Alongside the branches and leaves and whatever he brought, he also brought some seeds. So that seed was discarded into the backyard which is where this bamboo is to be destroyed, but it survived. So this is proof of evidence that a man planted bamboo can survive over 100 years. Next slide. This is a bamboo growth or rather a small farm of about two acres which I personally planted in the year 2007 and this was a degraded paddy field which was abandoned and again we were fortunate. My associate was fortunate to purchase this land and then allowed me to plant the bamboo and every bamboo that was planted here was basically to understand the different environment that it can survive and how it can play a significant role in mitigating climate change by sequesting CO2 from the atmosphere. So this species of bamboo is called Bendro Calamus Esper, planted in 2007 on another island in Malaysia called Langkawi. Next slide. In 1999, since 1995, when I came back to Malaysia, we were friends of myself, we were advocating the government to look at the possibility or sustainability for our Pamoa plantation and we were very fortunate that the then Prime Minister agreed to this endeavor and this project was started by our Foreign Research Institute in Malaysia where we look into the civic culture of designing companion cropping and to study soil, to study microclimate, water asset management and also biological resources. So this project was embarked in 1999. We completed planting in 2000, just over year 2000 or not 300 acres of land in different sizes of plots. They were not in one single plot but scattered all over a very large Pamoa plantation so this picture was taken in the year 2009 and you can see the relationship between the companion cropping of the bamboo and also the health and productivity of the palm oil that is not being managed by using external inputs like chemical inputs. So this is one of the evidence that we had but sadly in the year 2010 we were asked to remove this bamboo plantation because the degraded land that we work on turned into fertile land which could be used for planting palm oil again and as a result of that, a partner and friend of mine, both of us purchased this bamboo plantation and we sadly removed this plantation. I mean every bamboo that was living there, we dug it out and we removed it and we sent it to other parts of Malaysia to be replanted. Next, the beauty of planting bamboo with ecosystem on the left here is an abandoned palm oil plantation here on the island of Sarawak and in 2019 we planted this bamboo and as you can see there was originally a small stream but there were no water flowing through it. Today you have a water system, water asset from the ground flowing through this place. Next slide. So the question is why do we choose bamboo or why vertigo grass? The beauty of bamboo from years of research and hands-on working in planting programs that bamboo can establish microclimate very quickly. It is a fast-growing giant grass in that way and it reaches to the sky and photosynthesis takes place and within a matter of as fast as eight to ten months after planting and the clumps will shoot out though the first generation of quite small about one inch in diameter but they will rapidly grow to its required size and it's able to create this symbiotic relationship of photosynthesis bringing down the necessary so-called extrudates and whatnot for the soil system. We also notice over the years that when we work with land that is dedicated and when we plant bamboo there are still a lot of land that is not under cover and vertigo grass which is a very ancient grass found in India and widely distributed now in Southeast Asia is very fast-growing. It's not an invasive grass because it does not produce any seed so it has to be planted through vegetative reproduction and this grass has a lot of use and purpose in the sense that the root system of this grass can grow to three to five meter in length on a vertical basis and what it does is that it can recharge ground water very quickly as fast as within three months of the planting so when you have a land that is totally degraded and compacted and solid it is not easy to grow any other crops however the vertigo grass which is also a drought resistant is able to survive without much nutrient. Next, this bamboo is planted in a backyard here in the city of Puching in a handicap center which has about half an acre of land and they invited us to come in. We have the program called the power of 10 initiative. Through this initiative what we have been doing for a long time is we provide one free bamboo seedlings to plant and in return after over a year we request for 10 bamboo seedlings to be given back to the community. Now we have not gone out to really advocate for people to plant bamboo on social media or in any other form of media. It has always been on the world of mouth basis. People have basically come to us after hearing what we have done and we have basically given them this species of bamboo called gambusa bitchiana to basically allow them to have a hands-on experience with bamboo. Through this program, our objective is to create a value system, a change in an outlook about ecological resources which nature has given to us. Rather than looking at it from a GDP standpoint about how much money you can make, we look at what it can do in the lives of people to create a paradigm shift. So the growth of our community has been very slow but very firm because people who are interested in making money fast will ultimately be very disappointed with us because we are not about making money but we are about creating the value in the soil, creating the value in the lives of people around us. So the growth of our community has been slow but very firm and very solid and very resolute in terms of our objective to mitigate climate change and to restore ecosystems. Next, the beauty of bamboo leaf apart from microclimate is that when you plant bamboo which is a drought resistant crop, bamboo shed its leaves twice a year and these leaves become organic matter which are an important resource for the soil microbial life and the first thing that you will notice after planting bamboo on the degraded land that is totally compacted or destroyed, you will see that through the bamboo leaves it will create the first level of return of microbial life. Through our naked eyes, of course, we cannot see the microbial activity, the fungi, the mycorrhiza, we cannot see this but we can definitely see the arrival of earthworms. The earthworms are the first tier level so-called our partners in this journey to rehabilitate degraded land and the ample supply of the bamboo leaves is basically food source for them. Next, so as you can see, this is my finger pointing down to the soil, that soil about three years ago was basically compacted and there's nothing to show about it but through the bamboo leaf the microbial life has not returned so on the left you see bamboo that been chopped off due to the interest in bamboo planting now in the year 2021 onwards. We have been expanding our nursery into larger areas, in this case this nursery is about 20 hectares so we have to fast track rather than from the seedlings and from the planting material. We basically remove the bamboo clump and split it up and then transport immediately to the other side for replanting. This is because the demand for bamboo now is very high and planting material are quite limited especially for this particular species called bamboosa bichiana. Next, as you can see, we are harvesting the bamboo from within the palm oil plantation. One of our greatest so-called following of people involved in bamboo are people from the palm oil industries, mainly small holders. Most of these small holders basically have seen the devastation. I mean these are people who live with the rainforest and were so-called attracted to the economic benefits and they have allowed their land to be deforested and then planted back with palm oil. However, it does not seem that easy because big plantations have all the resources to manage and to have efficiency but small holders do not have that kind of resources and more than two-thirds of our palm oil plantations are actually in the hands of these small holders. However, their acreage of production is not very productive and as a result of them, many of our members who have joined us in this journey of our so-called restoration of ecosystem started to try out and say, why not? Let's see what it can do and as a result of planting the bamboo, they can see the soil change, they can see the result of what we have experienced when we did this big, large plantation system back in 1999 and as a result of that, they have really so-called pulled out their sleeves and got their hands dirty to be involved with us by producing enough planting material to expand to more areas in our country. Next, as you can see in this picture, this particular plantation, it's a small holder plantation, it's not very big but the area that they have given to palm oil is 100,000 hectares and but this particular section of this site is only about in the region of 200 acres. So if you can see on the back, we are sitting at the boundary of the rainforest. These are primary rainforests with waterfalls and ecosystem that are unbelievable to see. So past the next hill, you can see the mountain slope is basically what we called, it has been locked before, so this is a regrowth. So you have a primary rainforest, you have a regrowth and then you have palm oil and in between all of this is the bamboo growing and now what is happening is that you can see to the soil on the ground over here, the bamboo through the bamboo leaf have created this new microbial life and so we have a lot of physical evidence of this nature whereby many of these small holder plantations which is now being is being evolved into a not as a monocrop, evolved into an agroforestry setting with bamboo and also rainforest trees. Because we are near to the rainforest, we are able to collect seeds of very so-called endemic species of trees which are now very rare and so this is what we have been doing also. We also have a small nursery with over 30,000 rainforest tree species that we collect and we do our best to replant but because all our so-called members are individuals, they are not big corporations, they are basically small families and so they do what they can do to basically help in the restoration program. Next, this is in Sabah. Prior to the pandemic, the community of small holders of palm oil plantations heard about our work in Sarawak and about 30 of them flew over to visitors to see firsthand what has been done with bamboo and fortunately that was just before the pandemic started and after they are returned to Sabah, they organized themselves to basically expand the bamboo program and sadly the borders were closed until now and we have not been able to supply them the quantities of bamboo seedlings that they need. However, we have resources of vertebral grass in Sabah and the program started through the vertebral grass planting within the palm oil plantations. Next, so basically we basically consider vertebral grass as a resource for below ground and bamboo as a resource for above ground so they complement each other and they can be planted closely together. There are so many ways of civic culture design of using the plant and their plant physiology to complement each other to basically restore soil health. Our target always has been when we enter any degraded area is to develop soil health with minimal cost, with minimal human involvement except the planet and to allow both the vertebral and the bamboo to grow in a natural way. Next slide, we have the next slide please. I think we're on the left side. Chan is that the one? Are you seeing the same one? Yeah, this is the final one. So basically this is a picture taken in the year 2007 in the plantation which was developed in 1999. It was at the time I recovered from my stroke. I was bedridden for two years and I went back to this plantation to negotiate for protecting it to remain on this property as a showcase to the world what has been done. But sadly that negotiation went through until 2010 when we have to make the offer to purchase this plantation and to sadly remove it. It took us two years to dig out everything from the soil because the condition was that no bamboo should be sitting on the property. In fact they tried to remove this in the period of four years to many methods to destroy this bamboo plantation but it was not successful because they did not understand the physiology of the bamboo and how to work with it because the bamboo is a very, how we call it, it's a very accommodating plant. The only condition is don't try to harm it, work with it and it will work with you. So we were able to remove it in a very gentle manner and to replace them all over the country again in different sites. So thank you for this short presentation. Thank you so much Chen and how interesting I think what you are mentioning about trying to work with what you have and not against it is a really important strategy for a lot of the restoration of the work that we're doing whether it comes in the form of bamboo that doesn't want to be harmed or other plants that have already well established themselves in places. So thanks for sharing that part.