 we'll go on to speak of you. Your life now speaking. Your life now. Okay, thank you Christoph. You're welcome. Okay. Hello everyone and thank you for coming to the ecosystem restoration camps. First online symposium partnership with the UN decade of ecosystem restoration and biodiversity for a livable climate. This event was inspired by Jim Laurie and the UN decade for ecosystem restoration because we wanted to put forward some tangible visions and milestones for how we can achieve the restoration of the earth for decades. And we're here today with a lovely group of speakers. We have John DeLew who's the founder of the ecosystem restoration camps movement from California next to his lovely fire. We have Daniel Christian Wall who focuses on regeneration of all kinds, holistically looking at lots of different elements, political, ecological, social and how they all inter link. We've got Jim Laurie who's a restoration ecologist from biodiversity for a livable climate. We have Tim Christopherson who is from the UN decade of ecosystem restoration as you can tell by his lovely background. Welcome Tim. We have Precious Peary who focuses on holistic grazing and regeneration of ecosystems across Africa. My name's Ashley. I work for the ERC, the ecosystem restoration camps foundation and have done so since 2016 when I watched John Lee's documentaries and it completely changed my view of humanity and our role in how we take care of the earth and interact with it. So thank you all for coming today. I really hope that you're excited by this event. We're going to be starting off whilst we wait for a few more people to arrive with some music by a band called Terra Livre who are based in Portugal. So without further ado I'm going to play you one of their songs now and you must forgive me because this is quite technical and I'm sure there are big things that take me a little bit of time to get right but here we go. I'm going to start it from the beginning. This song is called Miracle. We are Terra Livre from Cintra Portugal. We are a music project that uses music as a tool to remember, to restore and to respect nature. We want to give thanks for being part of this event and celebrating this day with everybody. This is Miracle and I hope you enjoy our blissful message and this is our little part from this part of the world. That was really beautiful. Thank you to the Terra Livre band for for gifting that song to us. And next we're going to go to John Lou who is going to talk about why ecosystem restoration is so important at this time in human history. So thank you John. Well hello everyone I'm at the Moksha Hills in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California and it is possible that I will disappear because we've had power outages for quite a long time. Consistently certainly in the last week or so it's gone off a year or four times but we have a generator so I might be able to come back if I disappear but it would take time to run outside and change it. So I've made a little film that I want to show but I'm so grateful that you're here and I also want to acknowledge the common land foundation and the mustard seed trust that makes it possible for me to continue to do this work and to thank everyone Ashley who's really worked hard to make this happen and all the staff and and the people at the ecosystem restoration camps and it's so exciting to see the decade of restoration begin with the United Nations after so many years and decades of working for the concept of restoration to see it becoming part of the global community is wonderful. So Ashley can you show that film? Yes I sure can. Let me just make sure I've got the right boxes ticked so we can all hear you properly yeah okay. Hello everyone I'm so grateful that you've come to this symposium this is a very important topic we're basically considering the survival of human civilization and we need to understand that this has to be a profound and nuanced conversation and we have some wonderful guests with us here on the first symposium from the ecosystem restoration camps movement in 2021. As a journalist and then as an ecological researcher over the last well 40 years of my life and even earlier as a young person going around the world I have observed that the cradles of civilization are mostly desertified and when you understand the process that human beings over historical time have reduced the biodiversity reduced the biomass and reduced the accumulation of organic matter and that this is a reversal of evolutionary succession many of the problems that we're facing are not mysterious they're the result of these particular activities. Our impact is based on our understanding of the systems if we don't understand and we don't value the role of biodiversity biomass and accumulated organic matter and we think that extracting things and manufacturing things and buying and selling things are the basis of wealth we're incentivizing the behaviors that destroy ecological function. This problem is really a myriad of problems together one of these is ecological you can see that when you reduce the biodiversity the biomass and the accumulated organic matter landscapes become drier the soil becomes less fertile and it's less beautiful less functional but this is not the only problem this leads to scarcity and in scarcity you have competition for scarce resources so this is the basis of many of the conflicts that we see around the world. We've also created this concept that scarcity is the basis of wealth and so we have people competing for the material and so this causes differentiation and stratification of the economy so you have some people who are magnificently rich I mean unbelievably rich and then you have these people who are billions of people who are desperately poor so we're creating a billionaire class for a tiny minority and a vast number of desperately poor people and we have to consider is that okay is that a way forward for human civilization and we have other problems that cascade from this so it's a ecological problem it's a security problem it's an economic problem and it's a psychological problem for individuals and it's a psychological problem for society so many of the people who are massively wealthy are miserable they're not the happiest people on the earth they're people who are clutching their material possessions and losing their souls and often you see the poorest people are the happiest people and the most generous and kind and you see people who are super wealthy and they don't really notice how other people are suffering they're considering themselves and the society then is divided instead of everybody realizing that we're all related to one another and not only related to one another but related to all life the consideration is what's best for the individual and how can can they differentiate themselves from each other rather than how can we all come together and so now we're at a point where ecologically we have the cryosphere melting we have ocean acidification and thermal expansion in the oceans as the oceans heat up we have climate changes we have changes in surface temperatures which are moving the moisture into the upper atmosphere rather than maintaining it in the lower hydrological cycle we have the loss of soil fertility the loss of productivity we have toxicity in vast areas we've released persistent organic pollutants where the highest concentration of these poisons are in Inuit populations in the northern parts of the world far thousands of miles from any point source of pollution we're causing this pollution to go everywhere we have huge amounts of cancer and other problems and we have to ask ourselves and I started to ask myself is this an inevitability is this the best we can do and the answer is certainly no and I've seen that it's possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems if we can restore ecological function to broad areas of the of the earth and maybe to all of the earth why don't we do that that's what we need to do and in order to do that we need everybody to participate we need to understand this as a species and act together as a species on a planetary scale if we can do this then our effect is enormous our effect at degradation has been enormous if we change our intention from going shopping to restoring the earth our our impact will be enormous we have the power to do that and we have to choose that that has to be the central intention of human civilization going forward because the problem is so enormous we can't spend years and decades more in selfishness and greed and ignorance we have to learn from what we have seen our scientific evidence is enormous now that human impact on all the various systems is clear we can see that the organic layer respiration the height of the canopy the total amounts and the percentages of biomass and respiration around the world are what's regulating the hydrology the weather and the climate and that's creating the soil fertility the habitat for microbial and fungal communities which are releasing geologic materials for availability to biological life this is the synthesis of what our science is telling us and it's not so complex that we all can't understand it and we all have a role to play in making sure that we come back to a type of dynamic equilibrium at a higher state so we have forced the the ecology the earth systems to seek equilibrium at a degraded state that's very dangerous for us that's where you have extinctions and when you have extinctions the top of the food chain is the most at risk we're the top of the food chain so we need to process this quickly because this is determining the quality of our lives but more importantly it's also determining the future for our children and for future generations of life thanks very much for listening to me i hope that you'll keep participating in this conversation and that you'll consider coming into the community in the ecosystem restoration camps movement around the world where ordinary people are participating in restoring the earth thanks again thank you john as moving and inspiring as always and now we're going to hear from tim who works at the un decade of ecosystem restoration and this event was inspired by the decade and putting together ideas for how we can achieve it together so we're delighted that you're here and we'd love to hear from you if you could tell the the audience um more about the decade and and what it's all about thank you ashley and hello everybody i would like to pick up from a line from this song from the band uh so when they say do you see i think do we see is the central question here that also john just spoke about do we see not only the fundamental the fundamental dependence we have on nature but do we see a different future because right now we see ourselves on a downward path and uh on the path of potentially runaway climate change collapsing biodiversity the future doesn't look pretty if you don't have the power to imagine a different future so i have three messages for this core of the un decade that is hopefully watching and that ecosystem restoration camp camps also represents um the core that you represent other people who notice and other people who've dedicated their lives to this already and other people who have to know how how to make these big shifts so there are important messages for us to get ready for something like the un decade which is it in essence just a huge communications and outreach and awareness opportunity so the first message is that this is an idea whose time has come and one indication of that is the secretary general of the united nations in his state of the planet speech on the second of december said that making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century it must be the top top priority for everyone everywhere so he basically said exactly the same thing that john uh just said in the video and when the secretary general of the un says this i think it's a good indication that the message has been heard and this topic making peace with nature has uh become an idea whose time has come so what does that mean for us it means we have to get ready we as in you all of us who work already on this topic and have many of us done so for many years we have to get ready for the amounts of attention funding political will that will now shift because we are close to tipping points not only ecological ones we're close to social tipping points on this topic on climate action on biodiversity action and what happens when such a tipping point occurs is that the networks that exist can feel overstretched by this sudden sort of surge in attention and and being in the limelight so get ready for that get ready that there will this will develop into a multi-billion dollar global business investing in nature and restoration we're already seeing the start the starting signs of that there will be massive political attention for restoration on land in the oceans and we have to be ready to say yes we know how this works yes we've we have enough experience uh yes we can scale this up so be ready the fifth of June this year is the public launch of the UN decade it's world environment day we'll table a report that will basically summarize everything John just said why restoration why now and that will be the starting shot for everybody to pay attention to this topic so get ready for the fifth of June and finally please do continue to produce inspiration because we need to imagine a different future we need most of all inspiration and that inspiration comes from local leadership it comes from the champions on the ground we have to collect we have to make this available so the work of of john and others who film this and and make this available is hugely important and there will be a number of major tv channel and other documentaries coming out in the coming few years on restoration so i'm quite hopeful that we will hit this decade off on the right note with your support i will not show the slides that i've sent you actually please make sure they are on your website they're certainly on our website send them to everybody who wants them that explains what the decade is where you can find all the resources um it's decadeonrestoration.org there's a survey that if you fill it in you'll be in our database that will be invited to participate in all the uh the actions but the basic messages you can already download the logo you can already download all the resources that are there for free because we've designed this decade in the new power way how to succeed in the digital age so you are not only participating in the decade you are shaping it down to the logo which you can adapt to your own logo and merge it with your own logo so i'll stop here and thanks again for the invite uh go generation restoration thank you thanks tim we're delighted to um be a partner of the urn decade and all of the things that we'll be able to achieve together in the next 10 years and anyone who's watching if you have any questions already that you'd like to ask john or tim please do write them in the chat and they will make their way to me and then to john and tim and we'll have a chance to answer those shortly but now we're going to get started with the presentations and the first presentation is by jim uh and his title is how ecosystem restoration calls the continents and builds healthy soils by 2061 so please tim uh jim jim go ahead and share your slides okay so i i want to share a screen here let's see if that how that goes let's see okay it's looking good okay so that looks familiar that's uh quite an honor to be here with the ecological restoration camp movement and um and i'll uh let's see if i can catch my slides so here's my theme here um i teach home schoolers and uh these kids reflecting on this log here were were born in the year 2000 most of them and one of the things we studied in in environmental science was astronomy and they were interested in haley's comet and they said well how come we don't get to see it and i said well it's coming back in 2061 and then they said well let's meet well i'll be 112 they'll be 61 and i thought well that's that's a great idea so i thought what will the world look like when they're when haley's comet comes by what is the goal for that time so that's 40 years away now they're in college now but it's been a rough year in college for them because of the covid situation so um what is my vision for 2061 and one of the first things i did was look at the at the projection for co2 in the atmosphere in 40 years and it would go up another 100 points it's already gone up 100 ppm in my lifetime and i thought well that's intolerable i can't deal with that and so i wrote this scenario 300 saying if we had a goal of 300 parts per million could that be possible if that was what we wanted to do like what john was saying if that was our our major uh motivating factor and i thought what would we have to do well we'd have to re rehydrate and restore biodiversity on about 12 billion acres which is about uh five billion hectares and i i figure 10 must be wetlands wetlands this kind of drives everything so so that was the first part so we have to master the water cycle we have to know how to make sure that every drop of rain goes into the ground and um and then we start you know the vegetation comes the transpiration comes and that cools the surface and then uh we have to learn how to do condensation better we're finding we're finding now that condensation can be much more uh dynamic process um nurture soil biodiversity and mycorrhizal networks we've got to become experts at communicating with mycorrhizae that there's a lot of intelligent processing going on in healthy soils and discouraged fire we've got to get out of chemical fertilizer business uh antibiotics and so forth we've got to get animals out of feed lots and out onto the bare ground and with the plant grazing and so forth and and we've got precious here today which is really really cool which he's very aware of that and um so the rivers if we see rivers running clean and slow that's pretty cool and freshwater muscles filter feeders are really important so i have a kind of a general statement here um humans actively working with the natural processes you know i've got here you've got this picture over here we've got two women working uh maybe in central america i'm not sure um but uh we must figure out a symbiosis form of economics how do how do these these women benefit from making the soil and and get their income from making the soil and the food that comes up the secondary that's something that they can use and they can share and so forth but their their job is mostly to make the soil and i've got my breakdown here well in restoration about a billion acres uh i break it into hectares too uh grasslands is the biggest chunk because we've got a lot of land that's been desertified that was once grasslands and we've got to think of grasslands and grazing animals as being co-linked you know that they evolved together we need to learn more about forests forests we're finding out or now i think of them more as conduits of sending the the atmospheric carbon turning into sugar and sending it to the fungi that the healthy systems send an awful lot of carbon down into the soils regenerative agriculture um that's a field that's many people working on it's very exciting and how do we how do we grow food without without the chemicals without the and uh living shorelines this is kind of an exciting idea because uh well it as the oceans are going to be melting ice for quite a long time we've got it they're very warm and so how do we make the best use of the land along the of the oceans so i my kind of conclusion in this scenario was that nature has the capacity to restore 12 billion acres in four decades when humanity becomes a catalyst for land restoration when are we going to be ready to do that 12 billion acres five billion hectares that's about half of the available land it's not like it has to be you know every every place but that's a that's a good start and could we do that you know could get a good start in this within the next couple decades so what has to happen by 2030 and i think the first part is getting the water cycle you know you know how do we make an infiltration team that can make sure that every drop of water goes into the ground and uh is when the rain comes and i and i thought well one of my one of my favorite uh critters is the beaver here this beaver is actually trying to start a dam in a place where there's very little wood and that was new to me this is in northeastern nevada and the ranchers there were getting to the point where the streams held enough water for you know two or three months of the year and the beaver showed up they don't even know where he came from you know but they used to be beaver in nevada 200 years ago and they've started to stop these streams and keep the water there all year around and then the the vegetation will start coming in you know but they can use mud to start with and they dig these really deep trenches so we've got uh you know they can slow the water down and i thought well by 2030 we should have 25 million beaver in north america and we ought to be bringing beaver back to eurasia there used to be beaver in asia a thousand years ago but they were trapped out so long ago that we've forgotten and wouldn't it be cool if asia had more as many beavers north america at some point so the beaver got down to less than five million a while back um but they're starting to come back they may might have 15 million now but we've got to amp that up global restoration core wouldn't it be cool to have a 10 million good paying jobs of people that that's their job is to bring back the land and help local people make that happen so and by 2030 we've got five billion acres already in this process two billion hectares um fire reduction ag chemical reduction this is already getting started within the next decade the decade the un decade of restoration and um so that's so what what happens decade later and i've got these pictures of the ground this this is a very common picture i took this in west texas and you see no you see no vegetation whatsoever you see bare ground and what we have to do is we have to realize that bare ground is not normal it should not be tolerated bare ground is is considered a global threat to the human future and we've got to get animals back on the land and i i have i put this picture here to show that uh we don't have enough animals to eat all this grass that we don't want to leave grass just laying around growing several feet high and then not have it be grazed it's got to be converted into dung and urine as alan savry tried to tell us years and years ago and is still telling us and here you've got a cow patty so there is there are some animals here but there's no dung beetles so we don't have enough we don't have enough animals and we don't have dung beetles we need herds moving so that the dung beetles can find the herds and uh and then they can bury this stuff which is how it used to be almost everywhere in asia and europe in north america um we used to have that that process this is in brittle landscapes you know in places where you can grow forests that's really cool but in a lot of places that's really hard to do in in seasonal rainfall so but there's yeah i've got growing season is getting longer uh in warmer climates we've got more time so it's another positive thing so here i've got 40 million beaver and 20 million in europe and asia by by the 2040s so that's my scenario i'll i'll stick with that and then by 2050 we're starting to really get a handle on this and you can see here's some guys trying to slow down trying to slow down the um the river here they've got a big ditch here and uh they're saying well how do we stop this and they're they're simulating the beaver process and you see these trees here i think by 2050 we're going to start saying we can't cut the major trees down the biggest trees down because they're the ones that have the biggest mycorrhizal network we've got to selectively harvest the the middle-sized trees and uh i think that might be a way and and the other thing that we might be getting better at is how do we nurture the um microbial life that lives on the on the leaves that goes up into the air the airborne microbial life that actually stimulates rainfall that if you've got more vegetation you can stimulate more rainfall so by 2050 we've got uh we've got the water tables are rising many rivers are flowing slowly year-round but they rarely flood the arrow sea is coming back in asia you know we've got enough land restored that the water tables are rising enough that the arrow sea is coming back which used to be a really amazing fisheries uh possibility and i think in but in california in 2050 we've got beaver wetlands are common up in the himalayas or up in the himalayas up up in the the sierras glaciers are reforming in the himalayas andes and canadian rockies so it's like the reversing this process the oceans are going to take a much longer time to cool down so we're probably going to see a six foot sea level rise before it starts going down but but if we can start reforming the ice and the mountains that could be really cool and here on this in this scenario we've got 60 million beaver and 30 million in europe and asia dung beetles have returned to several billion acres well they have to have animals you know so the dung beetles aren't starving anymore and i want to make this comment nothing is being scrubbed if you if you have soil that's made by mycorrhizae and and breeze because mycorrhizae have to breathe then it scrubs methane right out of the atmosphere and that's that's the kind of soil so these are the kinds of things that animals can help you and we worry about the methane coming from the cows but if they're out in the on the land and eating grass it's a lot different than if they're in feedlots we've got to eliminate the feedlots 12 million acres all right we made the 12 billion acre goal the five billion hectares by 2050 and look at the co2 levels are dropping pretty fast at this point you know mid mid 300s and that's as that drops the pressure on the oceans the the co2 pressure starts dropping and the ocean acidification finally reverses a little bit and that's good news for oysters and mussels so so 2050s is starting to move in the right direction and then i like this picture of this woman and it looks like mangroves that she's working on though there's no water here right now maybe it's tidal but but i thought as as we get into the 2060s and the sea levels are starting to rise um we might have about 250 million acres uh of submerged land and that'll that'll keep increasing for a while and the american uh in america we talk about how we're gonna save miami and save new Orleans i don't think that's possible but what if we decided to turn these into areas of uh biodiversity and i and i have this you know i went to college in houston much of the texas you know at rice where i went to college uh they talk about houston slowly becoming an ocean city and that south texas will be largely mangroves mangroves might be up into the carolinas corals have a hard time in war in the warming oceans but would we start uh would they start emerging as far north escape cod you know we have to kind of think of what are all the possibilities when you think about biodiversity and uh and look we've beat our goal here um so that's some of the ideas to think about um regenerative agriculture uh i i put three billion acres up there all these estimates are about half of what might be available so it's the the scenario is a little bit uh conservative so what i've got about a minute here to keep my time what can you do you know this is some of the artwork uh and barrett who takes classes with uh bio for climate um and she's uh tried to capture some of this this is a menhaden which is a fish that is incredible filter feeder that if we had as many as we used to have we'd have a lot more bigger fish this is the beginning of a food web the dung beetles are here the devon cattle that are really good at 100 percent grass fed so what can you do join an ecosystem restoration camp all right uh build an eco machine uh and see down here i've got uh some of my kids right now they they build the system out in the back and then within a few months it looked like this out in my backyard but then we went into zoom classes and we couldn't see each other anymore and that's kind of disappointing and i've got a picture over here of precious peary who came to one of my classes years ago and i think precious you were on the in the air about 36 hours and you're dead tired and you show up in uh massachusetts and you spend an hour with these kids and i really appreciate uh they really enjoyed it so teaching kids about nature you know you know a lot of stuff that they have never seen so how can how can they benefit from what you've got to tell them and and also tell them they can be a part of the restoration you know support your local food stand for any species that needs your help insects are having a rough time uh bio for climate uh we've have zoom conferences coming up uh mastering the water cycles my course coming up and the scenarios 300 link and the other thing is we want you to join the common celebration in july 2061 you're certainly invited and i'll be 112 but i want to see i want to see john there i think that would be really cool so that's that's it ashley what do i do beautiful thank you so much jim if you were stop sharing your screen now okay i loved that so much and i must say i must let everyone know that hearing about jim's scenario 300 was actually the inspiration for organizing this event and it's such it's like drinking a cool glass of water on a hot day like hearing positive visions for the future rather than negative ones i feel like there aren't enough positive projections of what the world is going to be like and um it's just beautifully refreshing so thank you so now we're going to go to uh a round of questions if anyone has any questions for jim about his presentation please write them in the chat and they will make their way to me through the magic of technology okay while we're waiting i would just mention that you can actually grow and accumulate soils on the coastal regions so when you understand that in evolutionary outcomes you have accumulation and what we're seeing with the cultural outcomes with extraction and and urban areas and so on is subsidence we need very much to understand what causes subsidence and we need to understand what causes accumulation yeah so if we can stimulate accumulation along the coastal regions that's the way to protect all of the coastal infrastructure in those cities that are massively endangered the the way to raise can rise pretty fast that's that's a really young and the rate of increase through thermal expansion in the oceans and we can measure the the degree of accumulation and match those two then we just extraordinary let's do it discussed now for different parts in africa and the middle east and we have big industrial companies working on it and i think it's going to be it's going to be huge thank you john so there are some questions here for you jim oh okay somebody called danielle has asked how can we get ecosystem restoration going in the us maybe farmers can be players in this effort well i think farmers are a big big part of it and uh um yeah that's that's like our nonprofit that we started about seven years ago bio4climate.org has been you know trying to get as many people as we can involved and we we've had you know several conferences and many many speakers and all of that's on the on our website so so that's uh you know if you want to get updated on uh some of that the other is that there's uh farmers organizations organic farmers organizations all over the country uh NOFA in the northeast is NOFA is uh is a real good source so so we've learned a lot from them so okay great thank you uh the next question is is there a movement to restore beaver habitat in maryland us that you know of i don't know in particular um but yeah we've we've got some connections down in maryland we should find out but um remember that beaver were once in pretty much every state and uh and they ought to begin and maryland's got some good mountains the appellations and so forth they've got some good places where i think beaver would just really thrive and it might be harder to bring them down to downtown washington dc but they've been there you know so so yeah i i think it'd be great if we get some some beaver promoters in in maryland i'll also say if there's anyone that's watching who has answers to these questions please do go ahead and answer them so that we can do this collaboratively uh chris keen says what do you think of george mombo's criticisms of holistic grazing are you familiar with them uh i i don't worry about it i've seen it work too many places you know the the key is that the animals have to be moving as herds and the land brittle land dried land needs the nutrition of the animals it has to be digested in the animals the animals pre-digest the food it's like making gerber baby food for the to the land and uh when we took the animals off the land in west texas turn to desert and it's just a disaster it's just really sad you know and then we're trying to grow grain to feed the cows that are in the feedlots it's it's nonsense so the other thing i guess the methane everybody talks about the methane the problem with methane is what's coming out of the arctic right now the cows when they're out on the grasslands make some methane sure but they also make soils that actually can breathe and scrub that methane out of the air feedlots are much much much worse because you got all the poop from the animals and they put them into the lagoons and that's where you make you know 90 percent of the methane from from cattle operations that are done in feedlots so uh methane is kind of a spurious question we got to make the soil and then the methane will start dropping so i've also got some questions for uh for tim and john but i saw daniel had his hand up did you want to respond to what jim said yeah i just wanted to um commend jim for mainly like well for focusing on bio sequestration because as we move into this whole hitting the targets for 2050 of net zero carbon um there will be a lot of big industry pressure for large industrial sequestration of carbon and currently there's a lot of insufficient science that is now the base for arguments like bio sequestration will not be enough and yes we need to find biological mechanisms to transfer biological carbon that has a 300 year cycle into geological carbon that has a 10 000 year cycle but they exist and we can we can through ecosystems restoration roll them out scale them out rather than scale them up and the danger that with this whole carbon sequestration conversation is that we um fall back on technological solutions because our knee-jerk responses technology will save us and it won't it's biology and soil chemistry and and coral reefs that will save us we need not jim engineering yeah we we photosynthesis everywhere eliminate bare ground you know it's and yeah it's we the system was so powerful that it made ice ages we evolved in ice ages because it got so cold because there was so much turnover and uh and that energy was escaping so yeah thanks thanks daniel i'm gonna if i get it we only have one minute left before precious needs to to speak and there is a chance later for us all to to discuss so i'd ask you john to wait until that time um and there is a question here the question from carly uh i i see you carly and i think we should answer that question a bit later when there's a chance for us all to talk together um and now we'll go to precious precious is talking about actions and movement building strategies for restoring whole landscapes in africa so over to you please precious okay um thank you so much ashley and thank you jim um we need lots of gyms right now in the world um with you know all the numbers what needs to be brought down in terms of carbon and stuff and that helps me build on my um part of presentation which is mostly focusing on building whole landscapes in africa but my angle is um more towards how do we really get into those partnerships between civil society grassroots movement commercial and smallholder farmers partnering with policies um to actually get some action going on the ground in africa um and maybe as we go along you will understand why i have to put on a timer to time myself you have to um you understand how i came up with the thought processes that i came up with it's mainly because i work with farmers on the ground and then i also work with uh groups that are attempting to influence policy and obviously along the road i've been finding gaps which could uh when maybe filled we can have africa that will be a global leader in ecosystem restoration um so as has already been said let me let me put presenter view um yeah i hope this moves smoothly sometimes the computers tend to stick my name is precious piri i i am talking to you from zimbabwe um i'm an african coordinator for regeneration international which is an international movement uh forming networks and also influencing policy as well as supporting consumer groups and practicing groups uh to spread ecosystem restoration regeneration agroecology everything that will make our living systems continue to thrive and i'm an accredited professional with the savory institute educating and holistic management holistic grazing um i was very intrigued about the question on uh george monpiott and uh his criticism of holistic grazing out i mean maybe we can talk about it later and then i'm also founding trustee here back home of a network called edwiz dormant equal trust where i work with uh my own communal people to reverse uh land degradation and the loss of our grasslands which are one of our most prized possession here in africa um so i'll start off by talking first of all maybe let me ask is my screen showing okay okay because sometimes i hear people say it's showing a third or half okay so i i'll start off by expressing a bit on the african context our continent is very big 55 member states and i'm in just the little corner in the southern africa in a very small country um but um i've had a fair share of exposure across our continent including through the networks that i work with um so i actually expressed the challenges that we're facing of uh degradation or ecosystem degradation is opportunities to actually reverse what is happening um i think language is very important if we are to view anything with an eye of possibility uh i like the un decade uh hashtag so generation restoration and we are aware of the challenges but i think there are opportunities to actually being lead in the showcasing of restoration um and this is an opportunity not only to change only the small climates within our countries but macro and to also plug into the world to reverse and to bring down uh to operation 300 parts per million that jim was talking about um in africa we have about 13 million square kilometers of savannah grasslands and rangelands that are facing degradation and in my work and over the years i am learning very much on the importance of grasslands and being one of the very reliable carbon sinks uh by growing perennial grasses that stabilize the soil and through photosynthetic processes capture the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into the soil as carbon so building the soil that will capture carbon and store water to then feed the underground water storage and then that will reverse water wars and everything that we face in africa right now um we have forests um yuganda has lost about 50 percent of its forest and an astounding 12.1 million hectares and we have uh mangroves in the gulf of kini like barrier to angola um those 60 percent of those are actually facing a threat um so all these challenges obviously they lead to um lots of insecurities you find lots of wars in the sahel the gulf of africa i've worked with the pastoralists of uh kenya where before any meeting would have to do security checks because of uh pasture wars and water wars with the amount of animals that they have to keep moving on the land um this brings me to a quote to say i think as africa we have an opportunity to again dig into um the resources the richness of our resources and revamp and regenerate our wealth our social statuses and um of course the biology um of course this uh this degradation also leads to lots of migrations so we have lots of our brothers and sisters we have left because of this length stresses so i'll quote a bit of a quote um words from my mentor alan savory who said uh ultimately the only wealth that can sustain any community economy or nation is derived from the photosynthetic process which is green plants growing on regenerating soils so that is the wealth that we are aspiring is africa and that takes me to my vision which is africa is a continent where two-thirds of the degraded and unproductive ecosystems are restored to thriving diverse resilient and are able to support economic cultural and social well-being for all 55 member states of the organization for african unity um please note that this vision is inspired by probably my background of understanding the complexities of regeneration or doing restoration work and uh the relevance of actually identifying what works in what ecosystem um so sometimes when you get criticism that's because we think that we'll apply one practice across the landscape uh that is reductionist science but i think at policy level we are being challenged now to think regeneratively to think complexes to think diversities so that you imply or apply practices that are relevant to each and every um space as pay uh the norms of that area so i'll keep moving my screen keeps having my face on the zoom so blocking also my words okay so what needs to happen by 2030 um there's lots of work actually that has gone on in africa bought it uh regional level and national groups uh where people are doing lots of restorative work but then this work is in pieces there's lots of research it's lying all over the place so i said to challenge a quality level to synthesize all existing restorative initiative across the region and establish partnerships at large scale these partnerships for accountability have to be interdisciplinary why am i asking for interdisciplinary civil society has been very instrumental in really influencing a ban on gmors uh all the degenerative corporations that keep flowing into africa and our governments are vulnerable because sometimes they're looking for money and uh so we need civil society to hold each other accountable and of course partner with research so that all the decision makers are well informed and you cannot leave out uh all the citizens who are doing the actual action on the ground so this is my goal for 2030 um so we have initiatives that are already rolling right now with what we call afr 100 which has goals of restoring 100 million hectares of land by 2050 and then by 2030 they were actually aiming at 63 million hectares and then we have the great green wall initiative which is a massive project that cuts across the sahel region in africa alone we have 33 million smallholder farmers and hundreds of thousands of organizations that are grouping these smallholder farmers to have that impact i just gave an example of one called afsa which cuts across it's pan african it cuts across the whole of africa and then we have a committee in the pan african agenda which is committed to just ecosystem restoration all these groups need to be synthesized for us to really start seeing movement going forward um one colleague of mine once said governments are really good at making committees all this initiative we like it they create committees and then it ends there so we need to keep moving so that the committees actually get to deliver okay um what needs to happen by 2040 so this was fun to do i was like okay this is a lot of thinking about what must be done across africa and i feel like i'm ready to sit on those tables up there because i have my little document so all 55 member states uh to commit to regeneration and so consensus is usually shown by action so governments to create a committee up there that goes into regional spaces and then country action groups and this commitment cannot happen if we do not then commit funds to actually start helping farmers and support transitioning towards restorative work um so for an example in 2020 last year 25.3 23.5 million euros was given to malawi rwanda kenya and camera room for forest uh for a forest station um malawi committed 4.5 million hectares to that and uh if that can happen in each country and then those budgets actually roll out and then they should get to the people on the ground who are doing the actual work this has been an important conversation in uh in in our continent um okay so i mean this is such a big thing to also speak on behalf of africans i hope they are they are watching and they can input later um what needs to happen by 2050 is policy supporting whole systems in action so whole systems understanding that we cannot manipulate parts but we need to enable each environment to thrive in its biodiversity in its people and you cannot thrive in an environment when the people are not thriving themselves so development approach must be both social ecological cultural and economical even the economic spaces must begin to be regenerative and um and not support a very few who will be rich and turning this into businesses so again partnerships between private and public sector to keep this moving um so governments to actually do a reverse of incentivizing regenerative actions in agriculture and energy and so that's uh now that's partnership and in this what we call the land degradation neutrality fund which is uh by um ccd it was meant to be rolled out through governments maybe it could work as that incentivizing um and then of course adding taxes and costing all the practices or support to um degenerative practices and then i actually put in setting up a transition fund to support especially farmers and practitioners into ecosystem restoration because most farmers want to transition but then the fear of the unknown but then if governments say no we actually have a fund to cushion you in your times of uncertainty then farmers would really step out and start to see those rewards because now value is being added into restoration okay and then um of course then these are collaborations for scaling up and another thing that that will be very important is adding value in the marketplace for ecosystem restoration investments towards ecosystem restoration genuine investment not what's going on right now uh 2060 which is our landmark final year i say it's citizens action so i put lots of photos from all my work uh and they that's like yay we're all working together co-creation so citizens action and partnerships um towards thriving uh ecosystems of course including continuous research and development to help us continue to improve learning from our ecosystems um and then restoration work has a voice in the marketplace and it attracts sound investment and then biodiversity is valued continuous decisions to make it thrive are made by policymakers and then food and seed sovereignty for all farmers which will actually enable us to be resilient in pandemics and then Africa is a global leader in managing for a healthy planet we don't manage for profit because if you manage for profit your decisions are extractive but when you manage for a healthy planet the consequences and the outcomes give you wealth in economics and social stabilities um so we are a global leader in those including reversing all the extremes in climate um so what you can do for those of us who are already in the movement i think this is our opportunity to catch on to this vision and avail credible and easy easy to read easily accessible easy to digest information about what a normal citizen who is not involved in the movement can do how so that's like writing easy materials for people to read showing stories sharing videos so influence whole ecosystems uh through also the curriculum in universities in high schools start the conversation down the going up to the tertiary education um okay and then what also you can do the important thing is that everyone has a role in restoration consumers support purchase that is local to value ecosystem services and then we have savory institutes that have what we call ecological outcomes verification branding through their land to market initiative if that can be scaled up across Africa through the hubs of savory institute that would also help move things forward I mean everyone has an opportunity to start restoring right where they are like Jim said and then we need funding for restoration work across the continent that also respects rich and narrative uh thought processes that is we are not just checking boxes when this funding comes but we are doing a transformative work from people to the land and then for the greater good of our planet I thank you so much ladies and gentlemen my time is up thank you precious that was amazing and yeah I hope that people in the audience who are African or living in Africa that speaks to you somehow and sets a fire underneath you hopefully that's that's what we're looking for today uh so now we're going to go over to some questions for precious got some here um Jim shulman says must ecosystem restoration be accompanied by reduced urbanization in Africa or does restoration work together with sensitive urbanization it's an interesting question so my take would be urbanization is happening you know we are now in plugged into the bigger globe but I think ecosystem restoration is now an attitude of the heart where you are you can create a thriving ecosystem and of course in Africa we have bigger lands that are still wild and so our opportunity to support wilderness rebuilding is still very high but also in the cities people can still regenerate and still grow foods um so urbanization has happened and there's nothing we can do to reverse it but then at heart we must all be by supporting what we buy linking the urban to rural um communications and trade uh I'm not sure if you know the answer to this one because it it's quite a big question but um Mike will see you are uh you the president of Africa now so how many governments in Africa have bought into the need for ecosystem restoration or are fighting climate change generally so um like I said there's a pan-African community where all 55 member states have said yes so the actual implementation is another story for another day but I do know countries like Namibia that have incredible agricultural policies where conservation agriculture is at a policy at that high level in rangeland's risk restoration is also at that high level in Namibia um Tanzania almost pleased us a few days ago by saying no to GMO's and then they said no no no no no we didn't mean that so so yes all governments essentially have said yes to it but I think now the collaboration to keep it moving faster than just at community level and we also know from John's documentaries that governments in Ethiopia or Rwanda have been very uh positive about ecosystem restoration yes most of them are really positive and now very aware but I think generally they are also operating in a world where big corporations have so much muscle and um yeah so I think there's a lot to unpack in that sense yeah that's actually very um aligned with the next question which is would you speak to how the power of foreign direct investments into African countries undermine existing restoration initiatives yes I can um as a person who works on the ground um for example you know I will just give it a smallest scale so that everyone can then multiply it to that broader scale um you can find that you will have a few farmers where you're doing restorative farming from grazing and cropping where you've removed all synthetics farmers are actually using bio fertilizers or you know all that knowledge that is there but then these big corporations filter through our governments and then when farmers are getting moving and then they are called as a matter of law come and get fertilizers come and get this pesticide you need to use them and so that undermines all the knowledge that people have had for years we we never used to keep our seeds in chemicals we had ash we used to sweet when you put your seeds in a kitchen and then you put firewood that black stuff would protect your seeds all that has been undermined and now everyone needs a bit of a chemical to put into their seeds so that's how this has been running and eventually it multiplies across the whole continent such that people now cannot see themselves doing agriculture without these poisonous chemicals or synthetics do any of the uh other speakers here want to respond and ask anything to precious yes please go ahead john i would i would just mention that this question of economics is a bit deeper than just like how do we shift money we have to actually ask fundamental questions are there illogical aspects in the way the economy is defined now and how does this economy come about so we can see that this economy has come about through the expansion of colonization and and domination in the past and that this has led to um well different things it's it's disrupted the cosmologies and the world views of the indigenous people which knew that all life was sacred and has suggested that materialism is more valuable than natural ecological function and i say function instead of services because services become are already a semantic change to say that those ecological functions are only for human consumption that somehow but so what we're really talking about is derivatives so we have we've inflated the derivatives and we've devalued the source of life and when we get this right it basically flips the economy and it says that ecological function is more valuable than material things and then we can have a regenerative economy instead of having an economy which is built on commoditization of things and and of and buying and selling so we can grow the economy and that that brings us to the central question what is money and money is whatever we want it to be as a society if human civilization defines money in another way and wealth in another way then we're going to incentivize restoring all of the earth systems but if we continue to say that money comes from commoditization and buying and selling and then somehow speculation between the cost price and interest bearing debt which are just corruptions of that have been created over long periods of time even jesus was beating the money changers two thousand years ago to get out get out of the temple you guys because you're killing the earth and when you when you start to understand this then you realize our future could be beautiful and all of our economy and all of our work could incentivize regeneration so i think that's that's what i need need to say badly thanks john yeah and i'm hoping that daniel will be able to touch on some ideas about how we can make the economy regenerative and that leads us on to daniel's talk which is happening not right now we're going to have a short break first and in the break i'm going to play you a poem by a poet called amy and anamkara and her poem is called earth heart and it's extremely beautiful it's about eight minutes long so if you want to go and um and take a short break for whatever you need to do and we'll come back in 10 minutes and i'm going to i'm going to play the poem by amy what if our hearts sprouted wings and flew into the skies above and with the eyes of eagles look down with love at all the cracks and the breaks all the hardship our mother earth takes and what if it then was our heart that breaks what if we decided to mend it to work with nature instead of trying to bend it to our will what if we took time stood still and remembered that nothing works in harmony when it is dismembered what if we began to move together to work in unison with the seasons and the weather what if we we grew ourselves from the ground up building soil to soul enshrined entwined and bound up with the memory of community what if we turned ourselves like the layers of a healthy compost pile a symbiotic relationship created while we warmed our inner beings a new way of consciousness combined with the art of seeing all that is and all that can be what if we use brushes to cross pollinate the ancient knowledge that fornicates a new kind of painting colored by the ways we find of relating to each other to the earth our heart mother and what if we use this medicine to blend the plants and make our soil well again and what if we began collecting seeds of information to save them and store them spread their ideas in multiplication plants as messengers containing love notes that we then consume and owed to the sun the soil and the moon what if we began thinking biodynamically where planets plants and people connected systematically to the web of all existence a swelling movement of peaceful resistance water cascades and land degrades as the shame of the torrent spills over fertile earth is washed away as land begs water please please slower what if we sculpt the earth and remember to know that we need to calm water to initiate that mystical growth because without father and mother both we are nothing but thirsty matter waiting for the clarity of a pattern that calls for receptivity soften wetness welcome balance blossoms and each petal can feel that it came from you and you from two what if we redress the balance between masculinity and femininity so that we use our sacred polarity combined with the loving element of mystery to work in secrecy what if we dance cheek to cheek with our own inner earth and water father mother brother sister son and daughter the melody seems gently into our skin just like the so what if the trees we plant in soil and womb hold us together in reverence until we take to our resting to the fruits from our labours in life and death a myriad of silken flavours from first to final breath and what if we remember that each breath we breathe is a gift from every branch stem flower and leaf and what if we remember that each breath we breathe is a gift from every branch stem flower and leaf we would reforest Gaia in the blink of an eye a legacy of life left ahead of us when we die and instead of building funeral pious from the ashes of all our destructive fires we leave a waking utopia for all to admire and what if we resolved our conflicts under the canopy of a forest garden the quiet majesty of trees softening hearts which would harden effective tools organizing community rendering hierarchy obsolete so that we work with our strength instead of trying to compete for money for land for something to eat takes a seat and circulate the idea of a gift economy let it ruminate that this current model of capitalism serves only to stagnate that potent loving force that we can all generate when we are given the spaces to truly create a vessel which consciously relocates the value of how we educate what if we teach that when humanity and economy share a bed every man woman and child can and will break their bread and when true equality joins forces with law we no longer fight against but work with passion ignited by what we are for and when freedom and culture walks hand in hand we dissolve the scars in our hearts and the borders across our lands so that our stories cross pollinate with the wind as wings and we can hear the song that each heart sings the melody to memory of our innate power the melody to memory from sea to flower the melody to memory that we can live in the mystery our ability to rewrite his story what if it became our story our book of love our poetry in motion hands heart in service to devotion now the same letters make heart make earth and that is no mistake for everything that comes from the earth from our hearts we also take and what if we gave more of ourselves each one an imaginal cell that asks what if we cultivated this impulse to nurture dedicated heart earth connection researchers and what if we found that this entropy was designed to drive us towards peak complexity bursting from our chrysalis into what we were always meant to be pattern system thinkers to generate a sense of possibility that we can be the change we want to see and what if this learning became part of our human reality earth shepherds of biodiversity land sculpting our future universities where the only qualification is a vocational degree where we learn to be pollinated by the question what if we sent love before we touched asked before we worked are we in service to our heart are we in service to our earth i want to say i know that amy can no longer be with us now she was watching earlier but you'll see the recording amy and thank you so much for giving us that performance and it may look to you as if the the artists i'm just playing them randomly off youtube but they are actually people that have gifted their talent to us today and i want to say huge huge thank you both to terry libra and to amy for her poem and to ray who will be performing at the end of the event so we're now going to go to daniel daniel wall um daniel wall i'm never quite sure which one it is and he's going to talk about bioregional regeneration for planetary health so please take it away daniel sharing slides hold on where are we there can you see that yes great now you only see the main slide well thank you so much everybody for um your contributions this has just been wonderful and i love that phrase in amy's poem let's rewrite history and so it becomes our story and she yeah she touched on so much that they're really what this is all about and briefly about me lots of biographical detail there but um one interesting thing maybe in the context of this title um that in 2002 i was at a conference in findhorn which was called the restore the earth conference and under the auspices of the united nation's environment program unip um with john mano cherry being the person that present represented unip at the conference we actually declared the 21st century the century of earth restoration and i'm excited that we finally have a decade of restoration and as we see with these timelines it will take us more than a decade the decade at best gets us started and the pictures just below that round picture are from this morning where i've been out on the piece of land um that has recently adopted me and i've been collecting biomass for composting to build the soil on this the greater piece of my yorkan landscape so i just invite everybody if you're blessed enough to have access to a bit of land get in contact with the soil it will heal your soul it will heal your immune system and it will heal the planet um briefly in terms of like i my role in this three presentations was to open up the envelope but but i i feel like um pressures has already done that and also what john just said about the economics but briefly like these two um sort of slightly mobius loop infinity symbols that um you can see are essentialization of 45 50 years of ecosystems research into how do ecosystems change over time and one of the things that i find really helpful in this time is that it's normal for peak systems to be disrupted and need some form of breakdown in order to rearrange the system and innovate and for evolution to do its thing so new patterns can emerge and i i think 2020 was certainly the year where everybody woke up to the fact that we are observing this kind of breakdown everywhere now and i wrote a book called designing regenerative cultures which came out in 2016 and that i want to emphasize that in all of this and we've spoke about this like tim earlier on said about scaling up i think we need to scale out rather than to scale up and what i want to emphasize by that is that regenerative cultures is plural it will be place sourced out of the uniqueness of each ecosystem and the uniqueness of each culture and its history in unique symbiosis and co-evolving mutualism with the local ecosystem so that map in the top left corner is a map of the the planetary river systems and that's the kind of map that the future humanity should have in terms of re-inhabiting planet earth all the maps that we know with the straight lines that were drawn by the ruler of a ruler most of them through a colonial process are vestiges of an era of power over and we're now moving into the era of power with and the planetary era and so pressures already said that in Africa the aim that her networks are working towards is increasing the health of the ecosystems that it is a salutogenic a health generating approach she also spoke beautifully about stopping to focus so much on the challenges and see the opportunities at the heart of working regeneratively is to move from problems to potential and we need that place specificity and cultural specificity that coming home to our history and our culture and our local ecosystems with the with their unique conditions in order to really work in that way in order to really bring out learning from place learning from the community of life in that place not just the human community how to maximize the potential of that place how them maximize the potential for healing both our communities and our ecosystems this is the decade of ecosystems restoration but we we will only get there if we also restore community cohesion and collaboration and we stop telling stories of competition and and fighting against we we life is a symbiotic process life creates conditions conducive to life and one of the elders of the regeneration regenerative practice movement bill read the beginning of last year said to me in a conversation that daniel you can't heal the planet you can only heal places and yet again that invites us into coming home to place in our community and our local ecosystem and place in that sense is fractal by healing our places whether it's our balcony and planting more be habitat on our balcony or it's our back garden every little action actually has that fractal dimension that the place you are healing in your local region contributes to your local regions healing and your local regions healing contributes to planetary healing but if we start at the other end of trying to heal the planet we we just have long conversations that that don't go anywhere um so we we need to work in that local way local and global at the same time and there's a huge opportunity that comes together with the decade of ecosystems restoration that as we do this we can create locally thriving bioregional economies we can diversify the way we do things again all around the globe rather than have massive globalized supply chains we can lock even more carbon into biomaterials by and creating thriving local economies at the bioregional scale so so this is really a process of re-inhabitation an approach process of re-indiginization of remembering that we are indigenous to this earth that we have been brought forth by this earth and are depending on planetary life support systems and ecosystems health and I'm delighted that we've already gone way beyond carbon myopia it's really important that yes we need to reduce carbon CO2 in the atmosphere um in the next three four decades radically and let's hope that we make that 300 ppm target by 60 by by 2061 but this is about healing the water cycle just as much it's about moisture in the soil about healing the river systems and to go on with regard to this this timeline that we were all asked to do I loved that experiment of just putting down ideas of where what will we need to do by 2030 40 50 and 60 and I kind of overshot as I tend to do when I start to think about these things and I would really encourage people to find this document on the ERC website and read through these four slides that are coming now I'm only gonna highlight a few I think that by 2030 we need to re-invent education completely um there's already a group of people working on something called open badges which will allow people to get credits for being at an ecosystem's restoration camp or doing a permaculture course or holistic land management course or a guide education designed for sustainability course and really begin to invent a new way of education that is about local capacity building and that allows people to learn on the job rather than to spend 15 years in education to then go and do a job and I also think that we need to consider that we have to also pay a lot of attention to the oceans and there needs to be more ecosystems restoration camp activity around marine restoration and regeneration and by 2030 the UN Sustainable Development Goals will have run their bit and we need a 2050 regenerative development pathway that we should start working on now and by 2040 what shall I highlight centrophic I would say that by then analogue and centrophic forestry systems will have widespread along with widespread wilding will have reforested about 65 percent of the global forest cover on a 2020 baseline and we also need to look at how ERCs works closely with these UN regenerative development pathways and how as ecosystems restoration camps evolve they partner with universities that can reinvent themselves as centers for bioregional learning where the diversity of academic pursuits is focused in place and so the knowledge is actually beginning to be applied and learning becomes about applying 200 years of science rather than adding more abstract knowledge to it and we also by 20 what let's go back one by 2050 what would I highlight here 80 percent of humanity includes growing food and nurturing ecosystem cells in their weekly rhythms if we implement something like a universal basic income where people don't have to run in the hamster wheel for their basic needs and they can choose to fully dedicate themselves to what is their calling then we will see that a lot of people will find in here growing food and healing local ecosystems a pathway to community a pathway to meaning a pathway to ongoing lifelong learning and education and there's a lot of talk I mentioned earlier about technology coming over the hill to save us yes we need the technologies that are listed in drawdown in the book Paul Hawken wrote in order to decarbonize the the global economy and our current patterns but we need to go beyond just the technological solutions to really seeing the potential of bio sequestration and working also with marine ecosystems growing re growing seagrass meadows re and growing mangrove forests and without any mad geo engineering of algae seeding and all these proposals that are out there and in terms of the political changes in order to empower people to do this re regionalization process and heal their local ecosystems and create thriving local economies we need the political system to change towards subsidiarity we need this ideal that is already written into the european constitution that all higher levels national and international level of governments governance need to be subsidiary to enabling people in place to make the decisions that are meaningful and important to their lives that whole turning around of the governance process is vital because it will also enable thriving local economies but that also means that we need the united nations to revisit all its trade rules in order to stop the protection of multinationals and start the protection of local regenerative economies and pressures already alluded to to the change of subsidies like currently we're still subsidizing fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry and with about 70% of all energy subsidies only 30% go to renewables we need to flip that around and we need to do do that in the next decade so by 2060s living a life of meaning in service to self community and world is a shared experience for all humanity that would be one of my visions where we need to get to and with regard to the policy systems the power over political structures and processes of governance of the era of empires have given way to the power with pathways of enabling increased equity and social justice through civic participation and responsibility as humanity matured into the planetary era and i really encourage you to have a read of this i'll also publish it on medium if anybody is following my medium block and with regard to what we can do education is a key point to start there are wonderful courses out there get educated around ecosystems restoration around um designing for sustainability permaculture courses centrophic agriculture courses but also sociocracy nonviolent communication the social skills we need to animate our communities and um i'll i'll leave it at that because i think questions are always much more interesting than slides um hold on how do i stop sharing thanks daniel yeah i'm definitely going to be reading all of these slides line by line um once they've become available because they're like little road map guides for how to stay the world which is really cool i love the idea of actually inviting us to do these slides and and um it's it's a i put on the bottom it's the first draft but i think it's it's a really interesting exercise to do this i so i really appreciate it um you inviting us to um create a timeline thank you i'm very grateful that you know or you have ideas for uh what what should be done um so we're going to go to some questions for you now daniel igor says how can we support individuals to restore ecosystems for example providing financial support for people restoring the place where they live and creating spaces for local wildlife to thrive well there's there's a lot of people at the moment working on um these new kind of uh cryptocurrency based initiatives that will enable any person who's engaged in growing food or land care to not only be paid for the produce that they can pull out of that land which you have to be careful of because there's a threshold of how much you can take regeneratively um over over a year um and begin to start seeing that vital role of agriculturalists and land carers which is restoring and maintaining the health of the land landscape and the regen network gregory landers team um has created one such mechanism there's a new currency called seeds that um is is launching that is helping um people to basically work on regenerative projects and um as people start reading these these little timeline points that are made that there's also a lot of experiments that already exist that I've kind of put into the future like for example community land trusts and the transfer of land ownership away from this idea that we own the land and back to understanding that the land owns us and by doing so creating community land trusts where people who don't have the money to afford land can become custodians of a piece of land that are owned by these land trusts in perpetuity as a global commons and the only prerequisite is that if you're on a land storing it you have to prove that you keep regenerating it and that its health is improving and as long as you keep improving the land you you're on it um so yeah that that will be one way also this is a very nice um segue for me to say if you'd like to support people who are right now restoring ecosystems around the world ecosystem restoration camps is one way that you can get support to them we have 37 camps around the world that were all started by everyday people that could see that the land around them was becoming more and more degraded and that they wanted to do something about it and by becoming a member of ecosystem restoration camps you will be directly supporting those 37 communities and we are only predicting that number to grow quite rapidly um so we set up the erc foundation so that we could channel support to communities that are restoring ecosystems on the ground so that's another way I think now's a really lovely time to go into our panel discussion um the idea of this section of the symposium is that it is giving the chance for the speakers to discuss together how their presentations and topics interconnect um so we're going to do that for the next 10 minutes and then there'll be another chance for you to ask questions at the end before we close so Daniel, Jim, Precious, John, Tim, is there anything you've been burning to say to each other during this time that you haven't been able to? Well I just like to say I'm I'm always impressed by how many things are going on that I knew nothing about and this is there's been another more evidence of that we keep collecting more and more and more possibilities and and maybe we'll figure out how to put the pieces you know how to interact better and with these exercises. Yeah just following briefly up on that because I shared it with with this group but I realized people listening on YouTube won't have that link if you just go on regen.earth a google map will pop up that um is populated with little markers and each marker shows a project that is already so deeply implemented that it has a good website and a little video describing that project around amazing regeneration projects all around the globe and so don't think that's all that those are the ones that are already mature and the map is full of them and also Precious and I were um the on the jury of the lush spring price for social and ecological regeneration and if you put spring price in a in a search engine there's also a map popping up with not just the winners but also the runner-ups of those projects and I really encourage you take a look at that because it will give you hope and we need hope and inspiration to get going on the potential of the decade. And I wanted to also build on to um Daniel mentioned the seeds platform which will be rewarding regenerative actions is I think they are an incredible initiative and it will really help in the economic side of helping citizens moving with restoration. Here in Zimbabwe we actually have a seeds cluster and we are now putting together a list of all regenerative actions and then training regenerative champions so I was really excited to hear about that and it looks like it's spreading fast so I think there are lots of initiatives that are building on. I might just keep this how the seeds currency works but maybe we can come back to that. I might just mention that there are many councils coming together and hubs that are coming together so Africa is is coming together as a hub Scandinavia the United States and and to some extent the Middle East North Africa is coming together in hubs this will help and I think what we're seeing is that the ecosystem restoration is helping to create a mycelial network and what we learn from evolution is when bacteria which is critical for releasing geologic nutrients for biological life when it's stationary but when it touches the mycelial net it can go everywhere in the network so this is I think where the connectivity works for human civilization to use biomimicry to come from our understanding of this system. We do have quite a lot more questions on a page lower than I was looking maybe I can ask some of those. This is from Igor and this is for you Tim. Is the UN financially supporting smaller projects in which people can live in harmony with their ecosystems without financial pressure to make a living? Yeah thanks Ashley and thanks everybody this was really fascinating to listen to before I answer that question I just wanted to briefly one quick thing building on the region map that Daniel just mentioned. If you go to the decades website there's one link where you can which we call our social media wall and you can you will see here in real time all the posts on LinkedIn Instagram and Twitter that go up with the generation restoration hashtag so if you go there this is updated every minute you go there you will see lots of different things happening already in lots of different languages as well and in lots of different fora that we don't even didn't even know of and every well literally every minute there are new things popping up so just an encouragement for everybody watching this to use generation restoration as a hashtag because that will allow us to track this and and pick this up on social media. On the question of finance I would refer to one fund that we run called the restoration seed capital facility that helps to establish new restoration funds and we also run something called the global ecosystem based adaptation facility with small grants for communities but those are for projects to get restoration started they're not to pay communities for long-term income opportunities that you lose by shifting to other forms of management. Those do exist though in the form of agricultural subsidies they're just usually going to the wrong thing so there's lots of money flowing for this to pay in the half of the EU's budget about 40 billion euros a year for example goes to paying land owners to usually do the wrong thing on their land so these are the kinds of things that we have to change those are the big political decisions where we have where we need political changes so I'm all for you know doing the local projects and but it also has to add up to something bigger and to shift national and regional policies in the right directions and in particular subsidies. Just briefly add to that because out of this experience that Precious and I had on the lush spring price where we got frustrated that there were so many good projects and we couldn't really give prices to all of them we began to realize that most large funders and most large organizations would consider 500 000 euros or dollars a small fund and regeneration needs to be funded in over 10 years 50 000 to small projects each year and so we created out of the lush spring price and together with the Buckminster Fuller Institute something which if you again if you google regenerosity.world it'll come up and it's it's still a fledgling system but it's precisely aiming at trying to take these larger grants from larger foundations and then splitting them up into to smaller projects because in order to do this really nuanced place sourced ecosystem specific work we need smaller funds to go to smaller projects it's sometimes the way to get to scalers by scaling out with small projects not by scaling up with mega projects that's it I think if I go on John if I were to add one thing I would paraphrase Oscar Wilde and he talks about a cynic knows the price of everything but the value of nothing and what we really need to realize is that the value of what people are doing we don't have a theoretical problem we have a physical problem on a planetary scale and if if we value what people are doing and realize that restoring ecological function is more valuable than anything that human beings have ever made and everything that human beings will ever make then we have the type of economy which always incentivizes restoration of natural ecosystems and the maintenance and protection of that so that's that's what I think we need to to aim for and there's a question that that relates to that and I'm sure once you've said that John a lot of people probably thinking well how do we get that idea into the mainstream how do we get out of the what someone's called it our environmental bubble um I'm wondering if any of the speakers have any ideas on on how we get this to be as popular as top of the pops was in the 90s that might be just an English reference I think Terra Libre gave us a taste of it if we don't find every artist musician dancer theater performer cultural institutions galleries all of them need to message the regeneration rising they need to message this global transformation this this this species level right of passage that we can do differently and as a matter of fact we have done differently for many many generations let's not forget that indigenous knowledge is what's going to save us into the future we need to marry the wisdom of the past with modern technologies and move forward together and um that is a huge invitation like Appalachia rising and all these wonderful bands that are now singing songs about the regeneration um like like Terra Libre that that's what's going to make the difference and an artist and big known artists like we we want paintings and sculptures in the tate about regeneration and the the the fact that culture and nature are not two they're one this is very timely because we're just doing the short list for goodwill ambassadors and voices for the UN decades so if you have good ideas and yesterday Leonardo DiCaprio for the first time used generation restoration as a hashtag on instagram so we are you know starting to get more notice for the topic but of course the goodwill ambassadors we have can can already do a lot but we also would like to select some specific voices for the UN decade that can transport this really beyond uh what is very much an east topic at the moment I agree though Tim I do think it is becoming more and more known about um okay let's go to another there's a question about indigenous land rights actually relating to what you said Daniel Hannah asks how do we ensure indigenous land rights are recognized as a key part of the ecosystem restoration process does anyone have an answer to that precious yeah so I was going to say I think it will come back to the partnership between the citizens and policy makers so I think part of the indigenous wisdom actually working together with science to then bring in the evidence of the importance of ecosystem restoration and then into policy spaces so here we still have communities where elders wisdom still holds a lot of weight and I think that's what can be capitalized on without really people going to march in the streets I think first of all just respecting the indigenous wisdom that's like yeah I would say that's a first I just had an example Gaia Amazonas the work of Martin van Hildebrandt in Colombia and he want to um he want to write livelihood award for this he's connected over 300 indigenous tribes in a vast area of Colombia to protect basically a good chunk of the Colombian Amazonas and he's working with them to empower them to get the political power so mining companies can't infringe on their land and he has this vision of the um trail of the Anaconda of creating a protected corridor across countries from the Andes all the way down to the Atlantic coast of rainforest and we need to work with indigenous tribes and empower them because they are the custodians and the land owners in North America the you know we've got many Native American tribes uh with with huge holdings in land and with almost no no capital to work with but many many of the tribes are trying to hold on to you know dozens of buffalo or whatever there's there's many different groups uh and people are trying to figure out how to bring the beaver back and so forth but I think this idea of thinking of economics as being what has value is the land and uh you know that's that's uh you know you you can grow food on it you can do things like that but the the most important thing is that you're enhancing the land that you're increasing the biodiversity and I'm I'm just wondering how do we how do we shift that economic thinking you know John John spoke of this and that's that's maybe our big big question how do we value the work that people are doing right there but the there's just huge I mean think about the land that's available you know that in in tribal uh some of the tribes have held on to the land they've they've refused to take uh billions of dollars in cash you know that's been rewarded by the courts but they say well no we we want to keep keep the land so how do we help them uh say this is a resource for the future how do we how do these kids when they're 60 years old have a have a future to look forward to how do you know and and part of that is you know what what I think about a lot so I think again that there are already experiments all over the globe around community land trusts and there are big new types of investment vehicles being developed where people as they pass or want to have a legacy they pass over the land not to their sons and daughters but to into the global comments into global land trusts that are held in perpetuity for the future generations and I think that we will see new vehicles evolving that allow for that kind of investment and at some point our economic system spiraled out of control when when we went out of reserve currencies where money was still backed up by some kind of real value which was gold or silver and that's a long time ago in the 70s now but we can create new value backed currencies that that actually are backed by regenerated land and but not in a way that it can be traded and capitalized on but as a as a store of value of true value and I think there are lots of people working on that already well okay we should be having a very large discussion about stewardship rights so we're often talking about ownership but actually we're all going to die as individuals and so really thinking about stewardship rights and land use rights seems to be a bit more logical from where we are yeah yeah are you going to be there at the comet in 2061 john i i want to see you there you're younger than i am well i'm 68 years yeah young we will see my mother's 100 my mother's 101 and she's doing well so let's see but i i'm not sure hopeful hopeful signs john that you've got longevity in your genes precious has to head off soon but here's a question for her uh how can we how can our food purchasing in europe help stop degradation in africa you're muted can you see oh my goodness okay i guess the food purchasing in europe maybe if if the branding of the products like tells a proper story of where the food is coming from i think that's where we need to start it like the food is from a group of farmers who are saying no poverty in this community you know organic um with a brand that it's saying it's building ecosystems again they can support that food um but at this time most of the food that's shipped to europe it's probably produced at a massive uh not so regenerative scale in those farmers who can afford to export to europe they have a high um synthetic input uh trail really on the food that they are farming so i guess it has to start from africa to brand and then build up um produce from restorative farmers and then have it branded with a story to europe i think that yeah and how much awareness is there would you say amongst the general public i'm not going to ask you to speak for the entire continent but taking zimbabwe as an example you know yeah i think it's it's a it's a very important question um i will speak for zimbabwe but also um afsa the organization that i mentioned is mostly pan african and the conversation now is how do we really build up the story of regeneration agroecology and building up soils and make sure it goes to the market so that it that story is attached to the avocado that someone is buying because um that story is missing and i once worked with a community that was producing eggs from free range regenerative chickens they would pack those eggs and sell them to a group of very few elites in a small city in a small town and then they would buy like rubbish eggs from the supermarket and then they say oh yeah those that community wants to buy these eggs for much more and then i'll sell them and then buy the bad eggs and then eat them so i think that value the story there's lots of work but in people in the cities now with the pandemic i think the conversation has been ripening but we have lots of work because i think that's one of our weaklings in africa creating value in the marketplace for foods that restore soils and and also eat more locally and seasonally in general in wherever you are in order to not force poor african communities to grow a little green mosh too for the european that need water and don't fit their local ecosystem and so our own habits are important yeah yeah john is a question for you i'd love to hear from john as to what he thinks about creating solutions for individuals to live close to nature and restore ecosystems on a smaller scale than happens with the camp camp's movement well you know the kind of the way i would look at it there are now about eight billion people on the planet and really a huge number of these and this is what's what's been emerging in california a lot of people are now homeless or shelterless and hungry and unemployed and that's increasing as the as the economy is impacted by covid and so they're at high risk from the pandemic and they're they're available to do something else so if we can what we've been talking about in los angeles now is bringing together all of these people with central kitchens putting in central kitchens with creator spaces and with showers and saunas and toilets and and clothing banks and allowing these people to get get healthy maybe putting lockers so they can put put some of their belongings away and give them an address to to get mail and and access to wi-fi so they can talk to their families and so on so in doing this we would like to teach them also we also talking about having stages so there's music and poetry and and and films in in these places so that their sense of community and their sense of connectivity and we can then organize to clean up the cities but then we can also send them out in in california there are two types of camps which are already legal farm camps and forestry camps so if we if we start connecting the people who are available and have no community and have no security to their health and and we have compassion and empathy and and collaborate with them to make that their their health increase and then give them a pathway to go to regenerative agriculture and to go to reforestation of the burned sites where millions of hectares just in the last few years have been burning in these huge forests which are so important to capture the water which is evaporating off the pacific ocean so this kind of thinking where you're you're considering the entire river basin and restoring the los angeles river which is one of the most incredibly disruptive ecosystems that exist so this is a kind of expansive consciousness we have to have if we really want to solve these questions so if we're not just giving lip service to this but we're actually doing it and so this is what's happening now in this movement and that's what makes me so happy about it and there's been talk and talk and talk for decades now so we the great thing about the ecosystem restoration camps is it started four years ago and already we can see this explosive growth and so i'm very hopeful that more and more people will join this and more and more of the authorities and institutions who really have this responsibility it's not the responsibility only of the individual we need to all work together just building on that briefly the let's let's not forget to bring in the opportunity and the potential of connecting the post-COVID recovery money that every government is now promising and putting into their local economies or their national economies with the agenda of ecosystems restoration like it would be such a huge mistake to use all that money to bounce back to the regenerative system that we've had before it was just as murderous as the virus is we need to bounce forward to a new system and that includes people at the local level coming together and say and claiming that the monies that are now being liberated enable them to take care of the land enable co-housing and community cooperatives to take on on a large piece of land and and start farming businesses building local food sovereignty well building food resilience water resilience local capacity for education we need we've created a very brittle global system and in the re-regionalization process powered by that COVID recovery money we can actually deal with so many problems like unemployment and brittle highly like here in Mallorca the the economy has collapsed because 60 percent of the economy is dependent on tourism we need to reinvent tourism completely and we need to rescale all these waiters into agriculturalists and foresters and and people in the local economy I would add one more thing to this I would say that actually I've heard it now in the in the global security conference which I've been to a number of times that we have an existential threat from climate change and biodiversity loss and so on we know this so so what we're seeing is that this is a security issue and as a security issue the budgets for for defense budgets around the world is enormous and so if this is just taken as a as a as a as a security issue the budgets already exist because bombs and missiles and huge armies and war is definitely not going to restore the ecosystem so we need to wage peace and this is the way to wage peace and this is the way to take take swords and fashion them into I wouldn't say plow shares because I'm not really in favor of tillage but moving away from war to peace and to regeneration and restoration so the the idea of you know we we had the Civilian Conservation Corps in North America here in the you know it's been almost a hundred years ago now but but the idea of how do we instead of doing military service to your government you're doing global restoration service to you know that this is something kids do and they get the skills when they do that and that's that's half our military budget is restoring the land we stop trying to build weapons with all that money so again the good the good news is there is already an initiative that is called um Earth Restoration Corps that is is trying to lobby 10 percent of national military spending to be creating transnational regional groups where different militaries work together on creating sustainable infrastructure and plant trees and build soil and and this is interesting for for pressures the african union is particularly interested in this and I can be in touch with the guy who's trying to move this but great amazing well I'm going to take the chance now to thank you all for being a part of this event I've really loved it and enjoyed it and I hope you have as well I've created a little slide to share with you that just quickly runs through and sort of summarizes all of the things that you at home can do to make the the transition to a regenerative world via ecosystem restoration happen so I'm just going to quickly run through it and then we will round off so the first thing that many of the speakers have said is educate yourself there are so many films books documentaries articles loads of content on the erc youtube channel that you can watch we also have our online course which teaches you how to become an ecosystem restoration designer tell everyone about the solution your friends your family your colleagues your neighbours everyone the person that you sit next to on the bus anyone that you get a chance to talk to tell them about this solution because we really need to spread the word and then bring ecosystem restoration to your home and work so learn about the soil in your garden if you have a garden and clean out the trash from your local river speak to your local council about making your local park more abundant with biodiversity and native species these are all very doable things use your passion and your skills to make your current life regenerative so whatever is that you do that that gives you joy in something that you're good at if you're a copywriter if you're a playwright if you're an artist bring regeneration ecosystem restoration into your work rather than trying to drop your existing vocation to change if that makes sense find a local restoration project including an erc or one of the projects on this amazing map that daniel spoke about find like-minded people that live around you and live near you and start your own project and tell your local member of parliament how important this is to you and make your voice heard to oppose degenerative policies and practices and champion regenerative causes so there are just some ideas that i've put together for what anyone anywhere can do at any time so i'm going to stop sharing now or maybe i can hang on forgive me there's one more thing i want to show you i hope that you're all still there yeah this is about joining the ecosystem restoration camps movement one of the easiest ways for you to get involved is to to join this movement as we are incredibly spread out across the world and made up of all sorts of different types of people so go onto our website become a member join a camp um any which way that you want to get involved we are here with open arms and we would love to welcome you to to join together so um that's that i'd like to give a massive thank you thank you so much everyone for being here with us today and we're going to finally close with one last performance by an amazing singer called Ray Zaragoza who i absolutely love and i was thrilled to pieces when she said that she wanted to um be a part of this event and it's just a two minute song so i'm going to play it and then i'm going to wish you all a wonderful day evening morning whatever time it is thank you thank you so much i have to go thank you ash hi precious all right i'm going to play this now thank you on the top stop it ray i'm playing it from the beginning hello ecosystem restorers my name is ray saragoza and it's such an honor to be playing for you today now is the time to come together and protect our mother earth and this song i'm going to play for you today is called fight for you save the river save the seas save the mother and her family how can you take what you want and say that we are free if you put oil in the water we won't sit quietly and we were singing stand up stand up save the oceans and the tree save the people how can you do what you want and say you come in peace if you don't open your eyes how can you see we were cheering way to stand up soon thank you so much everyone i am ray saragoza have a good one such a wonderful song isn't it so i think without further ado we will draw this to a close and thank you so much to everyone that came and was here with us today i've loved every single second and yeah keep in touch and let's do this bye