Ecosystem Restoration Camps

Hello, I'm John Liu, and I'm really happy to have this opportunity to speak with you today remotely. I'm also very grateful to the Common Land Foundation and the Mustard Seed Trust that make it possible for me to do this work. When I was 26 years old, I went to China. I had the opportunity to help to open the CBS News Bureau and to work for CBS News for a decade. And then I worked for Radio Televisione Italiana and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen always as a producer and cameraman. And then something remarkable happened. I was asked by the World Bank to film a baseline study for an enormous development project called the Lus Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Program. Now this was very large-scale. The pilot project was 35,000 square kilometers, so approximately the size of the Netherlands or Belgium. And it was over a number of years, so it continued for 10 years, and about $500 million was invested in this program. And what it was, was to take the area that was massively degraded where the Chinese civilization had begun and to restore it to ecological health. And when I first went out there and saw the degree of degradation and the degree of difficulty, I was skeptical. That you could actually restore something with— that was so fundamentally destroyed. And this was also the point of view of most of the people who were engaged in the work. But it was very scientifically analyzed and very systematically implemented. So even though I was skeptical, when I went out there, I began to understand what was going on in restoration, and I began to study it. And so I ended up spending quite a lot of time in universities and research institutes around the world, getting fellowships to continue to study this. And I made a number of films that went on to the BBC and, and elsewhere. And ecosystem restoration emerged from a very obscure and kind of theoretical field to something which is very practical and that we can do. What I was learning was that biodiversity, biomass, and accumulated organic matter are natural principles from evolutionary development. So there's always more biodiversity, always more biomass, and always more accumulated organic matter in naturally evolved succession through evolution. When I first got to the Loess Plateau, I found a completely degraded landscape. Actually, the situation was pretty dire for the local people. So they couldn't continue to do what they were doing because they were at a collapse scenario where the water cycle was completely disrupted. There was virtually no relative humidity. It was extremely dry area. It really didn't reflect the ecological realities because there was maybe 350 to 550 millimeters of annual rainfall. And when you understand what that means, that's plenty for even climax temperate forests. But because of the way the land had been treated, the water didn't infiltrate and was not retained, and most of the vegetation and biodiversity had been lost. So after I started to see this, I compared what I was learning about evolution and ecology with the geopolitical events I'd been covering for the news, with the rise of China and the collapse of the Soviet Union and those sorts of massive geopolitical stories. And I realized that no one will remember the people and the, the things that we think are so important and that are being covered by the news, but The quality of life for all life in the future will be determined by our consciousness and our actions in terms of protecting and restoring landscapes on the, on the Earth. So I stopped doing journalism and I have devoted myself to understanding and studying and documenting and communicating about ecological function on a planetary scale. And I've been very fortunate to have a number of graduate-level research appointments with very important different institutions around the world, and I've been able to go to 90 countries around the world and all continents and see how the natural ecosystems function and where are the degraded landscapes on the Earth. At first, I was working a lot with the World Bank and the British government and the Global Environment Facility and various parts of the United Nations system. And I saw what they were doing, and I documented what they were doing, and I analyzed what they were doing. And at some point I realized, even though we know how to do this, it takes too long with this institutional framework, and we're not reaching everyone. And so I really wanted to see whether there was a way to engage very large numbers of people in this effort and through this address some of the larger historic systemic problems that we have. And I knew a lot about ecosystem restoration. You can go and see my films like Lessons of the Loess Plateau or Hope in a Changing Climate or Green Gold or more recently we have just participated participated in something called Kiss the Ground. That's on Netflix and now on the Public Broadcasting System in the United States, PBS. The Age of Nature, in the first episode, Awakening, they profile me and my work in China and elsewhere, mainly in China. And in one of the fellowships that I got to the Rothamsted Research Institute, the director said, "You must go to Africa." And I had this opportunity to go to Africa, and I went to South Africa and spoke to the Global Environment Facility to the ministers of finance and ministers of, of environment from all over Africa and all over the world. And then I went to Rwanda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. And especially in Rwanda and Ethiopia, the results were very interesting because this was back in, I think, 2005. And when we were able to present very clearly the experiences in China, the people in Rwanda and Ethiopia especially understood it. And they said, "Okay, that's wonderful. Let's employ that here." And so they changed their laws and they began to restore landscapes at large scale. And now there's 15 years of data on this, so you can actually go and see what the results are. And the results are measurable. So you're able to lower surface temperatures on the surface of the Earth. You're able to restore vegetation and restore soils, microbial and fungal aspects of soil, and biodiversity. You can bring back biodiversity. The legacy genome is often waiting to reemerge if the conditions are right. And the people's lives are better. Their work connected to this is meaningful instead of being about moving, buying and selling things, or outcompeting others, or trying to separate themselves from people who are less fortunate. As I saw this, I thought about the speed with which large-scale restoration was taking place. I realized that we're going too slow. And we're not engaging everyone in the effort. So I wanted to find ways to have everyone participate. And what ultimately happened was that I was dreaming I would wake up in the morning and I would have had this dream that people were going camping and they were waking up and having breakfast and then they were happily going out and doing restoration activities and in the evening they were telling stories and playing guitar around the fire. And I just thought this was a kind of romantic dream, a vision. I didn't believe in it. And I thought I'd been making films for such a long time and about restoration, and few people watch them, and few people really— some people, it's not like nobody saw it, it made an impact, but it wasn't like it was a blockbuster and everybody suddenly turned and said, "We have— that's what we have to do." And so when I had these dreams, I didn't actually think people would necessarily respond, but I kept having this dream. So I kept waking up with the dream of people going camping and restoring the earth. So I wrote about it in Permaculture Magazine. I wrote about it in the Cosmos journal, and, and I wrote about it on social media. And suddenly tens and then hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands of people started to basically say, "Well, we're having that same dream. We agree with that." And this was quite interesting to be in such a position because I realized that this could happen. If we can imagine it, we can do it. So we started talking about creating ecosystem restoration camps. And back in 2016, we began to discuss it on social media with tens of thousands of people. And there was a lot of opinions and a lot of things back and forth, but it seemed like there were quite a few people who would be willing to participate in this. So we said, well, who would share to make this happen? Could we all share €10 per month, which would be about €120 €10 per year, which is really just a couple of cups of coffee a month at the going rates now. And so when 1,000 people pledged to give €10 per month, then we created the first foundation in the Netherlands. Now there are two foundations. One is in the Netherlands and one is in the United States, and there's also plans for other foundations in the UK and elsewhere to be able to accept donations and provide tax relief for people who have too much money and want to get a tax deduction. They can give money to these nonprofits, and then that money can go to ecosystem restoration camps around the world. And what's happened in the years afterwards, we've gone from first building these foundations and creating a team to promote this to building the first camp in Spain, to building the second camp a year later in Mexico, and then in the third year to have 21 camps and now to have 37 camps in 6 continents. In places like Guatemala and Kenya and India and Thailand and Brazil and Morocco, Somalia, Egypt, etc. So In each of these camps, it's possible to make breakthroughs. And if breakthroughs are made in any of these camps, then all this information goes all over to the other camps like a mycelial network. And it also empowers people who generally are not the experts in the field. They're the, the people who have lost their livelihoods as small farmers, and many of these areas around the world are being deserted as well as desertified. So they're in Spain, the first camp was made in what's called territorios abandonados, where the young people have all left to go to the urban areas and the old people have rather destructive traditions of using tillage and chemicals and so on in agriculture, and the place is just pretty dry and destroyed. So what we found is it's possible there to bring back young people who are interested in restoring these areas. And it's a great way of life and it's a lot of fun. So this is now happening more and more. And I encourage you all to join the Ecosystem Restoration Camps movement. It's very simple. It's not onerous. And as you help to build these camps, then you'll be able to go to these camps. And you can see what we're doing in terms of earth architecture and water harvesting and nursery systems and food forests to feed the people. And this is all done by self-organizing, self-governing, autonomous camps around the world. So the, the main thing that the Foundation what John D Liu is doing is to link them all together and encourage them. And when they need financial support or they need knowledge, we can help to provide that. And if they need, say, specific volunteers, trainers, permaculture designers, or natural building experts, we can arrange to work together with the local camps. In order to do that, we can also film this and it can be used around the world. So these are all the things which are happening now. And I can tell you the people who go to camp, they really have a good time because it makes sense. Suddenly we're all doing something that we understand why we're doing it and we have this shared intention. We all know that we want to have a fully functional biodiverse Earth and that we want to make sure that our children and future generations of life of all kinds have a high quality of life. So this is a way in which we can do that. We may even be able to change the economy because gradually as we do this, we start to see, "Oh, the water comes back and the vegetation comes back and the natural weather regulation and climate regulation comes back. And when that's measurable, when that's possible at scale, then it's impossible to deny that that's more valuable than buying and selling things that end up in the trash. We think that ultimately this will have a really big effect. Plus, maybe we can address the refugee question and the question of the homeless and the hungry. And we can give people basic incomes and meaningful work and make sure that they're healthy and in a community that cares for them. So these are all the various ideas, and everyone has a role to play in this. It's not just that you have to go out and work in a camp. You can help to support the camp's movement which will create yet more camps all around the world. And what we see now is that this is already a global movement. It's in the last few years, it's emerged from 1 camp to 2 camps to 21 camps to 37 camps. And if that just continues in that way, we're at exponential growth and we can imagine restoring the entire Earth. So I hope you'll look at this and understand that this is a viable solution that has now had a number of years of development and is at a place where it can take off and restore all over the earth. And the thing that I'm looking forward to is having camps in tropical islands where we can help. We're already doing mangroves in a number of places, but we can also start to do coral regeneration, and coral is very rapid in absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. And we can also skew the corals that we grow to be able to handle increased acidity and higher temperatures, which assures that they don't die as easily as what's happening now, and the propagation rates, if we encourage it, are vastly higher and faster than natural regeneration. So that's a way we can all go camping in tropical areas, scuba dive, and have a really good time and do something that we need to do. So Please help this movement grow. It's not about institution building. It's about empowerment of everyone to participate in restoring the earth. Thanks very much.