How to Restore Soil Biology and Ecosystems | Re-greening the Planet Part 1

Hello and welcome, everybody. Uh, this is our July 2023 webinar series, Regreening the Planet., and this is Webinar One, Restoring Our Relationships with Soil Biology and Ecosystems. So before we get started and we allow folks to join the webinar today, if you can, in the chat window, which is going to be a button on the very bottom of your screen, just tell us where you're coming from. We like to see where in the world is our attendees from, and we usually get quite the international audience. All right, first one is Bulgaria. Great. I think we've already— it's scrolling so fast, it's hard to keep up. I think we've already hit all the major continents so far.

Quite a few of the countries too.

For sure. Exactly. Wow. We really got quite the international audience today, which is awesome.

Mm-hmm.

All right. Well, we got a lot to cover today, so let's go ahead and jump right into it. So I like to talk about the July 2023 webinar series. And this is again Webinar 1, which is Restoring Relationships with Soil Biology and Ecosystems. And then we have Webinar 2, What Does Ecosystem Restoration Look Like? And this is going to be at 11:00 AM Pacific time on Wednesday, July 19th. And we're going to hear from John D Liu and two of the ecosystem restoration community representatives and talk about the climate change mitigation work that they're doing and how they're improving human livelihoods. Should be a fantastic look at the great work that John and his team are doing. And then Webinar 3 is going to be Strategies for Soil and Land Regeneration, and that's going to be 11:00 AM Pacific time on Wednesday, July 26. We'll have Dr. Adam Cobb and Paul Morris talk about how to fix a broken soil food web and how to restore healthy ecosystems. And then Webinar 4, which is going to be Your Future in Soil Regeneration and Ecological Restoration. That's going to be 11:00 AM Pacific time on Monday, July 31. And you're going to hear from folks like myself and others that are doing restoration work and able to really kind of put in the time and the hours to do that restoration. So we look forward to having you attend all of the webinars and realize that if you can't attend one of the webinars, that's fine. They will be recorded and you can go back and and actually take a look at the ones that you missed. All right, let's get through some housekeeping. So first, we're going to have everybody in muted mode besides the panelists just to make sure that we get good audio quality. We have quite a few attendees today, so we want to make sure that it runs smoothly. And then if you have questions for the panelists, make sure that you put it in the Zoom Q&A section. And that's going to be down at the very bottom of your screen, again, next to the chat. Button. And it's important that if you want to have a question answered by the panelists, because we have a Q&A section at the end of this, make sure you post your question in the Q&A section. If you put it in the chat window, we might miss it, and it more likely won't get teed up for the panelists. But we also have the chat window so that you can converse with other attendees. And we usually have a really good dialogue happening in the chat window. So feel free to talk amongst yourselves as we're going through the webinar. And last but not least, please, please, please enjoy this webinar. All right, so let's talk a little bit about today's webinar, Restoring Our Relationship with Soil Biology and Ecosystems. Really kind of the topics we're going through introductions. You'll hear from the different panelists that are going to be in our webinar today. And then we'll have Ashley Brown will be talking about ecosystem restoration communities. And then we'll hand that over to Dr. Adam Cobb, who will be talking about soil biology is the keystone of restoring ecosystem functions. Well, a brief video talking about our July offer, and then we have about 50 minutes slated for Q&A, so a good amount of time to get through quite a few questions that you might have. Total time of today's webinar should run about 2 hours. All right, so let's introduce our panelists. And so, John D Liu, let me hand this over to you. Why don't you give everybody a quick introduction?

Hello, everyone. I'm John D Liu. I was a journalist for many years, and then I began to study ecology. That's been a long time coming. I've made a number of films, and then I founded the Ecosystem Restoration Camps and now Communities movement. So, you know, I'm excited by how many people are listening and working to do restoration, and it's something that we all need to do, and it's something that we need to collectively do. So we can't actually succeed by ourselves. So I do see a black line up there, and I'm not sure where it's coming from. No, it's gone.

It's gone. Yep. Sorry. It was on my end. My bad.

OK. OK. Well. Anyway, it's lovely to be here and I'm excited to have so many people from all over the world. Thanks for having me.

Thanks, John. Ashley.

Hello everybody. Um, very exciting to see so many people here. Uh, yeah, my name's Ashley Brown and I'm the education coordinator at Ecosystem Restoration Communities, and I'll be telling you more about organization soon. Nice to see you all.

Great. Thanks, Ashley. Dr. Elaine Hamm.

Thank you for introducing me. I'm the person who kind of started the questioning about how soil works. What do all of the organisms in the soil do? When I was a graduate student starting my PhD work at Colorado State University, went around to all of the soil chemistry department people who dealt with agriculture and asked if they thought it was worthwhile for me to be studying what do fungi and bacteria have, what do they do in the soil, and are they important? And to a person, all of those soil chemists said, it's absolutely ridiculous. They don't do anything in the soil. They don't help your plant at all. So they're just there. Well, that is not how Mother Nature works. And so since that time, I've been working on understanding the soil food web in determining all of the different things that the soil organisms in the soil do. And it's amazing. The longer we look at it, the more we come to understand that without the biology, you cannot grow. Plants in a healthy fashion. You won't be able to get the yields, you won't get the productivity, you won't get the nutrients. You're going to have to irrigate, you're going to have diseases and pests if you don't have the right biology in the school. So long, you know, gosh, it was 1981 when I graduated from my PhD work and been working, and I've been working on this subject. The rest of my life.

Great. Thank you, Elaine. Dr. Adam Cobb.

So I do science communication work and create some content here at the school, which means that I get to spend time with Elaine and our other wonderful staff members throughout the week, as well as interact with students and folks. And let me tell you, I've been looking forward to this webinar because 13 years ago, the combination of soil life and ecological restoration was my gateway into science. I had not been a scientist up until that point, and then I took a class in restoration ecology and fell in love with it. So I am ready to talk about this subject.

He's jazzed. All right, well, thanks, Adam. Appreciate it. And I'm Brian Vank. I'll be your host today. I am a soil food web consultant. I have two consulting companies, one called Sprouting Soil and Soil Matters, and I am based out of Oregon in the United States. Okay, let's go ahead and move on. Really, we also wanted to just talk about, really, in the spirit of the July webinar series, this really is going to show our deep and continued partnership between Dr. Elaine Soll Fuqua Web School and the ecosystem restoration communities. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and hand this over to Ashley. So, Ashley, take it away.

Thank you, Ryan. Um, so yeah, I'm going to be talking about the Ecosystem Restoration Communities movement and explaining, you know, its origin story and what we do. And then also looking a little bit into the question of what is ecosystem restoration and running through some of the examples of the different types of restoration work that the restoration communities are doing. So put simply, the Ecosystem Restoration Communities movement is a movement of everyday people coming together to restore the Earth. And this is a picture of some people living around the ERC known as BioOrganica in Mexico, and they're planting agave plants. So the origin story of the ERC, and we use the acronym quite a lot because it's quite a long name, um, it all comes down to this image here, which is of the Lys Plateau. And I'm sure many of you have seen this by now, and this is a before and after set of pictures, um, one, the first taken in 1995 on the left, and the second taken in 2009. And this massive transformation is something that was captured by John D Liu, who's here with us today, um, who was filming this transformational project. And it was a real turning point for him. I don't want to steal his story, he's going to tell you it, I'm sure, himself soon, uh, but it led him down a path of ecosystem restoration, and he started having this recurring dream that people would gather in restoration camps, so camps on their land where people would come together to restore the ecosystem around them. And, um, and he wrote about it in the Permaculture Magazine back in 2016, uh, and lots of people came forward and said, wow, this vision is amazing, I really want to help make it happen. And I was one of those people, and thus the ERC was born. And now I'm going to tell you about ecosystem restoration and what ecosystem restoration is. So there are two main definitions. The first is by the Society for Ecological Restoration, which is ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed. And the one on the right is by the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, which is ecosystem restoration means assisting in the recovery of ecosystems that have been degraded or destroyed, as well as conserving the ecosystems that are still intact. So as you can see, quite similar. Quite similar definitions, but the one on ecosystem restoration from the UN also talks about conservation as well and brings that, that in there. And this is an image that we had commissioned right at the beginning of our work where we wanted to really quickly and easily describe the process of land degradation and the process of ecosystem restoration. So this isn't complete by any means, but it's just a really simple way of describing the processes. So it often starts with deforestation, chopping down trees, removing that biomass that falls from the trees and nourishes the soil, also removing shade, removing the, the rain creation of, of trees, slowly drying out the ecosystem. Industrial agriculture is another big cause of degradation through tilling, which destroys the soil food web, as well as spraying chemicals, which also destroys it. Overgrazing is another cause of degradation by having too many animals on a piece of land for too long, which removes the vegetation dries the land out, removes the roots that kind of feed the soil, and, uh, and the defecation and everything that the animals bring to fertilize the soil. That's— that is, uh, the overgrazing issue, and it's really, really common all over the world. Removing too much vegetation, um, also compacts the soil as well from having too many heavy animals on one in one spot. This then leads to desertification, a loss of biodiversity, and results in climate change and loss of livelihoods. And then the reverse process can look like— it can look like a number of things, but it can look like controlling erosion. So when land is desertified, erosion basically means that topsoil is washed away by rain, which continues to remove fertility. So controlling that erosion by shaping the land so that when it rains, the water remains in the land and sinks into the soil, restoring the soil, which is a big one for the Soil Food Web School. So using compost, compost teas to put that fertility back, build that organic matter back up to provide food for the soil food web. And then planting with pioneer species, so species that grow really fast, put down deep taproots, often fix nitrogen, and produce lots of biomass very quickly. This results in intact ecosystems, which then leads to sustainable livelihoods and can, if done at scale, mitigate climate change. So that is the process that the Ecosystem Restoration Communities is trying to make happen all over the world as soon as possible. What makes the ERC really special is that it is a movement of everyday people that are supporting each other. So it's rather than there being this big massive organisation at the top and then all of these bodies underneath. It's much more decentralised with the ERCs working together in a network kind of process, and they do that by sharing knowledge with each other, which we help to facilitate, collaborating, writing funding proposals together, doing projects together, visiting each other, learning from each other. Yeah, it's really beautiful. And this is the number of communities that now exist within the movement. There's 56. Bearing in mind we only had one in 2017, 2018, so it's grown really fast, which is really cool. And this is the foundation that supports the projects. So there are a number of people that work in an NGO registered in the Netherlands, and we all offer our expertise to the movement to help it grow and flourish. And that expertise looks like fundraising, publicity and promotion, knowledge exchange like I just mentioned, training, and data collection. And this is the impact that we've had since 2017. So when I say we, I mean all of the communities within the movement. And we've planted 3,255,917 plants and trees, and I'm sure many more since this number was updated. Um, 56 communities around the world restoring 9,393 hectares, with 3.1 million in the pipeline. 60,000 people following us on social media, 459 students taking our courses, and 24,367 people who have visited an ERC, taken one of our courses, and their lives have, have been positively changed as a result. So I want to share with you a breakdown of the different types of ecosystem restoration. And this picture demonstrates it really well. It's called the Restorative Continuum, and it's by the Society of Ecological Restoration. And it talks about the 4 stages of an ecosystem restoration project. If you do them all, or some projects are just focused on one of these phases, But quite often, if you were going to do the full suite, you would go all the way along the continuum. And the first, um, the first category is reducing societal impacts. And what that basically means is stopping or reducing the actions that are degrading our ecosystems.. And a big one is industrial agriculture. So spraying chemicals, plowing, overgrazing, like I was talking about earlier. If these practices are reduced and stopped, that is an example of the first stage of, of an ecosystem restoration initiative. The second stage is remediation or improving ecosystem management. And that basically looks like cleaning up an ecosystem that's been polluted. So this is an example of that happening at one of the ERCs called Paradise in California, um, which suffered from a really extreme wildfire in 2018. And, uh, a lot of buildings burnt down. Buildings that are— were made with toxic materials. Um, so as you can see on the bottom picture, there is a burnt-out building. Um, and the people of Paradise were very worried because the rain would come, not only would it wash all the topsoil away, but it would also wash the remnants of these buildings into the watershed and into the drinking water supply. So what the ERC did was dig swales on contour to try and capture some of that water, um, apply compost, put in a wattle made of straw, which is one of these big tube things, apply compost tea, and then inoculate with native fungi to try and remediate. So to stop those toxins going into the into the waterway. The third section is rehabilitation, and that basically means that you are— the main goal is to restore the ecosystem function of the land or of the sea or of the river, but not necessarily always with native species, and not necessarily always just to benefit our more-than-human kin, but to benefit us as well. So what that often looks like is agroecology. Um, here is a picture of two types of soil. I mean, the left is sand, um, in Egypt, and Egypt is a really highly desertified place, and, um, especially this part of Egypt outside of the Niger Delta, um, the Nile Delta, sorry. So yeah, the, the picture on the left is of the sand just around, um, and then the one on the right is from the, the farm that this ERC known as Habiba is working on. And this is an example of increasing ecosystem function, um, and this was just within a couple of years, so it's a really impressive, um, change. And what they've managed to do is grow all of this food, bearing in mind they have 300 milliliters of rain a year, um, which is really, really low. And that often comes in one big burst, one big kind of flood-causing downpour. Um, but because they have been restoring their soil health, they are able to grow all of this food and supply it to their neighbors and people even all the way to Cairo. Another example of rehabilitation is agroforestry, and this is a picture of the, the ERC in Guatemala, which is called Contour Lines. And Contour Lines works with communities all over Guatemala who have cut down rainforests to grow chemical corn, um, slash-and-burn corn, and this ERC helps them to transition away from that onto very biodiverse agroforestry systems on contour. So this is an example of increasing ecosystem function, sequestering carbon, building biomass, increasing biodiversity, retaining water, cycling nutrients, etc., but without necessarily using entirely native species because A lot of the species that they grow are food-producing, and the main driver of these communities to take part in this is to increase their own food security and also to, to sell products at market to, to make a better livelihood for themselves. And this is the before picture. And this is one year later. Goes to show how quickly things grow in the tropics when, when planted right. Another example of rehabilitation is syntropic agriculture, syntropic farming. This is a picture of Michelle from Desperto in Brazil, another ERC, and they are reforesting their land and growing food at the same time with this this very quick process where they basically speed up ecological succession to create real fertility and growth, um, and grow food at the same time. Uh, another form of rehabilitation is creating wetlands, um, and this is a picture from Uthai Forest in Thailand. And again, within a few years, this is the difference. And then the last, the last phase of the continuum that I showed you earlier is ecological restoration. And ecological restoration is basically using entirely native species and using a reference model to base your restoration on. So reference model being an intact ecosystem nearby that you can basically copy. You can go and see what species are growing there. You can collect seeds, you can, you can propagate, you can bring those propagules in and, and restore the land to the state of the reference. And this is happening at Mundo Nuevo in Colombia, another ERC. This is intact tropical rainforest in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the background, and the foreground are ERC volunteers that are restoring a piece of land that was deforested, cut down for cattle grazing, and then elephant grass springing up and stopping the regrowth of the forest. So the volunteers were mainly, um, removing the elephant grass, which is an invasive species, and, uh, planting pioneer trees that they have grown in their nursery from seeds that they collected in the rainforest, led by indigenous guides. And then right at the end of the spectrum is assisted or passive regeneration, which could also be called rewilding. And this is an example of Embercombe. This is Embercombe in England, and it's an example of a rewilding project, part of the network where they are letting everything grow wild and making small disturbances that mimic animal behaviour until they're allowed to introduce animals there. It's quite a complicated thing to try and do in the UK, especially on small sites. And I just wanted to end with a story, a personal story, um, of one of the managers at one of the ERCs. This is Jani, um, and she's the manager at Regenesis, which is an ERC in the Philippines. And I want to share her story because it's a really good example of how the ERC works. So we created a course, a restoration course back in 2019 that Yany took, and this was before she started her ERC. She then used that course to create a restoration plan for her project. Or for her initiative, Regenesis. She started Regenesis off the back of doing that course, um, and she started having restoration experiences, which are where people come together, they restore the land, they restore themselves, um, and they connect, really connect with the culture of the place. She ran quite a few of those, started making more of an income, managed to hire more people, started a native bamboo nursery that later got funded by the government. The ERC supported her to take a regenerative business master's, which she used to then create other business models that can bring her in an income for her project. Her team expanded, and she also is collaborating with the ERC in Malaysia called DOKU. That is run by an elder that has been working to restore the Malaysian rainforest for a long time, and he is kind of her mentor when it comes to bamboo propagation. So I just wanted to end there really with a real story of, of someone within the ERC and how it works. And one of the things that is so beautiful about this movement is that we're really inclusive. So if you want to start a restoration project, but you're not quite ready, apply via the website. We'll give you access to a free training on how to set up a restoration project. Obviously, I'm, I'm part of creating all of these courses with the Soil Food Web School, the first one being the Introduction to Ecosystem Restoration course. There's a whole learning journey you can go on there to learn how to restore. Restore the Earth. It's been a pleasure to talk to so many of you. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Ashleigh. It was fantastic seeing all those different examples of the changes and how quickly some of those changes actually occurred. Kudos to you and your team. Okay, we're going to hand this over to Adam. But I also just want to give a quick reminder, if you have questions that you want the panelists to answer during the Q&A, again, make sure you click on the Q&A button at the very bottom of your screen and post questions there. All right, Adam, I'm gonna hand this over to you.

Awesome. Thank you, Brian. Ashley, it looks like you're getting a lot of love from the audience.

Yeah.

Seeing a lot of reactions there, and I really appreciated the way that you laid out, especially the continuum. You know, when I started in studying ecological restoration, we weren't quite there yet. And I really watched the field kind of struggle with how to get to that place and So you did a great job of setting us up. Let's see if I can move the slides forward because second talk, and Ashley has left me plenty of time here, is to bring in a little bit more detail about the soil biology component, how the microorganisms and their relationships with plants become so integral to restoring ecosystem functions, especially sort of along the continuum where Ashley talked about, you know, sort of the tipping point from agroecology into full restoration. That's, that's a space that we really focus on a lot at the school. People that want to transition their land to, to better land management practices holistically, maybe including food production, but also native species when and where they can. So I want to start with this quote, one of our former US presidents who exists, who oversaw some of the consequences of the Dust Bowl. A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. And I think I've seen in chat today that already people are discussing topics like erosion and the pollution of soil with agrochemicals and overgrazing and the influence that that has. So I think I'd be preaching to the choir to, to go into too much more detail about this quote. And I don't want to be a downer, but I do want to start with a reality that we're facing. In the US, the Union of Concerned Scientists recently said that we may be on track to repeat the Dust Bowl era losses of our topsoil 8 times over, right? So I think of that as this point in history where it was so destructive because of agricultural practices and, and the destruction of native landscapes, and then we got past it, was my hope. But due to climate change and other looming environmental threats, we are staring down a reality of, of deep disruption., and potentially, you know, with consequences for global food security writ large. And just to put this in context, Ken Burns did a documentary about the Dust Bowl a few years ago, wherein they mentioned a fact that in one night, the city of Chicago had 12 million pounds about 5.5 million kilograms of dust deposited on it in one night. Right? That's almost 2 kilograms or 4 pounds for every person that lived in Chicago. And that was all formerly fertile living soil from the Midwest that was being blown over to, to be deposited on Chicago. We don't want to live in that world again, right? We have enough fires and floods and other disruptions for a lifetime. We don't need to see this kind of soil loss. So how do we turn that into hope? That's, that's the reality that we're facing. To me, the hope is that we can be inviting and inclusive to everybody in this room, to everyone you know, to the entire society that we live in, to say, hey, you can be part of a restoration story here. Not just one ecosystem and not just soil health, but the part of the restoration through the entire biosphere, which we have through human activities really deeply harmed. By some estimates, we may say, we may see that by the year 2050, 90% of the wildlife on this planet is gone relative to what how many, how much wildlife there was 100 years ago, right? And it's, it's human society, it's human activities that are doing that. But I really like how Ashley presented restoration, uh, kind of the opposite of what this picture shows. We don't need to stay off these ecosystems. We don't need to stay away. We need to be part of the partnership with these beautiful living systems around us. And, you know, in our recent Soil Summit, we asked Lyla June to come speak. She is a member of an Indigenous group, the Diné, or sometimes called the Navajo. And she said this idea that humans are separate from nature or that we need to stay away to let nature recover is not the indigenous wisdom of my people, right? She made it very clear that humans have the opportunity to act as a keystone species, to do something in the ecosystems which extend the capacity to support other forms of life. We don't have to oversee on our watch the loss of all this wildlife. We can facilitate, we can restore these ecosystems and their functions and get things back. This is what John D Liu has called the great work of our time, that we would engage differently with our biosphere. There's another quote that I love from Aldo Leopold. Some people refer to him as the father of ecological restoration. He was also a farmer, and in the '30s he was part of a shifting movement in the U.S. from the exploitative methods of the past to a new mindset, to an ecological worldview. He said, we abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. And that's the difference. The people who want to use land as a commodity, I'd like them to stay off. I'd like them to stay away. But those of us, and I think the people in this room represent this, who want to be in a right relationship with the rest of life on this planet, we need all of us here, all of us working, all of us discovering together. Now, in the last, you know, 15 years, as I've been studying topics around soil ecology and agriculture and ecosystem restoration, I find that a lot of wonderful things have been discovered. There's a, there's a place for research, there's a place for experience. And concepts of management. A lot of times historically, ecological restoration is focused on landscape management and vegetation management. And I would say the same thing in farming, in agriculture. We can see the landscape and we can see the plants. And so we focus and learn a lot about how to manage those things. But we've left this thing that's missing, that's so central to success. And that's soil life. That's the soil food web. And, you know, it is very telling to me that when Elaine, when you were in grad school, that people were like, soil life, because that happened to me when I was in grad school. I wanted to study mycorrhizal fungi. I talked to some agronomists and they said, who cares about that stuff? It kind of goes away when you put some fertilizers on. It's not really that important, right? But it's actually the keystone of holding together all the sustainable options, all the regenerative options for landscape and vegetation management. The microorganisms are essential, right? They're more essential than us. They were here a long time before us, and we need to learn from their wisdom. How to partner with them. I have to acknowledge that people have been doing this for generations. We all exist here because of an agroecology that stretches back to the dawn of human civilization, and even before we could call it civilization, to the indigenous hunter-gatherers in every place. And it's been the last 100, 200 years that has been the aberration. We're living in the weird times. We need to transition and recapture that wisdom and move it forward with our technology and our capacity. But soil life is going to be at the center. It's going to be at the center of anything that works. And what do I mean by soil life? Well, this is going to be a little recreation of what Elaine brought to the world. Through the soil food web and through some of the work that she's done over decades of articulating how these relationships work. While all around her, those agronomists that said, who cares about microorganisms? They were just thinking about plants, just plant thinking. What can I see? What can I manage? Dump some chemicals on it, get this result, spray it if it gets bugs. The plant was at the center. And we also have a danger in our modern world because of our hyperfocus on the carbon issue, that we have too much carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, that we continue to burn fossil fuels in an unsustainable way, um, that people are going, well, let's capture the carbon, let's capture the carbon. So it's like a switch to carbon thinking. Still not really integrated all the time into the holistic system. And what is that system? Well, it's the fungi and the bacteria living in association with the plants. They're the ones that, that process the carbon, that accumulate the carbon in the system. And there's other organisms that feed on them, like protozoa and nematodes, and That process of, of eating the fungi and the bacteria releases nutrients in the right rate at the right time to keep the plants productive. So they keep photosynthesizing and drawing down more carbon. Carbon from a plant is like the liquid sunlight turned into sugars exuded from the roots to feed life in the soil, and then it goes on up and up and up the chain to various arthropods, to predatory nematodes, to birds and moles. This is, this is ecological thinking. This is the whole picture, not just focused on plants or carbon, but focused on the entire web of life. I didn't, I didn't I didn't coordinate this with Ashley, but I like that she put the dirt in the hand on the left and the soil in the hand on the right in her picture, because I did the same with the next 2 slides. I'd like to contrast dirt and soil, as Elaine has taught me, because so much of the research and work that's out there that farmers access, that land managers access, is research done on dirt. People are farming dirt in so many places. And so you're trying to keep a plant healthy, productive when it doesn't have like very many partners, maybe some bacteria hanging out in there. It's susceptible to diseases, water limitations. Those systems often have compaction layers, so the roots are, are limited. Naturally by that kind of issue. And then when you have soil, when there's enough organic matter, when there's this, the whole food web is intact, the compaction layers start going away. Or maybe we have to bust through them one time, right? And then get the life and the plant reconnected. So that the soil life can cover all the surfaces of the plant below ground and above ground. Those roots can reach down and find loose soil full of air and water in the right proportions that they need so they can thrive without expensive external inputs just constantly going in. I mean, I'm not saying there's no input. There's input of time and energy. Organic materials, other forms of nutrient management. We can't just go to sleep and expect that these systems will fix themselves in any short order. But when we set up the system differently and holistically and the life is in there and we think about keeping the soil food web thriving, increasing its abundance, it manages itself pretty well. The human role in this is to come in and say, how can I kind of just tickle that system a little bit, get a little bit more out of it? How can I increase the diversity of what's going on in this system? How can I bring some new land management practice or, or dig some contour lines so that we can reduce erosion, right? Humans have a role, but the magic comes from the soil food web. And what does that look like in the field? This is another contrast of dirt and soil. The Jasper County Soil and Water Conservation District put this on social media a couple months ago. What they're calling dirt is kind of typically managed row crop land. It's been tilled. It's been sprayed. It's been left fallow. It's been cultivated in monoculture for years. And when you take a chunk of that dirt out of that field and put it in water, it falls apart. It doesn't have aggregation and stability. It's not full of life. If you looked at it under a microscope, you'd be lucky to find a few bacteria in there. And then on the, on the right, there's soil. There's a field where they stopped the tillage, they stopped the spraying, they, they diversified the agricultural system and brought in the right kinds of biological soil management for years. And that soil is stable now, right? It's alive. It's got a high percentage of organic matter. In it. When you take a piece of it and put it in water, the aggregates are glued together because life is the glue of the minerals in soil. So I think that that is a nice dramatic way of showing this. Okay, I think I'm on track for time. I do want to mention Rachel Carson, one of the the founders of the environmental movement. And in this quote, which I do want to acknowledge, it's a little gendered based off of her time, but she says, "In nature, nothing exists alone, but man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself." Do we want the land and the dirt to become, you know, beset by dirt that will fall apart, that will erode in a rain? In a wind event, or do we want the soil, right? We need to stop doing war with these systems and get on track with restoration. So on the microorganism level, it's essential to reestablish microorganisms that, that play these important roles, that, that provide the biological function of soil. Of healthy soil. Bacteria and fungi have a lot to do with processing organic matter and minerals and drawing those resources into their bodies, building structure. They are the sustainable way that we can have plants access the nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and all the micronutrients that they need. But we need the protozoa and nematodes, the predators in the system as well. When they eat the bacteria and fungi and release those nutrients as waste, it helps the plant access the nutrients, right? They would all be tied up in the bodies of the fungi and bacteria without these predators. And protozoa and nematodes are also really easy indicators to us of some of the soil conditions. If you don't see protozoa, if you don't see root or fungal feeding nematodes and bacterial feeding nematodes, you have a problem. You have a problem. If you see lots of root feeding nematodes, you've got a problem, right? They're indicators. And I took this picture in one of the last intact pieces of the tallgrass prairie in Kansas, I sit back and I think about how it's estimated that there were 40 to 60 million bison roaming the Great Plains eating the grasses. And the Native peoples of North America were managing these systems, setting fires and such. They were part of that. They were keystones to that ecosystem, and they got to enjoy abundance when they ate the bison. But these enormous creatures were not subsisting on fertilized grasslands. You know, if you go in and you look at the nitrogen and phosphorus in these soils, it doesn't look high. You know, an agronomist would say, pour a bunch more on there. To get more productivity. But actually, the soil life is intact in these systems. We find everything that we're supposed to find down there. That's why the grasses are productive and nutritious. That's why you can go in a meter square and find 16 native species— forbs, grasses, different times of the year, all this habitat for pollinators. I hope everybody gets a chance to experience what a beautiful intact grassland is like, because it is one of my favorite things on Earth.

It—

the keystone of all of that is soil life. And this is where, as we get into the back end of my presentation, I just have to acknowledge a couple things. All of our human knowledge, everything that we've acquired, on soil ecology, on ecological restoration, it's like one glass compared to an ocean. The things we don't know, it's mind-boggling, right? Modern science has described like 150,000 species of fungi, and some estimates say there might be 14 million species of fungi out there in our biosphere. So even though we get to participate, even though I want all of us to interact with and be part of the systems, we also need humility, all of us, that we have to work together to overcome this vast pool of ignorance that we have, or just lack of knowledge. I shouldn't say it's ignorance, but we do know some things, right? I mentioned the indicators of holistic biological functions. These, these groups. I have a little slideshow here. When we look on the microscope, we see something like this nematode, and we get to ask the question, what is this? And because of the work of people like Elaine and other scientists, we can look at some of the features of this organism. Some of its anatomy and eventually go, oh, that seems like it's a bacterial-feeding nematode. If you have that in there, it's probably slurping up thousands of bacteria a day, and then it's part of the nutrient cycling. So we get to learn something about its identity and its function by assessing our soil food web. And then we look at the organisms in addition to their identity. What does it tell us that this is here? And these look like stocked ciliates to us, which can actually indicate lower oxygen conditions in the soil. And if the soil becomes too anoxic, too low oxygen, you can have big problems. Plants need oxygen. They need oxygen in their roots. So much of the beneficial soil life out there it's looking for some oxygen as part of its— what it needs to persist. And there's a place for a stock ciliate. It exists for a reason. But how much of your soil should you find this in? Well, that's part of the mystery, right? I don't want the soil to be dominated with stock ciliates or this creature, which I think is a rotifer., you know, then they actually kind of exist maybe in waterlogged conditions. Again, things that can hurt the soil ecosystem in general and harm the plants so that we don't get that revegetation. So we need to use the microscope as a tool to say, what is this? What does it tell us? And then we get to ask all these other questions. What are its biological functions? This picture with these clamp connections seems to be a basidiomycete, a kind of fungi. And basidiomycetes often are really involved at stabilizing soil, gluing little soil crumbs into bigger crumbs, making more complex habitat for other organisms. Fungi entangle their world. And so seeing this in there says, oh, we might have— it would be better to see this than to not, probably, right? So, and then one more example, this little alien creature here. It's so dramatic. It seems to be some kind of microarthropod. Those often actually eat fungi or chew on other forms of organic matter or organisms. But they're part of nutrient cycling as well. They have a biological function. I would rather see a diversity of microarthropods than to see none when I look at my soil, because you can't put back— you can't fix an ecosystem without putting back all of its components. So as I wrap up here in the last 5 minutes of my talk, I just want to share again that I've been studying this for years and I am— I feel more ignorant than ever of the story of soil. I mean, there are things we know, and Elaine and I love to have conversations and get each other wound up about things we know. But really quickly we go, ah, but there's so much we don't know and it feels overwhelming and the research is not out there and There's one way in which that is overwhelming, especially if you're new on your path to learning about soil ecology and ecological restoration. But it's also exciting. We're like this person sitting here on a car and looking at the night sky, but instead of the space being up there, the cosmos being up there, and I'm full of, filled with wonder. About space. The James Webb Telescope, you can best bet any new pictures, I'm looking at them really quickly. But the soil is a cosmos. The soil is a universe. And it's so exciting that we get to peer into it. And maybe we just see a mushroom, and then we go and figure out what it is. And then we find out it's attached to this mycelial network, and it's tied into trees, and it's tied— There's stuff out there that's mind-blowing. Plants that use fungi to steal resources from other plants. I mean, it sounds like a sci-fi movie, right? This is the cool thing about where we're at is there's so much to learn. But if I could synthesize a lot of that knowledge down to a really simple deliverable message. I'm going to do it here in the last couple slides. A lot of people are working, are, are recognizing the degradation of their ecosystems, and they maybe remember what it was in the past or whatever, but there's this concept that they could regenerate it. It takes a lot of effort to push that system back over this hill to where it is in a new state, right? A state shift for the ecosystem. The work is not easy. And a lot of people start pushing that boulder up the hill and like Sisyphus in the Greek myth, they get tired or they say, is it working? They, you know, and it falls back down, the system degrades. And then they say, ugh, this regenerative stuff or soil biological stuff, it doesn't work. I tried it, it didn't work. We have to keep each other on, on this path. There is a critical threshold for most systems. You will get a systematic shift. We have to keep trying, reaching for different tools, interacting with different people and communities, because there's so much that we don't know.. But we know that the system is not right now globally. The biosphere itself is degraded, and there's a way to get it over to here. What does that look like? Not surrendering. We can't surrender, but we might, we might be at the tipping point. You on your farm, in your garden, in the ecosystem you're working in, keep reaching for the solutions. These ecosystems can be healthy again. And we're not saying this is going to be easy, but we're on this path with you, right? The reason why I'm at the school, Elaine and Brian, when I talk to you, it's this passion to make a difference, to connect people with the things that— the knowledge that we've accumulated and to be on this pathway together so that nobody has to journey alone through this difficult process. And the neat thing is we are in the middle of a global awakening, right? There's over 500 people in the room today. Some of our YouTube videos get thousands and thousands of watches. Like, everybody's waking up. We're recognizing what John D Liu says. It's the great work of our time. Anyone who cherishes soil life, who is reaching for these answers, you belong with us. You belong with us. You're part of this movement. And We can disagree on all kinds of things, but there's a space right here for, for you to be part of this. And that is the end of what I prepared today, Brian, right at 1 o'clock.

Great timing, Adam, and very inspirational. I love your presentations and this one was fantastic. And it's such a good tie-in to with Ashley's presentation. So, all right, well, let's go ahead and move on to the next part of our webinar. We're going to talk about our July promotion, and then we're going to get into Q&A. And I tell you what, there was a lot of questions submitted. We're not going to get to everybody's question for sure, but hopefully we can get through quite a few of those questions. All right, so let's talk about the Soul Food Web School's July promotion, and I'm going to show a short video on this promotion and really big savings as far as the overall course. And remember, it's not just a Soul Food Web course, but there's also the other courses that come along with it. So without further ado, let's go ahead and watch this video.

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All right, thank you, everybody, for watching our promotional video. And now let's go ahead and jump into our Q&A section. So we definitely have quite a few questions and panelists at this time frame. I'd ask you to go ahead and unmute if you could, just to make sure that you're not on mute if you want to say something. And let's get into the first question. And the first question is from Dai. And the question is, what's the process for soil restoration in an area with very limited water supply, little rain? Go ahead, Elaine.

Typically, what we do from a microbiological point of view is get the biology back into the soil so they can build the aggregates so that they can hold 50% of the aggregate size. 50% of it will actually be water. So it takes a few months where you do have water coming down. So you'll start that at the beginning of the rainy season, make sure the biology's in the soil, make sure those things that are going to form structure, they build that structure so they can hold the water. But then I think the next step requires some of the ecosystem restoration management. And so I think I'll turn that over to Ashley.

The question was about how to—

Yeah, the question was around how do you restore ecosystems when there's very limited water or rainfall available?

So you're really talking about systems that are in a very desertified kind of condition and building aggregate aggregates have to be built in the soil by the microorganisms. Bacteria, fungi are the major components on that. But now you get that water stored. What's the best way to hold on to it? And I think that really goes into the design where you have places where water is stored and where water can be drawn on. And I think that's part of why You, um, both of these groups have to work together.

If I could add something, I don't know, Ashley, do you have something you want to add to that now?

I was going to give a couple of examples of the different, um, ERCs and how they do it in, in desertified places. So in the south of Spain, which was the first ERC, we built a series of ponds that started off with one being really big, then the second one being smaller, and the third one, then the fourth one, um, that were placed in— they basically did an assessment of where the water flows to, because in desertified places the water cycle is broken. It means that a lot of rain will come in one go and overwhelm the soil quite often. So the, the ponds were built in places where the water will flow to from different parts of the land, and then once the first one is full, the second one will fill up, etc. Um, so shaping the land to slow the water down so that it sinks in, and then increasing the, the organic matter and soil biology and decompacting the soil. I know I can't go into detail, but those are the kind of top line ways of doing it.

And when we see this sort of situation, we realize that we had to make certain that we had grasses and perennial plants around the sides of the ponds because you have to prevent or reduce evaporation as much as possible from the surface of that pond. So you want grasses that will hang in the over the water. And then when you have a morning where the cold of the night turns into the heat of the day, you get, you know, dewfall. And that can be a huge increase in water and the holding in those systems.

Ethan Musso, K'abij.

I think that in my experience, first in China in the, in the Loess Plateau, but also in Africa and South America and Central Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Um, what we've seen is that areas which have had very long-term agricultural impacts have basically reversed evolutionary succession. So in evolutionary succession, you always had more biodiversity, more biomass, more accumulated organic material, or necromass, because each generation of life dies and gives up its body and is incorporated. And if you go back to consider evolutionary time, you'll see that the Earth, when it formed, was a molten rock, and it didn't have an atmosphere, and it didn't have a freshwater system as we have it now. But over evolutionary time, this all was developed by symbiotic relationships between biological life. And so what happened was that this biological self-organization altered the physics on the planet. This is the only planet we know that has this type of an atmosphere. We're looking all over the universe for this. And so when we consider what happened in 10,000 to 12,000 years ago when we started to do— humans started to do agriculture, they altered the biology, which then reversed the, the control of the physics. So instead of having the physics, the water, the temperatures, the weather, the climate regulated by the symbiotic relationships of the, of the biology, the canopy reducing the direct sunlight on the surface lowering the temperatures, lowering evaporation rates, holding moisture close to the Earth. We're causing high surface temperatures, thermic drafts pushing moisture into the upper atmosphere. All of this is losing this natural regulation. This understanding works everywhere. Basically, you can take the Amazon Basin or the Congo Basin and turn it into a desert if you, if you take away all the vegetation, and we've done that in different parts of the world, so we need to, we need to change that. So I would say the best way is to restore the full understanding of how the systems work. We're not just talking about productivity here, we're talking about ecological function from which the productivity comes. So the productivity is a result of functional ecosystems. So if we, if we have functional ecosystems, and that's what you can see in places like the Loess Plateau, we're pretty much deserts and desperately poor, but they can be restored.

So, and John, just with the Loess Plateau, I mean, it was desertified, but I think once you start to get the systems— once the system started to restore themselves, then the actual— the hydrology changed, right? The overall moisture content increased over time.

Yeah, there's a lot of new new data coming out about this. I think it's in the 20 to 30% range right now. And there is also a kind of an understanding about the level of scale you have to reach in order to have critical mass for condensation and precipitation. And there are extreme cases. So if people are, you know, really interested, they could go to my academia page. I can put it into the chat., and, uh, there's some papers and, uh, films about different parts of the world where this has been going on. And it— the, the, the data's definitive. It's possible to restore large-scale damaged ecosystems if you understand what you're doing.

Great. Uh, panelists, anything else you guys wanna add?

Yeah, about water specifically, you know, going back to the little getting the marble up over the hill, water is a very common limiting resource. You know, like there's a lot of places in the world that have dried out or have, you know, we've gone the wrong direction for so long. And there was recently the reposting by David Attenborough of a graphic that showed like the whole planet Earth, and then there was this little tiny ball of water, and he's like, that's, that's all the water on the planet, you know, relative to size, but piled up in one place. And then he was like, half of that is in the soil or the subsoil. It's not even in the oceans, right? And everybody was just so amazed by this. And I thought, yeah, it's, it's, it seems like, you know, we're this water planet and 70% of the surface area-ish is water, and then the, like, 1% of that is fresh water, right? So that, so we need to get these landscapes rejuvenated back to where they're filtering the water. And, you know, I think a recent report said like half of the, um, tap water in America has forever chemicals in it, industrial chemicals. And so finding ways to remediate that Well, soil has that answer. It's this— it can sponge up that water, support plants that change those heat dynamics, right? Why do we say that rural areas are so much cooler than cities? It's just the dynamic of the vegetation is intercepting the heat and transforming it and evapotranspiring water from deeper soil layers. And so we don't have to just do a carbon solution. To global warming. It's a vegetation, it's a microbiology altogether, just as John has expressed here. But it is tough to sell to people, water is limiting, but you need to use a bunch of water to get your soil back to where it needs to be so that it can store water. You know, it seems like, like a, like a tough sell. But as John said, it's definitive. If you make those investments, you can change the whole system.

Well said. All right, panelists, anything else before we move to the next question? All right, let's move on to the next question. All right, question number 2. This one's from Mary, and Mary says, can soil decompaction happen naturally once livestock are removed? If so, how? So let's talk about the role of animals in restoration. Panelists, what say you?

Um, this question's about removing livestock. Um, so there are pioneer species of plants that will come in and start decompacting the soil. And naturally, if you just leave this, the space alone, um, there were the first plants that you'll see, the ones that we typically consider to be weeds are often the ones with the longest, deepest taproots, um, that come in and decompact the soil for you. Right now my garden is— I have a very small garden and my neighbors are probably quite shocked that it's so full of weeds, but, um, it's covered in dock, and dock is a plant that is very good at decompacting soil because it's got a very deep taproot. So the, the niche, the niches that are available will be filled by the plants that, that know what they're doing to, to heal the ecosystem. Or you can choose to put in plants that have deep taproots, but quite often you won't need to. They'll come by themselves.

And I think maybe also part of this is it's not necessarily the animals are, you know, the significant compactors of the soil. It's more around the management of those animals and those systems that can really contribute to compaction. I mean, Adam, you use that topic in your slide about how many bison were on the Great Plains. I mean, we're talking a massive amount of herbivores, but those systems have evolved over time to support those herbivores and not have the compaction. But it really comes down to the management, I think, is a bigger issue or concern. Yeah. Elaine, I think you're on mute. And it's interesting, I don't see mute from Zoom, so you have any other way that you may have muted, or is your headset maybe unplugged? I think Alayna has some technical difficulties.

I could jump in here. Oh, she dropped for a second. While we're waiting for her to come back, I know she may have had to leave a little early today too, but Is it okay if I nerd out on some plant community ecology for a second?

Nerd out all you want.

Go for it.

Okay.

I've worked with a number of restoration scientists in northern China in these incredibly dry grassland systems that are up there, like what they call Inner Mongolia. And what they found is mostly sheep were overgrazing these grasslands.. And as the sheep created, it preferentially targeted certain plants. They opened up spaces that where the soil changed and got dry or other issues. And then what they call weedy species, right? Things that are less nutritious or, or, or result in less weight gain for the sheep became more and more dominant in the plant community over the very nutritious grass. That the sheep preferred. So what did we do? We took in a pairing of reseeding some of the native yellow-flowered alfalfa, it's a legume, with restoring some of the soil biology. We especially focused on mycorrhizal fungi, and the combination of those things, it, it filled up those gaps and it changed the nutrient dynamics of that system because the legumes added more nitrogen, and it naturally helped the system go through that succession back towards its more non-overgrazed state. And then the sheep could be brought back in, right? Like, the system needs that periodic disturbance of the sheep and their grazing. But if we leave animals on land continuously and there's too many animals relative to the land, they eat the things they want first, and it opens up problems in the long run in the whole ecological community, with the plants and the microorganisms. And we see it over and over and over again. And so the work that's being done out there on high-intensity, quick-duration grazing, where— and especially multi-species grazing, where a lot of animals are brought into a small area for a short amount of time and they maybe take the plants, they knock back about 50% of the growth of the plants or the biomass plants, and then they're moved, right? Within a day or two sometimes, depending on the stocking of animals. That stuff's emerging. It's not just a fringe idea anymore. Like, it's, it's out there in the literature. It's out there in the land grant universities. Everybody is looking at these kinds of of solutions. So animals can be a source of harm, but they can also be part of the regenerative story of these landscapes. Because as you said, Brian, they co-evolved for millions of years, grasslands and herbivores.

Right. And I love that in the management systems, you know, they're trying to mimic that predator-prey relationship. You know, in natural ecosystems, herbivores will tend to be in larger packs for protection, and they move constantly. The predators are moving them through those systems. Fairly quickly and efficiently. So I really appreciate the idea of kind of doing that mimicry and seeing how much that actually goes right back into how those plants and herbivores evolved. And there you go. It's a system that works. Elaine, let me just do a quick voice check with you. Can we hear you? No, darn it, we can't. You're still on mute, unfortunately. All right, well, we're gonna let you try to resolve that issue. Uh, other panelists, did you have anything else you want to add about, uh, animals in the systems?

Well, I, I would just mention that, uh, what I had a film called, uh, Hope in a Changing Climate that came out at the time of Copenhagen COP15 in 2009, and the first person to call me was Alan Savory. And he said, you know, you're gonna have to rethink your position on animals. He said you actually stated it correctly in the film because it was like relentless grazing that destroyed all the vegetation, but if you were using a holistic management for moving the herds rapidly through, it would, it would have a different result. So I, I, I have visited Alan's work in Australia and in Africa and in, in South America. And in the best cases, it's really dramatically wonderful what's happened to grassland. That under the, under the holistic management.

Great. Okay, um, anything else, panelists, before we move on to the next question? Okay, let's move to the next question. All right, next question is, uh, from Benjamin, and the question is, is it possible to quantify the amount of climate change mitigation that has happened during the increase in ERC popularity and effective work? I know you guys are working on metrics, but what say you, John D Liu?

Well, I think, you know, we're seeing that a lot of people are, are interested to do restoration. And that they're coming on and that they're having an effect in local areas. And this is a very good thing. And there are also thousands of other projects which have nothing to do with ecosystem restoration communities. So I think that the, the fact is, yes, there's quite a lot of evidence which is emerging that, that it works. But I think it's quite necessary to realize that if 30 years ago when this began to be publicized, it was taken up, we'd be in a better position than we are now. Because the situation is quite extreme at the moment. We have multiple crises and the data looks worse than everyone thought it was going to be. People would talk about 2050 or the end of the century or something like this, but we're actually— we're hitting points where the situation is quite grim. We're having multi-year droughts, we're having atmospheric rivers that drop huge amounts of water on places, we're having wildfires, fires we're having, every kind of thing you can imagine. Multiple, multiple hurricanes where you can actually see the hurricanes in the same satellite image. Um, all the stuff with methane release, snowmelt in the Arctic. I mean, the kids are swimming up in the Arctic, you know. They were used to— couldn't swim easily because of the ice flows, and now they're swimming up there. You can take a little boat, uh, across. You know, it's crazy. It's, it's getting really scary. So understanding that, for me, means we all have a responsibility to understand what's going on. And to realize that this is what we have to do. All the generations of life which are alive now have got to focus on this and understand that the quality of life for every, every human being, but also every other life form, is going to be determined by what we understand and what we do now. And we're crossing criteria which, from a scientific perspective, look really scary to cross, but there we are. So we can't even— we can't spend much time getting upset about that. We have to, we have to say, what can we do? And what we can do is we can all work together to restore ecological function. We can do that in our— where, where we are, but we also have to realize that we're going to have to do that simultaneously throughout the throughout the world. So it doesn't matter if we just restore one place where we live, because that's not going to work. We're going to have to restore where we live, and we're going to have to do this simultaneously all over the world. So this means we're at a transitional point in human civilization, and this point in human civilization is— we, we have to get this right. Where there is no no other way. We are forced to understand where— what's happening to us. And so what can we do is come together and work together, because what I started to realize— I mean, I feel like a fairly mediocre character, and I realize that, okay, for a very long time I've been totally focused I'm doing everything I can to help transform human society to restore Earth systems. And so even though I feel like a fairly mediocre guy, I have been able to, like, have an effect. But my effect is not enough. We're going to have to have everybody, and we all have the same amount of life's energy. Our problem is if we try to do this by ourselves, it's not going to work. But if we bring everybody together with a co— collective, a collaborative intention, our intention totally is we're going to care for the earth, we're going to re-regulate the hydrological cycle, the soil, we're going to bring back the biodiversity. And because of this, we're going to have productivity, and we're going to change our economy so that, that we don't believe that the purpose of life is to go shopping, but we understand that we have an obligation to our ancestors and we have an obligation to our descendants to steward this, the beautiful, amazing unique planet that we live on. So this is what our opportunity is. And it's a scary proposition to have to think, oh my God, it's so complex and difficult what we have to do. But the fact is, it's doable. And we have to do it. So let's go. And let's have fun while we're doing it. Let's just go camping, have dinner a lot, play volleyball, plant trees, restore the soil, and work together because this is what's going to make it possible for us to survive. And when more and more people do that, it's going to attract more and more people to that way of life instead of having dystopic world filled with vampires and zombies or whatever is going on, and crazy political propaganda and hatred and stuff. Let's just be peaceful, care for one another, be kind to one another, and do what needs to be done. We'll be okay. That's kind of how I feel right now. That's the best thing.

Very well said. Exactly. Ashley, Adam, anything else you guys want to add?

No. Ready to move on to the next question.

Exactly. Well said, John D Liu. Okay, let's move on to the next question. And this question is from Richard, and Richard says, as a current TTP student, is it possible to work both as an SFW consultant and in the ecological restoration arena at the same time, or am I dreaming too big? And I'll just give my personal opinion on this. You're not dreaming too big at all. In fact, there's a lot of synergy between this. As a consultant and I go out and I work, a lot of my clients, I say the vast majority of them are going to be in agriculture. But I do have a number of clients that are around ecosystem restoration and the same principles that I use when I'm working with agricultural clients. A lot of the same tools are available to me to use when I'm doing ecosystem restoration. So I think there's a tremendous amount of synergy that's there for sure. Anyone else want to add to that? Go ahead.

Well, restoring the soil is ecosystem restoration. So they are— one is just like a part of the other. Soil restoration is like one part of a broader picture, which is ecosystem restoration. The two absolutely go hand in hand. And if you weren't restoring the soil as part of like, maybe your soil isn't degraded and therefore you wouldn't need to restore it in a wider ecosystem restoration project. But a lot of the soils are very degraded. So if you're doing ecosystem restoration in most of the world, you will need to be looking at your soil and, and restoring it. So the short answer is no, for sure.

I mean, really, they're so synergistic, really, that you can easily be working on both of those. In fact, I assume that there's going to be a number of people that come out of the Sulfur Web School that are going to focus primarily just on ecosystem restoration and not even touch the agricultural space at all, which I would find actually is very well needed. We need to have people that have that knowledge to understand the role of soil biology and soil health when they're doing ecosystem restoration. So I think it's fantastic.

Brian, I'm not sure I would go so far as to say never touch agriculture, because I think once they have the skills necessary, they're going to do a lot of agriculture. And I, I think we're, we're also going to be in another thing. I mean, when you, when you see that like some huge percentage of industrial agriculture doesn't get eaten. You know, this is ridiculous. And so, you know, if we're worried about hunger, if we're worried about land degradation from, from inefficient industrial agriculture, we don't need to grow all that food. We need to grow healthy, nutrient-dense food in a way that it moves directly from beautiful gardens directly to kitchens and feeds everybody. So this, this is something that we could learn how to do, and we are working on that in very specific places with refugees in, in desert conditions, in and so on. So those who want to learn how to do this, definitely learn how to do this. And whether you want to work with the ecosystem restoration communities or you want to work with any other organization or just in your own communities or however you want to do it, we all are called to do this and we, we are forced to do this. Because it would be like if you're in a train and it's headed to crash off the cliff and, you know, like, stop the train, or, you know, do, you know, brake, do something. So we're there now, and so this is what we have to do.

Agreed. All right, uh, Adam, anything you want to add?

I would love to take the opportunity because of what's been laid out by the rest of you to click one thing together, which is sometimes in the spaces that we all dwell in, people have a kind of a romanticized idea about agriculture that it's like, oh, we just need to do nature's way, or, you know, like we need to farm naturally. And that, that's fine. But agriculture is a combination of sort of what we could call native ecosystems or natural ecosystems and cultural landscapes. And I think that that's something that the Society for Ecological Restoration struggled with for a long time, is to accept that it's okay to have a landscape mosaic between wilder places and more cultivated spaces. Well, cultivated is not the right word because that makes me think of tillage. I don't like tillage, but managed spaces, right? And then this whole gradient in between. And so I just want to say that like it is, the continuum is there and we need people working with a little bit more of the agricultural lens into the ecological restoration space and with more of the ecological restoration lens into the agricultural space, it has to be pluralistic because there's a lot of different things to accomplish all at once, right? There's a lot of different ecosystem services and functions that we need to, to work on, and that mix is going to look different everywhere. So I mean, I just want to affirm all that. I've got a container garden because I don't have space for anything else, and when I go and I I touch my plants and, you know, and I like take the zucchini or the tomatoes off or whatever, and I think about my compost pile and the organisms and all, the thing that's natural is that my relationship with the living world kicks up a notch. My tactile experience, the smells that I smell, the things that I think about, and, and that's a huge part of what we need to heal or restore. Is humans can live their whole lives on this planet in the modern age and not really connect with nature, but it, it's not better for us to do that, right? And so anything— agricultural space, spaces in between, going out into a native forest— it's all part of that continuum that Ashley spoke about, and it's all important.

Agreed. Okay, let's go ahead and move on to the next question. This next question is from Leszek, and the question is, hi, I would like to understand how these restoration communities are being financed. Is this a combination of both private and public? Where do you see this really coming from, John?

Well, this is a, a great question. Um, we have now two foundations, one in, uh, Europe and one in the, in North America. And, um, but the way that the, the, um, whole movement started was, as Ashley, um, said I was dreaming, and I wrote an essay called Earth Restoration Peace Camps that was in Permaculture Magazine. It's available online, you can find it. And, um, it was interesting because thousands of people said that that's what they wanted. And so it did start this way. And what we said first was, I wonder if we should just ask for grants, or, you know, and that usually takes years and it's difficult, or could we just ask for people to share €10 per month? And when 1,000 people said that they would share, pledged to share €10 per month, then we said, well, we'll have to start a foundation. So we did, and people started sending in money, and then we said, well, we have to make the first camp. And we did that together with Common Land project in Spain, in Alvalao, with the Alvalao cooperative. So this was really an interesting way to do it, and I still believe that this is the way forward. So if you all go out and you become supporting members of the ecosystem restoration communities, then if we reach a million people who are supporting us at €10, or supporting themselves, supporting the restoration of the Earth for €10 per month, that would be €120 million per year, or let's say dollars if you want to support in dollars, because there's a US 501. So if we got a million people, that would propel this movement to the top of the restoration because most of the other big developments, they have such high costs in real estate or in their administrative costs and so on and so on. If we just keep a very horizontal, transparent, distributed administration of of camps that are affiliated. So each of the camps is autonomous, self-organizing, and self-governing. And so what happens is that we— it's just a huge community. It's humanity coming together to do restoration. And we have a methodology to working with you, working with others to teach to work with landowners, to work with community and common lands, and to work even with governments and anybody who's willing to do it. So if everybody helps and shares, then we're going to have a good time and we're going to get some work done. And I think it's going to change the way we feel about everything, because right now there's a kind of nihilism which is moving into the society where there's depression and suicide and violence and hatred. We don't need that at all, you know, that we should just let that go and just focus on what we need to do.

Yeah, well said, Ashley. Adam, anything you want to add to this one?

All right, so the everyday people donating would definitely be one really great way to finance the movement, and there are a number of people who do donate, um, on a monthly basis for an affordable amount. Um, It's very blended, so we receive donations from everyday people, companies, uh, grant-giving bodies, just generally wealthy people who give donations, personal donations, um, the EU, uh, and then we also support the ERCs to set up their own businesses so that they can produce sustainable income for themselves and not rely on donations.

I mean, it sounds like funding hasn't been— I mean, obviously funding will always be a challenge no matter what, but I mean, in a relatively short period of time, you guys have been able to set up quite a few ecosystem restoration camps, which is extraordinarily impressive, especially going through the whole COVID phase there too within that time frame. Your model seems to be working well.

Our NGO didn't set them up. They are initiatives that have already existed or have set themselves up with us, with our support. It's not like we went out and set up 56 new initiatives. A lot of them already existed, but maybe weren't doing restoration. Maybe they were doing something else and they wanted restoration to be a part of what they did. So then they became an ERC that way. And we, we really believe that that is the best way to do it because it would be way too expensive and way too slow to set them all up from scratch. That's what we did with the first one, and it took— it's taken 6 years to get to the point where it is now of being fully developed and able to welcome those people and having a staff and everything. But it— yeah, we realized the partnership route and empowering partners was a lot quicker and cheaper.

Plus you have people that already have the passion, they're already really ready to go and you're just helping support them in that process. It's fantastic. Great. Okay, let's move on to the next question. This next question is from Warren and Adam. This is a question that came in when you were doing your presentation. And so the question is, Adam, surely stopping to disturb the soil physically and chemically is necessary before soil microbiology can be restored, i.e., the keystone of soil regeneration is stopping soil disturbance.

Okay, so yes, we at the Soil Food Web School say that the shift of land management practices to principles of regenerative agriculture or soil management has to go in tandem. With bringing back the biology. One of the papers that I linked to— I worked in rural Zambia for a brief amount of time when a friend was in the Peace Corps over there. And when I sampled soils in these communities, I found that in every agricultural setting, the microbial biomass, especially the biomass of AM fungi, was half what it was in a local perennial grassland. So that disturbance had knocked back— other research shows that the diversity has also dropped. So when you're knocking back the abundance and diversity of your microbial community, you're losing key functions in there. We see a lot of times that any agricultural land, almost any agricultural land that's had chemicals applied, the protozoa will be gone, right? A lot of times the fungi is at a minimum level. And so it's the bringing together of these things because we can't just put the biology into the soil and continue to have such disturbance in the system and such poor habitat. The biology will just keep dying, right? The soil life, it won't find a home. Think of it like if you clear-cut a forest and then you put back a bunch of you know, foxes or something, they would just die again because they would have no source of food and no shelter. And microbes need those things too, right? The microbial world is, is like the macro world, just shrunk real tiny. So we have to align and get as much disturbance out of the system as possible. I am one of those people that believes in during the transition that we can't tell the land manager all the things that they can have to stop doing right now, right? Like, I'll always challenge people, for example, to reduce their tillage as much as possible, but I won't say don't till because it's not my job. It's not my role as to tell the land manager. They know better their context than I do. But if I can get them to till once every 4 years instead 4 times a year, it's done something, right? It's, it's, it's really helped that system. So there's a practical side to this, and I have a lot of friends that are doing chemical traditional farming and ranching and think everything that I talk about is just some hippie stuff, right? But they're also seeing the degradation of their system year after year after year through monoculture, through tillage, through chemical fertilization. And then I get to interact with farmers all over the world who are like, I got off that treadmill, I got into soil biological management, I aligned the principles of how I manage this system and brought back the biology at the same time. And that's the leverage point. That's the leverage point. We got to put the plants and the microbes back together and heal that relationship and We're going to heal our relationship with the land and we're going to see ways to reduce that disturbance.

Yeah. In my practice, we really try to work with our clients to say we're going to try to minimize the amount of disturbance that you're actually doing in that land, but also recognizing sometimes disturbance is a tool that you can use when you talk about putting animals and doing the mob grazing or holistic management. The idea here is that I'm going to allow disturbance to occur and I may have an expectation that disturbance is going to do something for me. In forest management, going through and doing proactive burning and doing some forest management in that sense can be a very practical thing to do. But the challenge is that for most of the same agriculture, we have disturbed the soil way too much, too severely, too often, and we don't let the soils recover. So we definitely try to minimize and remove disturbance out of the equation, especially when it's not an effective tool for us to be able to use. Ashley, John, anything you want to add about the role of disturbance into soil management, soil health?

You covered it.

Well, I think personally, as someone who started studying this because of dysfunction, I got very used to studying dysfunction. And then I really found out the most important thing is to study function, because when you study function, then you get happy. When you study dysfunction, you go, oh my God, you know, well, how, how can this be? But when you study how, how the evolutionary succession works and, and how functional ecosystems work, then you go, oh, okay, you know, that kind of makes sense. It's not insane, it's not crazy. And then when you look and you see throughout historical time you see wars and you see domination and, you know, all these horrible things. I mean, then you kind of think, oh, you know, I, I think that, you know, this degradation is connected to the kind of bad behavior that human beings have, have taken up. And so when you have joy and happiness and good food and dancing, I think that'll be— that's the way to go. Strive for that.

Right. OK, we're running short on time. I'm going to pop up one more question. And I'm going to skip past a couple of questions to get to this one. So give me one second here. Sorry for those that I skipped. And this question is from Taylor. And I think this is a good way to end this. Taylor says, how do I find local movements? I'm in Phoenix, Arizona, which is massively affected by population increases. How can I connect with other people near me? I think a lot of people have, and I've seen a lot of the chat going on about how people trying to connect with each other, but what are some of the tools and ways that people can actually connect with folks? Anybody want to take that one?

Yeah, having more collaboration, like facilitating more connection and collaboration is definitely something that we're currently thinking about at the ERC and with the Soil Food Web School. So the course that we've run, we're running together, which is part of this bundle in this promotional package, is Introduction to Ecosystem Restoration course, and we're now thinking about how we can facilitate an alumni network. But in general, for finding local movements, I would just maybe just try and reach out to as many sort of green groups as you can in your area. There tend to be little clusters of people who are gathering. Also attending conferences and festivals and events that are being organized around this topic is also a really great place to meet people.

Yeah, I'll say that from my standpoint, when I first started to get into like, you know, Sufi principles and so forth, the schools are very helpful. Tool for me to connect with folks because I could see a map of the fellow students that were out there. But I also find that there are a lot of just local groups. When I moved from California to Oregon, I started searching for things that interested me. So I found a local mycology group and we meet once per month and I was able to do a presentation on the soil food web and the role of soil biology and where fungi fit in. And then I found a beekeeping group And, you know, so there's a lot of kind of hobby local groups in your area that you might be able to connect up with that you'll find people have very similar interests to you. And if you don't find any groups in your local area, I mean, there are some really good social media tools out there to put information out there to try to start a group yourself. And so I think technology could be actually a big benefit in the sense of trying to connect people. Technology has been a fantastic way as far as connections are concerned. There's also a negative side to that as well, but, you know, use the technology appropriately to find those positive benefits. Adam, John, anything else you want to add before we close? John, if you're trying to say something, you might be on mute. There you go.

Well, it's, it's I think, you know, we have to have more. There are 3 more of these this month, right?

Yep.

So, uh, tell all your friends, and more people should be focusing on ecological restoration. It's the way that, uh, we can help our children and future generations, and we're doing that by helping ourselves. So we, we, we just need to do this so that we are satisfied personally. And also we need to recognize that we're just the latest generation of humans to pass through, and we're making some giant leaps in understanding at this time, and that it's critical that we process what this means and share with our children and with future generations, because this is going to change everything. And hopefully we're not too late. My, my friend Jane Goodall says We have a window of opportunity. So we have this window of opportunity. Now's the time to act. Don't wait.

For sure. Now is the time to act. And, you know, things like this, the webinar, is a way for people to connect. And, you know, we've seen in the chat from many of the webinars that we've done where people will say, hey, I'm in so-and-so area, I'm in so-and-so area, and they'll, they'll trade direct messages and then hopefully they make those connections. So I think connections is a big thing. And John, like you mentioned, it's not just the individual, it's the collective that's really going to push us together. So we definitely do need to connect with each other and be of like mind. So, okay. With that being said, we're at the end of the webinar. Let me just go ahead and finish a few housekeeping things here. And so I want to tee up our next webinar, which is going to be Webinar 2: What Does Ecosystem Restoration Look Like? And again, that's 11:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday, July 19th. And then we have Webinar 3, which is Strategies for Soil and Land Regeneration, which will be 11:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday, July 26th. And then we have Webinar 4, Your Future in Soil Regeneration and Ecological Restoration, 11:00 AM Pacific time on Monday, July 31st. So again, hope to see you, everybody, attend those webinars. And again, if you can't attend one of those webinars, we will have them recorded and available for you to to watch. And this webinar, if you attended it and want to rewatch it, it's available for you to do that as well. All right. So let's get to some thank-yous here. First of all, I'd like to thank the audience. It was great conversation in the chat, a lot of good questions. It seemed like everybody was really well engaged. So thank you very much for attending. I'd also like to thank our support staff. You know, to pull these webinars off, it takes quite a few people to do so. And there are a lot of people working behind the scenes to make this happen. So thank you. Thank you very much for that. And a big shout out to our panelists, Ashley, Adam, John, and unfortunately Elaine looked like she has some technical difficulties, but she was there at least for a little bit with us. Thank you again for sharing the knowledge. It's very generous for you to share your learnings and understandings with the rest of the folks. So with that— Thank you so much. Alright. Well, with that, I'd say we go ahead and close and hope to see everybody on webinar 2.

Cheers. Bye.

Bye, everybody.

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