John D Liu, a former CBS journalist, turned a recurring dream about restoration camps into an essay that sparked a global movement. From one camp in Spain, the initiative grew to over 50 across six continents by 2020, positioning ecological restoration as humanity's answer to poverty and hunger.
Chapters
If restoring the Earth becomes the central intention of human civilization, there's no way we can fail. Those people who want to take a rocket to Mars, you know, they should go, you know, as quickly as possible, you know, and if they think staying in a titanium tube is better than Earth and drinking their own urine, well, you know, go for it, you know, that's what I say. All the generations that are alive today have a responsibility to understand how critical this, this period, this moment is for human civilization. I'm John D Liu, and I would say I've been a journalist, a filmmaker, and an ecologist. I worked for CBS News, and I started making a lot of films, and I was really worried about the ecological impacts and especially toxicity from the rapid growth in China. I spent a lot of time in the, uh, early part of 2000s in Africa and in Rwanda and in Ethiopia there was really tremendous acceptance of this idea of climate change because they were already at extremes where they were seeing collapse, collapsing systems. I was a little worried that people were not listening, and I started having dreams where I'd wake up in the morning and I was dreaming of people going camping and restoring the earth. That was a recurrent dream. So I wrote it down as an essay, and it was published in Permaculture Magazine. And it was interesting, when it was published, then tens of thousands of people started to react, and they said, "That's what we want." Restoration is not culturally specific. So we started a movement about 5.5 years ago. We started the first camp in Spain, and then the second year we started a second camp in Mexico, and in the third year there were 21 camps. Camps, and in the fourth year there were 37 camps. At the end of 2020, there were over 50 camps. But it was just so astonishing to me that people in all continents— so they're in 6 continents and they're in different, different places and different social, different cultural contexts. So it's, it's, it's all humanity is ready for this. When you have poverty, when you have hunger, when you have social disruptions. You, you really need harmony, and it's this kind of harmony that— where everything is interacting with everything else, and the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts.
