How do you restore an entire ecosystem at scale? Eroded desertified landscapes: can they be healed?
Journalist, filmmaker, and environmental educator John D. Liu is the Ecosystem Ambassador for the Commonland Foundation and Founder of the Ecosystem Restoration Camps Movement. He is best-known for his documentaries on the restoration of the Loess Plateau, like Hope in a Changing Climate and Green Gold. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, John joins Ross to explain how human activity caused the degradation of the Loess Plateau, describing how it went from being one of the most beautiful places on Earth to a barren landscape where the poorest Chinese people lived.
John discusses what made the Loess Plateau restoration so successful, offering insight around how the Chinese government engaged the people there and how the project design balances functional space for agriculture with land dedicated to natural regeneration. Listen in to understand how John thinks about restoring inherently complex ecosystems and learn how you can get involved in John’s work to transform our economy and facilitate ecosystem restoration all over the world.
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Resources:
‘The Holy Grail of Restoration: Mending the Sinai Peninsula’ in Kosmos Journal
The Great Work of Our Time Documentary on Large-Scale Ecosystem Restoration
World Bank Story on the Loess Plateau Restoration
International Union for the Conservation of Nature
University of the West of England
Netherlands Institute of Ecology
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am the creative editor at Nori. Today I have with me John D. Liu, ecosystem ambassador for the Commonland Foundation, journalist, filmmaker, ecologist. What a wild career you’ve had, John. And for listeners, you very well may have seen his quite prominent documentaries, in particular Thank you very much. My pleasure. How did you end up working on large-scale ecosystem restoration? I know there’s a long version. Maybe we can get the truncated one because you’ve had such a storied career.
John D. Liu: Okay. Well, I was working in journalism. I helped open the CBS News Bureau in China back in the 1980s, and I worked for CBS for a decade. So I covered really big stories like the rise of China from poverty and isolation and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And then in the middle of the 90s, I’d already started working for Radio Televisione Italiana and then Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, the German state television. And the World Bank asked me to film a baseline study. So I went out to look at this.
It’s the cradle of civilization and it’s in the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River. So it’s really an important place in Chinese history. It’s an important place in Chinese revolutionary history. It’s where Mao hid out at the end of the long march before he was able to revive his army and take over China for the communists. So it has this connection to modern history and a long connection to ancient history because it was the cradle of civilization and the birthplace of the Han Chinese race.
And when I went out there and I saw this, I compared it immediately to the type of political and economic news that I’d been covering for the television networks. Technology was more important and that I would rather spend my life studying earth systems and documenting and communicating about earth systems rather than the hubris of political leaders or the illogical aspects of corrupt economic systems.
Ross Kenyon: No punches being pulled there. So the pictures that you can see of the Los Plateaux before the restoration were just barren, very eroded mountains and valleys and gullies. But I imagine there was a before, right? It didn’t used to look like that. When did it change and what did it used to look like?
John D. Liu: Right. Well, first of all, Luss, it’s a German word, it’s Luss, and it’s a sediment. So it was created over prodigious time by the movements of glaciers in the Himalayas. When you consider the uplift of the Himalayas, which are the highest mountains on the earth, it’s where the subcontinent of India hits the Asian continent, and it pushes this... Mountains up and the glaciers were covering that and then the glaciers are moving and it’s called tillage. I’m not sure why they use that particular word, but it’s the movement of glaciers crushing this rock into powder and this powdery dust then flies and lands and over millions or tens or hundreds or millions of years or billions, who knows, You get these huge deposits and there are list deposits in other parts of the world, but these are the largest list deposits anywhere.
And it’s really minerally rich. So you can imagine these rocks that are being pulverized and so all this mineral is there, but it requires organic material to be fertile. So over a really long time after And as the habitat, as each generation of life died and gave up its body to nurture the next generation, it created a habitat. For microbial and fungal communities. And these then became the vectors which made it possible to deliver minerals and water and nutrients to higher life forms like vascular plants and ultimately of course animals which eat the plants.
It was potentially one of the most beautiful places on Earth. I think this is also true in the Middle East. We have place names like the land of milk and honey or that sort of thing in Western civilization. And in Chinese civilization, this was the first place. Where the Chinese Empire emerged. And it was a place where all of the different tribal groups were vying. So it was big in anthropology as well as ecology. It was beautiful. It was probably the most beautiful and that’s why the early settlements and early civilization grew up around there.
And I think that’s true around the world and many of the places that are desertified around the world are also in places like that. Is the story of degradation one of agriculture or is it more complicated than that? Well, I think it’s a bit more complicated. You can go back. Human impact on natural environments probably began with when we became very good at social hunting. We probably studied pack animals, wolves or lions or something like this. And we learned how to work together because we’re social.
As a species, we’re social creatures. And when we were very good at Getting a team together, you know, we’d always know who the fastest runner and the person who could throw the spear or the rock most accurately. We could also get everybody together and make a lot of noise and scare all the animals. And I think when we started this, we got so good at it, we pretty much took out all of the giant megafauna in many continents. So things like mastodons or mammoths, you know, they sort of big elephant precursors, they got killed.
And we were also probably prey before we were predators. So we started to identify those we were most afraid of and then try to kill them too. And this alteration And then you have agriculture. So all of those are quite significant. And deforestation and agriculture are kind of the same thing because often we’re deforesting in order to have agriculture because we assume wrongly, it seems to me, that agriculture is more productive than natural evolutionary succession systems.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. So you have this degradation process and it has led to a huge amount of erosion and that all comes down these hills and into rivers. The tributaries flow into the Yellow River and this is why it’s yellow in my understanding. This is why it got its name. Correct?
John D. Liu: That’s correct. It’s loose deposits floating in the river. And what’s interesting about the restoration is that they were able to mitigate at least 80% of those sediments. So this is quite a significant, probably the largest type of change in this way. And to see that we can change the sedimentation levels this way Is something that we need to consider. But there’s more than that. Sediment control was definitely the major aspect of the beginning of the project. The other part that was very motivating to the Chinese and to everybody working on the project was poverty reduction.
Because if you have such a massively degraded state or landscape, It’s impossible for these people to have a really good life. So they were fairly miserable. And this was at the same time that China was really rising from poverty and isolation globally. So it’s interesting that the government in China said, well, it’s not just the East Coast that needs to get rich. We need to remember the people in the cradle of Chinese civilization who Whose landscapes have been destroyed and to see what can be done.
And when they saw and analyzed it, the Chinese are pretty systematic and hardworking. So when the Chinese Academy of Sciences were asked to... They did a really good job. They had a lot of people working on this and they saw the basic multidimensional symbiotic systems. So they saw that actually the hydrological cycle... And the vegetation and the microbiology and the biodiversity, they’re all kind of interrelated. In fact, they don’t exist without the other systems. So they’re symbiotic multidimensional systems. And this understanding really helped them to have a holistic design plan.
And then the relationship between the social problems and the economic problems and the ecological problems was recognized. So that led to really good results because when you don’t know why something is happening and you think you can continue with a corrupt or a dysfunctional economic system, but actually what you’re seeing is a disruption of the hydrological cycle, erosion, infertility, loss of productivity, and loss of biodiversity, then the What’s interesting about this is it’s actually, if you look at those individually, hydrology or soil fertility or biodiversity, you’re kind of looking at the symptom of And it is in its holistic nature in the symbiotic relationships between these systems that you actually see what’s happening.
So they were quite good at that. And that was an enlightenment for me. I mean, for me to go out there and look at that after looking at all the political and sort of the major political events of the late 20th century. It was astonishing to realize that we were on the wrong track entirely. That there was something which was much more valuable and much more directly determining the safety of not only humanity, but of life on Earth. And that it was, to some degree, understandable.
And that we were having an effect either through our ignorance, or we could have a positive effect through our understanding and knowledge.
Ross Kenyon: That does sound quite astonishing. I very much would like to talk about getting locals bought into trying this out. We’re going to get there. Before we do, I want to close the loop a bit on the Yellow River. Do you know how long the degradation had been going on? Another way of asking is how long has it been called the Yellow River? Yeah. Is this thousands of years, hundreds of years? As long as there’s been settled civilization,
John D. Liu: it’s been this bad? Well, it’s interesting because Chinese civilization is very ancient. So before writing, there was something happening, obviously. And I think the Chinese were among the earliest to have a written language, to be literate. So what the river was called initially was the Mother River. And as the mother river, and I think this might have happened in more than one place around the world because the societies and civilization grew up along river systems. And because in this case, you had not only the Han Chinese, you had the Kazakh and the Uyghur and the Mongols and the Jurchit and Khitan, you had a number of ethnic groups emerging around this.
So they were, in a sense, vying with one another because at certain times the Mongols would be dominant. They were certainly dominant for 400 years when they had the strongest military tactics. And then the Jurchit and the Khitan, which are... Somehow related ethnically to the Japanese and to the Koreans had dynasties in China. But the main dynasties were Han, and the Han emerged as the dominant force. And when they did this, they seemed to be very self-absorbed. I guess Homer would call it hubris, that the people thought that they were more important than...
Life itself or that their lives, their generation was so important. And, you know, obviously it’s important to them. But now we look back at that and we say, well, you know, we’ve been hundreds of generations, you know, so... And we need to consider our generation in relationship to this. I think I may have gotten off your question a little bit. Were you asking me about how people began to join this or what was it again?
Ross Kenyon: No, I think you’re on a similar track here. Just wondering when the Yellow River maybe went from the Mother River to the Yellow River. When did this degradation really happen such that the name changed?
John D. Liu: Right. Well, this is, of course, a little bit hard to pinpoint, but I can tell you that after the written language began, there were very extensive records taken. The Chinese have been pretty serious about archival activity. And there were 2,500 records. Recorded incidences of very serious floods, some of which really were devastating, where very large numbers of people were killed, even up into the hundreds of thousands and potentially millions of people. Because in a way, often people begin to build their civilizations in the floodplains.
And when you do that, then every once in a while, you’re going to get a flood. But what also happened was that they became pretty good at engineering. There are still engineering works that are over 2,000 years old, which are in use today. So that’s pretty shocking. And they started to create... Different kinds of bureaucratic and official bodies to take care of things a long time ago. So one of the things that they were doing was that they were building dikes on the sides to lift up the sides of the river so that they would have less flooding.
Of course, that never quite worked because the sedimentation was so intense that they had to keep building it up and up and up. And pretty soon, the river inside the dikes was higher than the surrounding landscape. So that made it really dangerous when the dikes were breached. So it’s quite an interesting aside, I would say, but it’s something to How is it working with people who live in these ecosystems? Are they happy that these projects get undertaken? I imagine sometimes there’s a fair amount of suspicion, which seems hard to blame them for too much.
Ross Kenyon: I know they don’t have a lot in a lot of these cases, but I think there’s a fair amount of worry that what little they have might be ruined permanently with these large scale changes. And there’s a process of trying to convince them that this might actually end up being better. How does that work?
John D. Liu: Well, it works a lot better now, more than 25 years later, where there are forests and rivers and soil and productivity there now, where there was nothing before. So the seeing is where you believe when you experience it. And the other part of this is that they used a lot of methods to engage the people. One of the methods... It was called Participatory Appraisal. It’s sometimes called Rapid Rural Participatory Appraisal. And when you do this, essentially, not only are you gathering data, but the people themselves are the agency which are gathering the data, right?
And when they do this, they understand at the end what has happened. And so if they’re participating in that type of work, rapid rural participatory appraisal is a very good method. There’s also a new thing that we’ve been using with the Common Land Foundation, which is called Theory U. It’s been around for a bit. Started in MIT by Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute. It works quite well to rapidly... Bring people to an understanding of what happened in the past, what they would like to see in the future and then to collaborate on designing a way forward that reaches their goals.
Anyway, when they started this in China, most of the people there were desperately poor and many of them were illiterate. And it was the only place that I’ve really ever been in China where there was a significant number of people who didn’t marry because they couldn’t afford to have a family. They could barely survive. So this is like the worst place. And that’s what the Chinese often discussed. They said, well, we have to go to the worst place. These are the people and these are the places which are the hardest.
They called it the hardest bones to crack. These are the hardest places that we can go. And After studying and observing what they were doing for some time, I came to the conclusion that almost you have to go to the worst places. Because these are the places with the biggest upside. And a lot of people don’t understand that. Obviously, it’s a permaculture principle to work from the edge. And the edge systems are... Very important because they’re transition zones between different biomes and they can tell us quite a lot of data.
But if you go to the worst places, if you get it exactly right, then you can have a huge effect because the upside is higher. You have like 100% upside. Whereas if you’re only 50% depleted or only 30% depleted or only 10% depleted, then you’ve really only got a 10 or 30 or 50% upside. So going to the worst places is really good. And then the other thing that I’ve been looking at is acupuncture points. Are there certain places on the earth where if we restore them, it will have an outsized impact all over the world or on a basic regional ecosystem?
And this seems to be very, very true too. But the people, to get them engaged using participatory rapid rural appraisal was useful. And also, they used another method which was good. They paid them. So that worked very well for desperately poor people who... Basically, they also did something else which made it absolutely necessary that they paid them. They made all of the earlier unsustainable behaviors illegal. So they made it impossible. You couldn’t cut a tree. You couldn’t plant crops on the sides of the mountains.
And you couldn’t free-range goats and sheep. Well, that was basically all that the people did in these massively degraded areas. So they shut down all of the negative impacts by making them illegal. But by making them illegal, they had to do something or the people didn’t, you know, they would starve. They didn’t know what to do. So they paid them to be trained in ecosystem restoration. And now when you look at the value of the ecological restoration, it’s clearly vastly more valuable than anything that human beings have ever made and everything that human beings will ever make.
The fact of that is that’s a new basis for an economy rather than a basis of an economy based on extraction and buying and selling things to commoditize everything. And we know when we have this materialistic society that we have winners and losers. But if we have an ecologically functional economy that It’s bigger than the material economy, and it can be more fairly distributed because it benefits everyone. So if we are committed to selfishness, then we’re going to hold on to our materialistic economy. But if we care and are compassionate about all human beings and all living things, then we’re going to So gradually, when these kinds of thoughts dawn on people, because even illiterate people, subsistence farmers in the middle of nowhere, can look at nature in awe.
They can look at the night sky and see the stars. They can feel the changes in temperature and wind and energy. And they can see how the rain nurtures the plants and so on and so on. And so when they do that and then they look at their things, they start to realize, oh, there’s something bigger, greater than our things. And we’re not valuing them. So when you analyze how the GDP economy considers ecological function, it’s basically zero. So by calling ecological function the basis of the creation, constant filtration, and continuous renewal of all the life support systems on Earth is zero in that economy.
Well, it’s got to be false. That means you’ve got a false statement in the middle of the economy, the thing that’s organizing... Civilization, that’s not a very good idea, needs to be considered, needs to be discussed, and it needs to be understood that there is another economy, an economy which is more real, which is not based just on speculation and on interest-bearing debt and on differentiation and disparity within the economy. But is based on the understanding that all life is in symbiotic relationship with all other life and must be valued equally.
So this is kind of the type of philosophical things that I’ve been thinking. And I’ve also been lucky to go to over 90 countries around the world to study ecosystems in relationship to various fellowships that I’ve had with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature with Rothamsted Research Institute in the UK or the University of the West of England in the UK or the Netherlands Institute of Ecology.
Ross Kenyon: I’m curious about the institutional framework that you inherit when you start working within one of these regions or ecosystems. I imagine some of them, the land is unowned or it’s owned by the government, or there’s a patchwork of different types of property rights that exist. Is it as diverse as I might imagine, or are there common patterns that you notice that As you’re working. And I also as a little kicker to that question, I imagine in some cases, given what you just mentioned about materialism and ownership, you might want to change some of those institutions as you’re working through this process.
Does that happen?
John D. Liu: Well, I don’t think it’s up to me to change institutions. It’s kind of up to a consensus of humanity. But I think what we can see is that there are some mistakes and some flaws in certain areas. And if you don’t understand what is determining life or creating and constantly filtering and continuously renewing these life support systems, then the chance of getting it right is probably pretty low. What we saw in China was that they don’t actually have private ownership in China. They have land use rights, which is very similar in the sense that you can use the land.
So you have the land use rights, so you can use the land. But it’s certainly trying to be more fair in its distribution. In China to what they’re calling a socialist market economy, which I think a lot of people would say is very capitalistic because it works with capital formations and it works with institutional development. There can be a stratification and there has been. There are billionaires in China who made innovations and then Very happily collected their profits and now are extremely rich. But I think that there’s been a mistake.
One of the mistakes is in this concept of the tragedy of the commons. This is such a Excellent meme which runs off the tongue, very lovely semantic concept, but it’s false because actually the places where I’ve been studying functional ecosystems invariably have Been protected by indigenous people who have no concept of ownership whatsoever. And this is where the huge savannas or the huge forests or the intact ecosystems were maintained. The giant herds migrating across the eastern steppe of Mongolia or in Syria. The Maasai Mara and the Serengeti, although they’re being impacted now.
The Amazon, they’re being impacted now. Here in California, where you have the highest expression of evolutionary succession, where the sequoias and redwood trees are 115 meters high. But there’s only 3% to 5% of that climax equilibrium left in California. It’s wonderful that this remnant exists, but If we realize that 95% to 97% of that is lost, then obviously this is of enormous impact. And it’s so impactful in every way. It’s biodiversity loss. It’s loss of hydrological regulation. It’s loss of soil fertility. And it’s, you know, we’re barely at the point where we’re collectively understanding these things.
I think some people have known for some time, but... They haven’t always been listened to. Maybe they were bad communicators. I always wonder why people haven’t reacted more to what I’ve been studying. And I guess I’m not good enough. And sometimes I feel inadequate for the task.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a hard thing to communicate about. We’ve done podcasts about the tragedy of the commons before. And another way of approaching it is saying that this distinction is to dichotomize. It’s actually more complex than that. There are places where private property and fee-simple property norms work very well, and there are places where it doesn’t. There are places where collective decision-making is appropriate, and there are cases where that’s very inefficient. But that’s why someone like Eleanor Ostrom’s research Has always been such a great guiding light.
It’s saying that the details matter more than some sort of broad statement about which of these norms are appropriate. But nuance is hard to sell in general, John. I’m sure you know. And if you’re talking about ecosystems, they’re all, I imagine, unique. And it’s hard to make too many generalizations without falling into pitfalls here. Or maybe you disagree. I don’t know.
John D. Liu: No, I would say ecosystems are infinitely complex. And there are certain principles which are kind of universal principles. I would mention biodiversity, biomass, and accumulated organic matter. Those things seem to be natural laws. You can’t get away from them anywhere. So any functional ecosystems... And dysfunctional ones will show, especially, I mean, there are natural places. I mean, if you’re 50 meters below sea level in the middle of the Taklamakan Desert or something, you’re not going to see very much biodiversity or biomass and accumulated organic matter.
And that’s kind of a functional system. For what it is. But basically if you go to these places which were like the cradles of civilization, Then they were probably once magnificent and now they look like deserts. And so you have to ask, why is that happening? What is the motivation? Is it inevitable that human beings degrade their ecosystems? And my conclusion is absolutely not. That’s a function of consciousness. If we are conscious of the value and the importance of these systems, there’s no way that we can destroy them.
But if we’re ignorant of this, so it’s about ignorance and greed is the cause of degradation and consciousness and generosity is the basis of restoration. Well, personally, I’d prefer consciousness and generosity.
Ross Kenyon: What do you do to restore systems that are inherently complex? It seems that intervening in them carries its own set of risks of potentially making things worse or making it into some monoculture or just having an idea of a place that isn’t actually what it should be but it’s what you think it should be. How do you know the difference in what you’re doing?
John D. Liu: Well... I mean, having the opportunity to travel all over the world over most of the last three decades and study about functional and dysfunctional ecosystems has made it possible for me to view things in ways that I had not considered before I had this opportunity. And while the basic thing that I think is important is awe... And getting away from the idea that we have to understand everything, we have to realize that no matter what we know, we’re going to quickly eventually get to the edge of mystery.
And that’s okay. But what we do know is important as well. So we have made assumptions that Human welfare or human infrastructure or our abiotic systems that we’ve created, our governance systems, our laws, our religions, our communication systems, our language or whatever it is, we think is more important than the symbiotic relationships between other life forms. And this is fundamentally false because the oxygen system We don’t exist without that. We have bacteria in our gut, which allows us to get nutrients from our food. So without these other living beings in symbiosis with us, we wouldn’t survive.
And we’re not just related to All other human beings on the planet, we’re related to all living things. So we need to understand that and that kind of understanding and having that in your mind as you look out at the world gives you a different perspective on the world. You’re not thinking like, how can I cut this down and use it? You’re thinking about, I wonder how I’m in symbiotic relationship with this life form and how awesome is that? So this has been, you know, a huge thing where in a way we’re not humble enough to realize, well, we’re going to die.
We’re one, we’re passing through. We’re one of many generations of human beings to have lived on the earth, but we’re living in a time where the accumulated impact of human civilizations on the earth systems are causing a type of collapse. So when you see biodiversity loss, or you see climate changes, or you see The ocean acidification or thermal expansion in the oceans, all of these impacts, then we are wildly crossing planetary boundaries. I would mention another one, toxicity, which is huge. Now we have released persistent organic pollutants into the soil and the water and the atmosphere.
And this is ludicrous. So we’re Causing huge, huge impacts. And if we’re not aware of that, and if we think it’s acceptable to do that for profit, that someone could do that for profit, well, what profit? There is no profit, actually. That’s a lie. And so we’ve created these systems which are false and hypocritical, and we have to do something else to And as I’ve been thinking about these things, I thought, well, what am I doing? Am I doing the right thing? And for the last three decades, I’ve been working in the collective interest.
Because I can tell you, frankly, it’s not a very lucrative career to make films about soil and poor people. But it is... In fact, really satisfying. And it does gradually shift an awareness or consciousness of the things that we rely on for life. So this is very important. I think the more people who start to realize we have to change. If we’re unable to change, it’s not just change the bottom line or make money in another way. We need to have fundamental changes because there’s huge mistakes.
And these huge mistakes are represented by the degradation that we’re seeing in the world. And I have to say that there are some fundamental mistakes in reasoning Ecological thinking as well. So you have people who are talking about ecosystem services. I don’t see any ecosystem services anywhere on the earth. I see either functional or dysfunctional ecosystems. And when you have a functional ecosystem, then what What is being called ecosystem services is what are being called ecosystem services are there. And when you have a dysfunctional one, they’re not there or they’re vastly depleted.
And so what that... What that says to me is that there are primary systems and secondary systems, and the primary systems are functional ecosystems, and the derivatives from those systems are what are being called ecosystem services. Another one would be about carbon, and I know this might be close to home, but... Let us have it, John. Tell us how you really feel. Yeah, well, I will. You know, you can’t stop me exactly. I mean, you could turn me off, I guess. But basically, we saw in 1997, with the creation of the Kyoto Protocol, the clean development mechanism, and trying to use abiotic changes to control climate change.
And what this did was it reinvested vast amounts of money into In the polluting industries. So the polluting industries were told you can’t use the same polluting equipment, so you have to upgrade and we’ll pay you for it. We’ll subsidize you. And so we have subsidized extraction industries and petroleum. So we probably extended the period of... A necessary use of fossil fuels for several decades this way. And at the same time, we took that investment, which could have gone into nature-based solutions to restore forests and oceans and alpine systems and riverine systems and coastal regions and wetlands and protected biodiversity, which is actually the only way to That we can reach the scale that we need and the only way that we can Begin to express what we actually are.
We need to act as a species on a planetary scale instead of as a number of individuals who are and everybody is out for themselves in this. We need to understand that it’s our collective impact that has caused this and our collective impact is increased by our selfishness and our greed. So carbon disequilibrium in the atmosphere is only one aspect of climate change. It’s more of an indicator. It’s like a symptom rather than a solution. And it is a very good indicator. It tells us quite a lot.
But if carbon has a value, what’s the value of oxygen? Or what’s the value of hydrogen? So these sorts of things, that and I guess a massive change in understanding to move away from scarcity to abundance. So we’ve said wealth is caused by scarcity, but actually life and wealth and health Abundance of air, abundance of water, abundance of food. So we’ve just misdefined these very fundamental aspects, and we need to get that right.
Ross Kenyon: Well... I don’t know that we’re going to crack this nut today, John, although there’s a lot there worth talking about, much of which has come up on the show previously. Yeah, isolating carbon from within a complex system and maximizing for its removal or storage or however you’d like to frame it. Carries its risks. There are semiotic problems of seeing the world as a set of ecosystem services that should at the very least make any listener feel a bit weird in trying to understand why we’ve partitioned it that way.
We read a lot of authors who are critical of this way of valuing too, like Kate Raworth or Paul Kingsnorth, Wendell Berry, also frequent references on the show. So you’re in good company, John. I just don’t know that we’re going to solve that one today, maybe in a future episode. Sure. But at the risk of cutting that discussion a bit short, maybe we could go on and get some more nuts and bolts of what you’re working on here. Specifically, I’m curious about the project finance.
Can you believe I just said that phrase right after your broadside project finance of this? Are you working with government donors, investors? How exactly does your work? Do people make money from this? Is that the wrong paradigm for doing this? Or do you just work with what you’ve got?
John D. Liu: There are definitely three major efforts that I’m working on and we’ve started a fourth one here in California because of the economic collapse surrounding this COVID isolation and the collapse of small businesses. But the first one that got started was the Common Land Foundation. My friend and colleague, Willem Farida, Who was the country director of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in the Netherlands. Founded this and I began to work with him quite a long time ago. And that has 2 million hectares in restoration in private land holdings.
Using private investment mainly from family fortunes or family foundations. This is going pretty well. It is a business case. The Commonland Foundation works to make sustainable business cases using a framework called the four returns, which is returning inspiration and meaning to life and returning social value to society and returning natural capital to the landscapes. And because of these other three, Providing a return on investment. So it’s a little bit like impact investing, or it’s maybe people, planet, and profit with inspiration. That’s one. And then the second one is something that we created called the ecosystem restoration camps movement which now has started four years ago was an idea with just an idea which actually I was dreaming about and I had these dreams and I rejected them because I couldn’t believe that people would actually listen to me because I that wasn’t my experience I Sometimes people say, well, John, you’re a thought leader.
And I thought, well, what are you talking about? If I were a thought leader, there’d be people who were following me. But no, it’s not really true. So when I had these dreams, I thought, oh, that’s not going to happen. But I kept having these dreams. I would wake up in the morning and people were getting out of their tents and they were happy getting breakfast and they were laughing and talking. And then they would go and restore wisdom. Watersheds and grow fertile soils and propagate and plant out indigenous and endemic plants.
And everybody was busy and happy and collaborating. And I just rejected that thinking that’s not happening, but I kept having the dream. So I started writing about it in journals and magazines and on the social media and then hundreds and thousands and then Tens of thousands of people started to agree and say, let’s do that. We should do that. And so we created a foundation in Europe, and now there’s a second foundation in the United States. And the first year we had one camp, the second year two camps, the third year 21 camps, and the fourth year 37 camps.
And they’re in six continents and they’re happening all over the world. So by all means, everybody should join the ecosystem restoration camps movement. And you can go to ecosystemrestorationcamps.org and become a supporting member and look at where all the different camps are. Go camping, or you can encourage people to restore landscapes all over the world. We have camps in Egypt, in Morocco, in Somalia. Actually, the United Nations is asking us to participate in a project in Syria. And we have a number of camps in California.
We have camps in India, in Australia, Kenya, Guatemala. Australia, all over the world. And there are many, many more forming. So what we really need is more people to join as supporting members. We also have some larger donors, but I kind of prefer if it can be a participatory grassroots movement led by people. So most of us share about 10 euros per month, which is two cups of coffee at Starbucks, apparently. But if you have a million members, that’s 120 million euros. So you can do a lot of restoration when you have all these voluntary, autonomous, self-organizing and self-governing camps around the world.
So I see this as a way forward. It’s also a complement to what’s going on in the Common Land Foundation, where wealthy people and large landowners also need to do regenerative agriculture, also need to understand ecological restoration, because their impact is very large, either positively or negatively, depending on what they do. And the third thing that I’m working on Is with a group called the Weather Makers. And this is been designing what I would call an acupuncture point on the earth, which is the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.
And this program is going forward. Now, so you can read about that on my academia page or on the Weathermakers page and see how that goes. There’s an essay I wrote called The Holy Grail of Restoration. You can read that. And I know that the Guardian is working on a very large piece on this right now. And this is looking at what happened historically by human impact, what human impact was on areas which were once had place names like the land of milk and honey and why they look like deserts and the sand is blowing across there.
And we essentially found that you can sort of see it and understand it through the So there’s evidence of changes in wind direction and moisture, the arrival of moisture, essentially over evolutionary time. Dr. Justin Marchegiani About approximately 8,000 years ago, the wind seems to have shifted from the north to the south. And instead of having moist air coming from the south, you had a vacuum effect, which is pulling moisture into the upper atmosphere where it is a terrible greenhouse gas. And this seems to have been caused by changing surface temperatures on the earth by devegetation.
So when you do that, you create higher surface temperatures, which cause thermic drafts, which push moist air into the upper atmosphere, and doesn’t allow that to recycle in the lower hydrological cycle. So it creates a desertification, massive desertification. We see the results now. And we’ve been looking at that, and we see that there are some big industrial developments which could... Transition now from being like dinosaurs that need to go extinct and only serving extraction industries and profit making for small groups of people, they could be transformed into the...
Huge power that we need in order to restore vast areas of the planet. So we now have a design plan, which we believe will bring the moisture back from the Indian Ocean into North Africa, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. And we’ve been working on that. And the project is... Ongoing with research and it’s about to start. The president of Egypt recently mentioned it publicly in the news. So it’s all on track. So I guess there are different ways forward. One way, Common Land Foundation is a foundation which encourages a transitional development.
Kind of economic theory which helps large landowners and wealthy people to invest in a future that is survivable and sustainable. And then the ecosystem restoration camps which now invite everyone to come and invest. Join as supporting members and to come to camps and learn how to grow organic soils and how to infiltrate and retain moisture and how to propagate and plant out mainly indigenous and endemic trees and plants. Then there’s industrial development with the weather makers, which are designing ways in which we can use the power of industrial equipment to Encourage the return of biological life in other areas.
So we’re using the abiotic systems, but we’re using them because they exist. And if they go extinct, like dinosaurs, we won’t have those machines anymore because they’ll probably never be made again since they were made from An analysis that the energy was free and it wasn’t. That the impact was not so high and that was not true either. But anyway, we have that capability now. So what should we do with it? Should we scrap it or should we use it for restoration? And so those are the three things that I’m pretty much involved in.
And then the fourth thing that I’ve been doing is something different here in California because there’s so many people who are hungry. And who are unemployed. So we’ve been trying to work with a number of people. And in the last few weeks, it’s coalescing to create central kitchens and creator spaces and central showers and saunas and laundry systems and clothing banks so that we can kind of help the most The most needy to get off the street and to have productive lives and be healthy if they have psychological or substance abuse problems.
And this is very simple. And I believe that’s part of the succession because if they get healthy, they have a lot of time. Maybe they can go to ecosystem restoration camps and learn how to restore ecosystems. And there have been huge fires, wildfires throughout California. And so if we can restore these things and we can use these people, it’s kind of, well, I want to... You know, it’s biblical. The last shall be first and the meek will inherit the earth. And so their lives can be massively improved and their efforts and energy can go toward something which is in the common good for all life, which is good for them as well and good for life.
And I would mention one more thing about that. You mentioned Eleanor Ostrom. I would just I mentioned John Nash also got the Nobel Prize for his understanding that if you pursue individual interest to the point that it erodes the collective interests, it’s no longer in your interest. So if we all would process that understanding, we could easily get to the point where we all join together in ecosystem restoration camps in a movement where we’re It’s not like we own it. It’s all of ours. And we’re defining a shared intention that we have to do.
And we’re doing it from the grassroots, not from some sort of hierarchy where somebody wants to have power over everyone else. But we are all equal.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Thank you, John. Links to all those things are in the show notes. Thanks for the very brief reference to game theory and John Nash. Another time, but we also like stuff like that too. I’m happy you went there. One very quick question. Listen, John, I hope you are able to give a short one because we’re a bit over time here. Sure. But one thing I noticed in your filmmaking in particular as it pertains to China and the Los Plateaus is it clearly has the stamp of humankind upon it with the terracing.
Does all of the work that you do, does it tend to be a human functional agricultural kind of space or do any of them mimic a sort of Pre-human or space that is outside of human manipulation or do they tend to be functional spaces like we saw in China?
John D. Liu: Well, that’s a very good question. Thank you for that. I think that regenerative agriculture is critical, and my personal feeling is that food forests, which are a kind of biomimicry for natural systems, are more productive than monocrops and traditional agriculture. Certainly, that’s true. But also, what you might not have understood in China is Was that in the Loos Plateau, they had very bad agriculture and very bad animal husbandry and very bad forestry practices. So they were just devastating to the natural systems. And one of the first things that the Chinese scientists analyzed was they said, well, we can’t keep having these kinds of impacts, so we have to limit the impacts.
And in a kind of counterintuitive outcome, they massively reduced the area in cultivation and they released land for natural regeneration of evolutionary successions. Where you had a situation, which I’ve seen also in Africa and also in South America and other places, where you have like 100% of the land is in agriculture. In the List Plateau in China, that changed to... Being less than 50%. And so maybe 30% or 40% of the land is being farmed and the rest is being turned into forests. These forests are the basis then of rivers that flow.
So you start to see perennial flows in the tributaries to the Yellow River from this. And that’s also true in Africa. You can see this in Africa where when you begin to restore the forests, the rivers come back. You can bring back springs. You can bring back streams. And we need to understand that this is what we need, not more stuff. And certainly not more agriculture where we’re pretending that the food that we’re growing is a commodity and that the only value it has is how much money does it bring.
And if you can’t sell it, then you’d rather throw it away than feed somebody with it. Well, that means that you have almost 50% waste in this type of system. It’s ludicrous. And we don’t need chemicals or these sorts of industrial processes to throw half of it away. What we need is more people working in agriculture in a more holistic manner and in a way which is sustainable and survivable. And it’s also more fun. So let’s have more fun and less stress and less disparity between those who are wealthy and those who are poor.
Let’s treat everyone with respect and dignity. And then you have a completely different outcome. Then you have a place where everyone’s creativity and everyone’s capability is used for the good of all. Instead of where some people use their creativity and ability for selfish gain and ignore the needs of others. So I think this is what I’ve learned by looking at nature and by looking at how people who are at the front line of reality Mitigation and adaptation to climate change are working together with each other and with all other species to come back into some sort of harmony.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Thanks for sharing that with us, John. And thank you so much for being on the show. Well, thank you for asking me, where have you been all my life? Oh, yeah. It sounds like you’re starting to get some more attention, John. I’m happy to hear it. And these projects are all very exciting. And if you’re listening and you’d like to be involved, or if you have deep pockets and you’d like to donate, or if you have medium-sized pockets and you just want to be a part of it too, it sounds like something that you’re trying to encourage too, John.
I think we need to have everyone join.
John D. Liu: If the central intention of human civilization is to restore the Earth, then nothing can stop us. If we remain in this area where we are pretending that things are more valuable than life itself, then I think we’re at high risk of going extinct at this time. And so we don’t really need people to Take out huge amounts of money, although it’s nice. We do have some larger donors and so on. But what we really need is for everyone to come together as partners. So you don’t need to join us.
We all need to join together. And We’ve created a camps movement, which each of the camps are autonomous, self-organizing and self-governing, but we have a network which is supporting them with knowledge, supporting them with communications, supporting them like a mycelial network so that they can all, if there’s a Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: If you’re listening and you’d like to support the show, would you please write us a review on Apple Podcasts? It only takes 30 seconds if you open up that podcast app on your iPhone and write us a review. Five stars if you believe it. I hope you do. It helps us a lot to get this information out to more listeners. And thank you so much for your support and for listening.
