Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
There’s so much money being put toward ecological restoration around the world and the United Nations recently declared this to be the decade of ecosystem restoration. So it’s a really important moment to be thinking about how to better align the goals of ecological restoration with the goals of social justice.
If you’re a ‘Beaver Nut’ and realise earnestly just how critical these creatures are to the future well-being of the earth, with a pivotal role in the creation of abundant biodiversity, water provision, purification, flood and drought alleviation, you will pursue beaver advocacy with the kind of tedious zeal generally restricted to deluded members of obscure religious cults.
And the global task of ecosystem restoration will begin in earnest. Once ideas on how to achieve what’s assumed to be impossible are articulated, that goal is no longer impossible.
Let’s get inspired.
In 2017 John founded the Ecosystem Restoration Camps, a mass movement aimed at healing the Earth while healing ourselves — meanwhile, turning around runaway climate change. Sequestering the excess carbon in our atmosphere on a massive scale is one of the last remaining solutions to staving off the worst effects of climate change.
While the subject of this story is what we may call biocultural, eco-culinary, or reciprocal restoration, it is quite often enabled through a social process that has been called either community-based restoration, collaborative conservation, or cooperative collaboration.
So what a surprise when an Internet search brought up an intriguing phrase juxtaposing the word “ecological” to “civilisation”. Ecological civilisation? And it was all very official. In a statement to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), a Chinese spokesperson announced to the world that ecological civilisation was China’s new national strategy, that the view of man as conqueror of nature was outdated and that the new approach to modernization would be to strive to live in harmony with nature.
How can the Kissimmee team and others best restore degraded environments in the face of the unpredictable and tumultuous future that climate change promises? A big part of the answer is by building in resilience — the ability to resist change or to recover from disturbance in a way that preserves the essence of a system’s structure and function.
Humans often “speak to” nature, as when we assume a dominant attitude and expect to be able to “improve” upon nature with technological solutions to perceived (or real) problems….
You’d think you could walk the streets of an average residential neighborhood and see green infrastructure galore, including raingardens and bioswales, not to mention hedgerows. But no.
What will it take to transition to local economies that are truly just, resilient, and regenerative? Recently PCI had the opportunity to explore this question with Mateo Nube, a co-founder of the Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project.
Restoring degraded ecosystems — or creating new ones — has become a huge global business.
