For those of you who have followed my work over the past 3 decades and for those who have never heard of me you might be interested in a conversation I had with a charming young Belgian musician and ecological activist. Raphael Esterhazy host of Deep Seed Podcast is deeply interested in finding ways forward for the young people of today and generations to come. I hope you enjoy this in depth conversation.

Over the 73 years of life I have enjoyed I have concluded that the only way we can succeed in addressing the multitude of issues that we collectively face is by mass collaboration and mass participation. Over the years of observation, documentation and study I have had the privilege of founding The Ecosystem Restoration Communities Movement that has grown to nearly 100 camps and communities in 6 continents. My experience is that working together with family and friends on ecological restoration is the bridge between concept and transformative action.

With many friends and mentors I am working on some new projects. These include Podcasts, films, and on growing the Ecosystem Restoration Communities movement. Those of us already collaborating are very interested to get to know those who can imagine collaboration on communications and on ecological restoration within Community based land trusts.

It seems clear to me that we must solve social problems, psychological problems, economic problems, and ensure the birth right of all living beings in order to restore ecological systems and live in peace and abundance.

It would be an honor to know and work with all who are called to weave your imagination and your work together with this initiative. Together we are stronger and only by working together can we transform human civilization at this time. This is our time and we all are needed to participate in THE GREAT WORK OF OUR TIME.

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On the 2nd day of 1953, the person writing these words was born prematurely at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. My childhood took place mainly in Bloomington, Indiana, a somewhat sophisticated University town in the midwest of the United States. It seemed to me as if I was experiencing a rather normal middle class life with perhaps a few rather particular ethnic differences. Although if I think about it I do notice that few of my peers in Bloomington at that time traveled around the world on ships for a year and a half when they 13 and 14. But together with my somewhat eccentric family, I did.

My father was born in Hunan Province, China in 1920. His birth came just 9 years after the fall of the Ching Dynasty ended the dynastic era in Chinese history. My father was the oldest son in a ancient family of modest landowners whose ancestors had migrated south approximately 500 years ago from the Yellow River basin to the just south of DongTing lake, where the Yangtze River widens before flowing on to Eastern China, and the estuary emptying into Pacific Ocean at the port of Shanghai.

My mother was born in Montgomery Alabama. Her ancestors came to North America from Scotland and England as colonists settling in the Southeast before the revolutionary war. Although I have not chosen to make a specific research of the subjest I suspect this makes me one of a very few “Sons of the Revolution” and “Sons of the Confederacy” with Chinese ancestry.

There are many interesting stories from my early life that I hope to write down soon. However, in the interest of staying with the journey to ecology, I am going to speed along in this narrative and come back to those details at another time. In 1979, at 26 years of age I first visited China to meet my fraternal grandmother and extended Chinese family for the first time. This led to a decision to move to China and participate in a grand adventure which led me to build professional television studios for several organizations, to help to open the CBS News Beijing Bureau and cover many of the biggest news stories of the late 20th century, and to travel the world continuously observing, documenting and communicating in awe of the beauty and fascinating reality life on Earth. Again there are many important and fascinating events that hopefully I will live long enough to write down but for now we will fast forward to 1995 and a request from The World Bank to document a baseline study of the Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project that fundamentally changed my focus in life.

In the next 3 paragraphs the narrative shifts into the 3rd person as it quotes from a chapter about my observations and documentation of degraded landscapes, that I co-authored with Bradley T. Hiller. The book which includes our contribution is “Land Restoration - Reclaiming Landscapes for a Sustainable Future” published in 2015 by Elsevier. Edited by: Ilan Chabay, Martin Frick and Jennifer Helgeson, Published: 2015, Academic Press ISBN: 978-0-12-801231-4, DOI: 10.1016/C2013-0-18711-9

“In early September 1995, after spending 15 years working as an international news television producer and cameraman, John D. Liu embarked on a life-changing assignment that ultimately prompted this section. Liu was part of a documentary crew flying in a small Soviet-era copy of a Fokker Friendship aircraft (dubbed the “Friendshipsky”), which landed at a small, dusty airport in Yanan in Shaanxi Province, on China’s Loess Plateau.”

“The Loess Plateau has proven to be an excellent place to pursue a type of ecological forensics to witness and understand how human actions over time can destroy natural ecological function. The restoration process of the plateau is providing a living laboratory in which the potential of returning ecological function to long degraded landscapes can be studied. Essentially, what has been witnessed and documented on the Loess Plateau is that it is possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems.”

“This realization has potentially enormous implications for human civilization. Witnessing firsthand many geopolitical events as a journalist, including the rise of China from poverty and isolation throughout the 1980s, the Tiananmen tragedy in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, global terrorism, and much more, provided John D. Liu with references to compare to the restoration of the Loess Plateau. He quickly came to realize that, in terms of significance for a sustainable future for humanity, understanding what occurred on the Loess Plateau would be critical.”

(The entire chapter is downloadable below.)

A Continuing Inquiry Into Ecosystem Rest

1.39MB ∙ PDF file

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Just to let you know that I am back writing in the first person.

My observation, documentation and long term study of first the Loess Plateau and then Function and Dysfunction in Terrestrial Ecosystems globally over the past 30 + years has kept me busy and has had some impact on recent history and human civilization. My hope is that the Lessons of the Loess Plateau will be fully understood and implemented and will positively affect the quality of all life in the future.

You can download and read some of my thoughts on the Loess Plateau at the links below. (hint … the 3 lines next to the download button seem to take you to some options.)

Lessons Of The Loess Plateau

183KB ∙ PDF file

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A Comprehensive Strategy For Development

400KB ∙ PDF file

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You can view some of the films that I have made on this over the years at the links below. In addition many other films including, “Kiss the Ground” “The Age of Nature - Awakening” and others have also included reports on my work in the Loess Plateau.

The documentation of the Loess Plateau made me realize that not only can we restore degraded ecosystems but this is the best way to mitigate and adapt to climate changes, reduce biodiversity loss, ensure food security, ensure full employment, protect human rights, achieve peace and create a fair, logical and thriving economy.

This understanding made me consider the role of storytelling and the media. I began to realize that if I chose to sacrifice the idea of fame and fortune, and instead devoted my life to contributing to the transformation of human civilization in a way that would benefit all life I would actually create more value than if I measuring success in a typically mercantile way. History will judge whether this is true or not.

Dr. Jane Goodall, Professor Li Rui, Jürgen Vögele, Dr. Clyde Goulden, Sir Ian Crute, Professor David Powlson, Professor Stephen Nortcliff, Bela Hatvany

Willem Ferwerda, the Founder of the Commonland Foundation, has been a friend, colleague and supporter since we first met at the Tallberg Foundation in Sweden in 2009. The work of the Commonland Foundation continues to expand the understanding and growth of local restoration efforts on a global scale. You can learn more about Commonland’s methodologies, projects and partners at Commonland.com

Over the past 30 + years many thought leaders have encouraged me to continue. I am eternally grateful for their knowledge, wisdom, encouragement and support.

The link below is to Earth Restoration Peace Camps

https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/PM90.pdf

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