A Global Tour of Earth Repair

Week of March 5, 2022

A Global Tour of Earth Repair
This is an introduction to the growing global eco-restoration movement, a profoundly positive and hopeful development that has largely been under the radar. I’ve had the chance to learn directly from pioneers, and will share stories and photos of revived landscapes, from China, Saudi Arabia and Spain to Southern Africa and Mexico. And highlight why this is important in light of our current challenges: the role of healthy ecosystems in climate regulation has so far been missing from the climate conversation, and yet here we have tremendous agency.

 

Earth Repair Starts Here
This follows up on the evening presentation, and gets into the question “What can I do?” We’ll discuss how you can start where you are—wherever you are–and the many ways to get involved while building on your own skills and interests. (I’m seeing this movement grow from the inside, and am tapped in to many efforts that might not be common knowledge.) I can also discuss the community consensus method, where over three days I watched a community in rural New Mexico go from conflict and sabotage and gunfights to committing to work together to heal the land.

 

Learning From Nature—How Animals Heal Landscapes
As a writer, I’ve been drawn to animal stories as a way of conveying nature’s synergies: showing how landscapes “work”. Many of these stories are counter-intuitive. For example, having grazing animals like sheep and cattle can *increase* a ranch’s water stores. Plus, reindeer keep the Arctic cool. And so these stories can upend the way we see and appreciate nature. Let’s learn how cows, reindeer, donkeys, horses, camels, elephants and prairie dogs are partners in restoring our ecosystems.

 

 

Judith D. Schwartz is a journalist who focuses on nature-inspired solutions to global crises. She writes on this topic for numerous publications and speaks to audiences throughout the world. Judith’s books include The Reindeer Chronicles and Other Inspiring Stories of Working With Nature to Heal the Earth, Water In Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World, and Cows Save the Planet and Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth. She lives with her husband, author Tony Eprile, on the side of a mountain in southwestern Vermont, where they are adding fruit trees to an old apple orchard and designing a pollination corridor for vulnerable native bees and other insects.