What if we can balance our climate quickly, naturally, safely?
November 10, 17, December 1, 8
Mondays — 7:00 PM EST / 6:00 PM CST
Restoring climate, water, and life through living systems
Over the course of four gatherings, we’ll discuss how the living skin of our landscapes and oceans creates our climate from the ground up.
Spoiler alert: it’s through the profoundly fascinating intelligence of Nature, and how water flows from soil to branch to leaf to cloud and back again, powered entirely by the sun and life.
While the dominant perception of climate change is focused on carbon and technological fixes, a holistic understanding of climate can be described as: a living process emerging from the relationships between soil, plants, landscapes, microbiomes, water, wildlife, and humans. In other words, how we treat or mistreat the land and the oceans has a significant influence on our climate. The benefits of expanding our focus to include the restoration of living processes to our farms, cities and homes are many, and a topic perhaps less divisive and quite profound.
Crucially, restoring living processes and relationships will call in the rains and restore small water cycles. For example, when soil is stewarded into a vibrant ecosystem (holding water like a sponge) and populated with diverse plants, these trees and grasses breathe out water vapor carrying bacteria, and other bits of life.
In the atmosphere, these bacteria help water to condense into clouds and rain. Rain in turn needs healthy soil to soak into its depths, and help the plants continue to grow. It is by care-taking these relationships that we will allow our climate to balance itself naturally, quickly and safely through powerful cooling dynamics.
In our time together, we’ll discuss how altering our Earth’s living skin has hindered Nature’s inherent ability to create and balance our climate, and together, we’ll explore the potential at our fingertips for building coalitions of regeneration.
Learning Objectives
Participants will learn more about:
- The distinction between the bottom-up (ecological, living systems) and top-down (atmospheric) perceptions of climate
- How Nature cools the landscape (via shade, transpiration, clouds, rain, night-time reradiating windows, winds, etc) and the crucial role of diverse life in these processes
- How we have disrupted Nature’s inherent climate balancing processes
- Why most of the climate conversation focuses primarily on carbon, and how a complementary life-based perspective adds to the conversation
- Actions we can do individually and collectively
What’s Included in the Course
- Live Classes every week! A live 60-minute class each week on Zoom for a total of 4 live sessions, recorded for your convenience
- Mondays – November 10, 17 & December 1, 8, 2025 from 7:00 – 8:00 PM EST
- Membership in a private email group to ask questions, share resources and connect with a like-minded community
- Plus articles and videos you can use to help decision makers create truly effective climate action plans.
Reserve your spot today!
Your Course Instructor
Dr. Katie Ross is an independent writer and researcher, with a background in ecology, renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, transdisciplinary research, and transformative sustainability learning. Knowing how stories hold, transmit and transform paradigms, Katie is keen to share these stories of regeneration.
Katie was raised in central Wisconsin, often feeling a deep sense of awe and empathy with our natural world. After graduating with a degree in Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University, she focused on climate change by supporting Tribes and rural communities in their transition away from fossil fuels, both in Wisconsin and later in Australia. After 15 years as a transdisciplinary action researcher and Research Director at the Institute for Sustainable Futures within the University of Technology Sydney and an internationally commended doctoral inquiry into transformative learning, her focus shifted to the life within our soils. She began working for, and had the privilege of leading, Soils for Life, an Australian organization that supports farmers transitioning to regenerative agriculture. And it was here that many interwoven threads revealed a beautiful story of how landscape restoration is a profound point of agency to cool our climate, regenerate water cycles, grow nutritious food, foster biodiversity and reconnect with ourselves.
To review and subscribe to Katie’s important work, visit her:
Blog: Below and above
LinkedIn: Dr. Katie Ross
Google Scholar: Katie Ross
If you have any registration or general course questions, email us at courses@bio4climate.org. If you have specific questions about the course for Dr. Katie Ross, you can contact her at katie.elizabeth.ross@gmail.com