Panel: Dr. Anastassia Makarieva, Tom Goreau, Dan Kittredge, Judith D. Schwartz Moderator: Didi Pershouse
We are excited to share with you the panel discussion from the Boston Premiere of the film Regenerating Life! It was such a full day with three parts to the film, interesting exhibitors, and reconnecting with friends, that it was difficult to take it all in at once.
You can share some of that excitement from our great panel of speakers, featuring:
Moderator Didi Pershouse (Land and Leadership Institute), with panelists
Tom Goreau (Marine biologist,Global Coral Reef Alliance),
Dr. Anastassia Makarieva (Atmospheric Physicist, biotic pump co-formulator),
Dan Kittredge (Farmer, Founder, Bionutrient Food Association) and
Judith D.Schwartz (Environmental journalist and author).
Realizing that there were many topics in the film that could be their own 3 hour film, Didi started the conversation by asking the panelists: What would you like a little more time to talk about from the film? Didi also asked the panelists to share their long view of the situation and what they are focusing on looking forward.
One of the most interesting parts of the discussion to me (and they were all interesting) was hearing from the audience their questions and reflections. Over 25 participants had the chance to speak their questions for all of us to reflect on as the event wrapped up.
I hope you enjoy the panel discussion, and please feel free to add your questions in the blog comments and share resources you think are important.
Thank you for being a part of the most important climate conversation of our time!
Regenerating life together,
Beck
P.S. Connect with Bio4Climate and friends from OR this Saturday at theRedesigning our Communitiesconference featuring Richard Heinberg.
P.P.S. Yes, the film is available for purchase!! Follow the links from our film page.
Dr. Makarieva explains why protecting existing forests is one of the most important things we can do to stabilize the climate. Pending legislation in MA (USA) serves as a model for policy protections needed around the world. Learn more about taking action here, and find out more at Save Mass Forests.
Our climate system is incredibly complex. Much of it depends on clouds. Clouds will either cool or warm the Earth depending on their type, because they reflect sunlight (cooling) but absorb thermal radiation (warming).
The natural forest can be compared to a skilled tightrope walker whose equilibrium (producing warming and cooling clouds) keeps the climate in balance. This dynamic has emerged throughout the evolution of the planet. It requires coordination between all species in the forest community. (Some cloud-seeding particles are produced by forest bacteria!) When we log or burn the forest, we introduce a disturbance. When the disturbance goes beyond the threshold, the system collapses. The tightrope walker cannot keep balance and crashes. Climate destabilization commences.
The less disturbed the balance of the system, the more efficient climate regulation will be. After a disturbance, the forest ecosystem has the capacity to recover through the process of ecological succession. Consortia of different species (starting from lichens and mosses and proceeding to herbs, shrubs and trees) replace each other in a non-random order — restoring the ecosystem’s environment and capacity to regulate climatic conditions. Such a recovery is not guaranteed — if disturbed beyond a threshold, the ecosystem can totally degrade. With the beginning of the era of industrialization, North American forests suffered a dramatic devastation. Today those forests show signs of self-sustainability, are recovering with a full suite of biodiversity and are exceptionally valuable. These are recovering mechanisms maintaining climate stability.
Life is governed by the universal laws of nature. These laws are not dependent on imaginary lines drawn on human maps. We have learned so much about natural ecosystems in recent decades. The sooner we align our laws with the newly discovered evidence of how important natural forests are for climate and water cycle stabilization, the better chance we have to secure favorable conditions for ourselves and our children.
A unique effort is currently underway in Massachusetts, including bills to protect natural self-sustainable climate-regulating forests from logging. Let us champion the legal recognition of the climate-regulating function of natural forests!
Our Boston Premiere of Regenerating Life at Tufts University was a tremendous success! It was exciting to see about 100 people come together to experience how John Feldman wove the many threads of the importance of nature to climate stability together in film.
Tufts Screening
Conversation was lively during the lunch break, as people talked with exhibitors from local organizations while enjoying sandwiches. The room was abuzz with admiration for the way that all the pieces of the climate message came together, along with the beautiful photography and Feldman’s own sense of humor.
Attendees in the break
After Part 3, John Feldman answered questions about the making of the film and introduced us to Sheila Silver, the composer of the mood-setting, and often hauntingly beautiful score.
We concluded with an insightful discussion from our panel of experts who traveled here from Russia, Jamaica, Vermont, New York and Western Mass. The conversation, led by Didi Pershouse, brought together key researchers, some of whom have been with Bio4Climate since our first conference and most of whom were featured in the film. The discussion proved lively as some differences in how to best apply the information were expressed. Check out the recording of the panel discussion and Q&A here.
Panel: Dr. Anastassia Makarieva, Tom Goreau, Dan Kittredge, Judith D. Schwartz; Moderator: Didi Pershouse
Nearly 30 attendees had the chance to share with the rest of the audience and panel the questions they had, which were inspired by the film. Perhaps the most common question was “How can we get this message out to more people?” Which is the same question we ask ourselves every day at Bio4Climate – but the short answer is – share the film!
The distributor Bullfrog Films is now making the film available for individuals and community groups to host a live or virtual screening. You can learn more about hosting a screening here. Bio4Climate will also make a community screening toolkit available soon, so stay tuned.
We look forward to getting this excellent movie and its important messages out to the world. Thank you so much for being a part of it!
Have you seen the film at our Premiere or elsewhere? Please share your comments and pictures in the comments so we can Regenerate Life together!
To a climate conversation long dominated by computer models and technological jargon, Regenerating Life: How to Cool the Planet, Feed the World and Live Happily Ever After brings some badly needed rain, along with dung beetles, sweating trees, fungal mycelia, cloud-making forests, beavers, worms, soil microbes, cow patties and whales. As more and more people are learning, there’s another side to the climate that’s been overlooked, one having less to do with what we put in the air than what we do to the land and this film brings it beautifully to life.
It’s a daunting task, for once we open our eyes to the biological side of climate, we confront an almost incomprehensible complexity. There’s photosynthesis to understand as well as plant transpiration, the small water cycle and the greenhouse effect. Soil microbiology, cloud formation, ecosystem dynamics and nutrient cycles all figure in. There is the physics of light and heat and the twin chemistries of carbohydrates and hydrocarbons to account for, not to mention the legacies of colonization, slavery and the industrialization of agriculture. A lesser filmmaker would leave us lost in facts and figures and timelines, but John Feldman, writer, photographer and editor of the film, delivers a journey so visually sumptuous, so evenly paced and cleverly edited, we hardly realize we are being taught at all.
The film starts quietly, with the sound of rain, then opens to a downpour in a woodland. As the camera follows a creek down a mossy ravine Feldman begins, “When I started this film about the causes and solutions to the climate crisis, I had no idea I would be spending so much time looking at water.” And so it is with anyone who learns about the living basis of climate. It’s so much about water. And water is so much about life. Together, and in exquisite synchronization, through myriad cycles and feedbacks, they produce what we call the climate (of which CO2 emissions are a critical part.) But there is no simple linear explanation for how it all works. It’s too complex for that, with many things happening at once, cycling one through the other. As he discovers early on, “everything leads to everything else.”
Mist over field – still from Regenerating Life
To deal with this lack of linearity, Feldman divides his film into three parts, looking at the whole through three lenses, so to speak. Part 1, called Water Cools the Planet, looks through the water lens. Part II, Life Sustains the Climate, asks “How does life sustain itself?” and looks through the lens of life for the answer. Part III, Small Farms Feed the World, takes on the industrialization of agriculture while providing common sense climate solutions through the lens of food.
I use the word “lens” deliberately. Feldman shows his story as much as tells it. An example comes at the end of part I. He’s just led us through the intricate ferment of living processes that run the water cycles that cool our climates. We’ve seen how living soil not only sequesters carbon but also water, banking moisture against drought while hydrating green growth above, and how vegetation sweats much like we do, with forests cooling their environments much as a sweaty shirt in the wind cools us. We’ve examined the subtle, but oh-so-powerful physics of how heat moves through the phases of water, liquid to vapor and back again. There’s been a lot of information to take in, and then as reward he lets our eyes feast a while on a time-lapse unfolding of morning mist over a glen. Vapors rise, twist, curl and fall like dancing veils as we move beyond the science into the thing itself, the animate beauty and mystery of it.
Part II widens the lens yet further. To understand climate you must understand water and to understand water you must understand life, thus the question: “How does life sustain itself?” I love that he asks this question. It’s the very opposite of the scientific reductionism that characterizes the standard climate narrative, with Earth’s climate reduced to something of a machine with a carbon dial.
A particularly mesmerizing passage occurs when Feldman takes us behind a microscope to look at the creatures we’ve so far been referring to as “soil microbia.” Looking down on the slow, translucent bodies moving about at their tasks, with the film’s subtly melodic musical accompaniment tugging at my borders, I felt a sympathy and connection with these beings that I hadn’t expected. The passage affects me still. This morning I was looking at the edge of an incoming tide and saw what I first thought was a pale fragment of dead seaweed. But noticing it was translucent like the microbes I had seen in the film I looked longer and realized it was moving on its own. Then I saw the dark eyespots, and fin-like appendages waving from its sides. Would I have noticed this embryonic creature-in-making had I not seen this movie? Hard to say, but life is so at the center of this film that it seems to have affected how I look at things even days afterward. With this intensified attentiveness to life, my surroundings seem to have, well, come alive.
The network IS the fungi – still from Regenerating Life
In Part III the film takes on more of an edge. To talk about food is to talk about the industrial takeover of agriculture. It’s also to talk about slavery and its legacy, as well colonialism and its long trail of brutal land-taking. Feldman doesn’t shy from any of it, detailing just how the growing of food has become so poisonous, industrial and corporatized. The “green” revolution turns out to be not so green after all, kind of like “green” energy: imposing an industrial solution on what is an organic problem.
Karen Washington at her urban farm – still from Regenerating Life
I’ve mentioned how Feldman shows as well as explains his material. He also lets others do the telling. There’s long been a quiet community around the world of people who, coming to understand the power and beauty of this new, more ecological way of seeing the climate, have pretty much dedicated their lives to it. We meet many of these figures and what’s so refreshing is that none of them are big names. There are no Hollywood figures, just everyday people who, in their own way, have come to see how all the pieces fit together. Along with soil scientists, microbiologists and organizers, we meet an ecologist who homeschools eighth graders in science, a nutritionist turned soil communicator, two African American sisters reclaiming their afro-indigenous heritage, farmers in India applying regenerative agriculture at province-wide scale, growing food even during drought, and a community gardener in the middle of New York City who is regenerating life from the city-center out and has become very clear that “to grow your own food gives you power.”
There’s a good chance some people won’t like this film. They won’t appreciate it referring to carbon gases and the greenhouse effect as a cause of climate change, rather than the cause of climate change. Some may even try to portray it as a kind of climate denial. But this film isn’t about denying anything. It’s a film of affirmation. And what it affirms, over and over, is life, not only the wonder of it but the power of it to heal our broken climate. It’s more of an orchestration than a machine. But even that is too tightly structured a comparison. There is something wild and beautiful at its heart. It’s a force with its own will. And if you allow yourself, it will fill you with awe and even hope.
Feldman is surely awed. You may well be too. It’s something you can only see through discovery, and now you have this calm and generous film to help you with that. You might want to have pen and paper on hand, and maybe invite a friend or two to join you.
There’s a lot to talk about.
Rob Lewis
Pictures are stills from the film Regenerating Life, used with permission.
Rob Lewis is a poet, writer and activist working to give voice to the more-than-human world, and a member of Bio4Climate’s Leadership Team since 2021. His writings have appeared in Resilience, Dark Mountain, Atlanta Review, Counterflow and others, as well as the anthologies Singing the Salmon Home and For the Love of Orcas. He’s also author of the poetry/essay collection The Silence of Vanishing Things. Lately, he’s been writing about how the climate isn’t a machine with an engineering fix, but a living system that only can only be healed through restraint and restoration, at https://theclimateaccordingtolife.substack.com/
I’d like to introduce this piece with a scenario. Suppose someone pointed out that you’d been looking at the climate through a pair of glasses with only one lens? Lifting them off your nose, they then provide you a new pair of glasses with two lenses. Suddenly, parts of the climate you couldn’t see before appear. In addition to the atmosphere, you now see the landscapes around you and the soil beneath your feet, not as helpless victims, but as active drivers of this thing we call climate. Not only that, but you see that at one point, not too long ago, science looked at the climate in just such a manner. It was only later, in the 1980’s, that the glasses with the single lens was put before our eyes and declared the official scientific view.
These are some of the insights gained when you follow the path of Millan’s career and scientific work, though Millan uses different metaphors, referring to a “two-legged” climate understanding versus the one-legged, CO2-only view, the current orthodoxy. He also shows us that water, which lies at the heart of Earth’s climate, “begets water,” that soil is like a “womb” for rain and climate, and vegetation acts as a “midwife.”
I realize I’m throwing out a lot of metaphors here, but with today’s data-driven orthodoxy, metaphors are needed to help us see through the numerical fog. In any case, read on and things will become clear.
Millan Millan and the Mystery of the Missing Mediterranean Storms
When Mediterranean climate expert Millan M. Millan was a boy, his father brought him along on his frequent partridge hunting forays through the dry scrubland of southern Spain known as the maqui, often stopping to show him how to read the surrounding weather, pointing out how a “cloud in a certain place in the morning would move somewhere else by afternoon, triggering a rainstorm.” They’d watch the storms form across the landscape and plan their route home to avoid getting wet. Little could Millan know that 40 years hence he’d be asked by the European Commission to figure out why those afternoon storms, which he and his father so enjoyed tracking across the hillsides, were disappearing throughout the Western Mediterranean Basin, with rivers drying up in their wake.
The future Dr. Millan, Head of the Center for the Mediterranean Environment, degreed in Fluid Mechanics, Industrial Engineering, Aerospace Science, Atmospheric Physics and Spectroscopy, Synoptic Meteorology and Weather Forecasting, would indeed figure out why the summer storms were failing. “Land-use perturbations (mining, industrial expansion, deforestation, paving) that accumulated over historical time and greatly accelerated in the last 30 years” had rendered the land incapable of supporting the region’s climate. The storms were vanishing because the land was vanishing, Millan showed, with far reaching implications for our understanding of the human causes of climate change and how we should respond.
Though hailed by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen as the most significant finding for climate change in twenty years and published in the American Meteorological Association’s Journal of Climate and others,1,2 his work was effectively ignored by mainstream climate science, proving as Millan put it, “incommodious.” The CO2-oriented, global computer models that came to dominate climate science couldn’t see the local, land-level processes Millan uncovered. Politicians, with their pet building projects and “growth” mandate, ran from them.
Millan isn’t the only scientist raising the alarm about “land change” as a human cause of climate change,3,4 but at 82 he has been around the longest, long enough to remember a time when science held what he terms a “two-legged” view of climate, with a leg for atmospheric carbon and the greenhouse effect, and a leg for land disturbance and hydrologic effects (water cycles.) By researching past climate reports, I’ve been able to verify this,5,6 leading to another mystery: what happened to the two-legged understanding of climate? As it turns out, Millan’s story answers this mystery also, as we will see.
The boy, whose father pointed to his destiny and who went on to deftly met it, nonetheless feels defeated. “I failed, for all of us,” he wrote me once. And indeed, today’s climate narrative completely leaves out Millan’s work. But I don’t think the story is over. The wheel of science is moving toward Millan’s understanding, not away, and the scientific case for a two-legged view of climate just keeps building. Now, in fact, is the perfect time to tell his story.
Shared with permission from Rob Lewis, writer, activist, and member of Bio4Climate’s Leadership Team since 2021. This article was originally published on Resilience.org on July 17, 2023. Read the original article here.
Rob Lewis is a poet, writer and activist working to give voice to the more-than-human world. His writings have appeared in Resilience, Dark Mountain, Atlanta Review, Counterflow and others, as well as the anthologies Singing the Salmon Home and For the Love of Orcas. He’s also author of the poetry/essay collection The Silence of Vanishing Things. Lately, he’s been writing about how the climate isn’t a machine with an engineering fix, but a living system that only can only be healed through restraint and restoration, at https://theclimateaccordingtolife.substack.com/
Sources:
Millan, Millan et al, 2005, Climatic Feedbacks and Desertification: The Mediterranean Model, Journal of Climate, Volume 18, pp. 684-70.
Millan, Millan, 2014, Extreme Meteorological Events and Climate Prediction in Europe, Journal of Hydrology, Volume 518, pp.206-224.
Pielke, Roger Sr., 2009, Climate Change: The Need to Consider Human Forcings Besides Greenhouse Gases, Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, pp. 413-414.
Schwarzer, Stefan, 2021, Working with Plants, Soils and Water to Cool the Climate and Rehydrate Earth’s Landscapes, UNEP Foresight Brief, pp. 1-7.
1971, Inadvertent Climate Modification: Study of Man’s Impact on Climate, MIT.
1979, Proceedings of the World Climate Conference: Conference of Experts on Climate and Mankind, World Meteorological Association.
Photo: Low maquis in Corsica (Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=181723)
I spent many hours researching, talking to experts and choosing articles from around the world to come up with what I think is a unique, inspiring and practical collection centered around rainwater infiltration and climate restoration!
Abstract
Water restoration is the key to climate restoration. With almost 100 pages of articles, photos and illustrations contributed by approximately 20 contributors from around the globe, this book shows how simply retaining rainwater in soil and plants can work to restore landscapes and climates that have been degraded through poor water management. From homeowners, farmers, and foresters, to entire communities, we can all help to renew local water cycles that are essential for our climates, and for humanity and all life on Earth.
This is a document intended to guide people from individuals to the national level, on addressing climate change through the restoration of short, or small water cycles, thus increasing the production potential and biodiversity of all continents through the introduction of various measures of rainwater retention.
Excerpt from:1. WHY IS A GLOBAL ACTION PLAN (GAP) NEEDED?
A global plan of climate restoration of the small water cycle of regional landscapes, with a goal of decreasing floods, drought, natural disasters, and other undesirable climate changes, and increasing the biodiversity and production potential of all continents, through the introduction of various measures of rainwater retention suitable for all areas of human habitation and usage.
Conclusion and Action Needed (p 4)
For climate change due to anthropogenic drainage and vegetation depletion, the major necessary intervention is to restore water in dry, damaged ecosystems, a measure which can be achieved with rainwater retention and soil erosion control. Consistent and widespread restoration of native vegetation and soil fertility will bring about restoration of the natural water cycle. It will also achieve increases in food production, fresh water supplies, and biodiversity, while mitigating the occurrence of severe weather, and decreasing the volumes of storm water flowing down rivers, thus ultimately decreasing sea levels. This can be accomplished; it is only necessary to mobilize stakeholders, from local and regional to national, international, and global levels.
Despite the above-described realities of the deterioration of water cycles, and that water as a resource is extremely critical to many public investments, current efforts are insufficiently responsive to the nature and dynamics of the ecological processes taking place. Hydrological cycles have been negatively affected in many types of forested, agricultural, and urban landscapes, as well as in the transportation and industrial infrastructure and other developed areas. These intensive human-caused effects accelerated in the twentieth century, especially in recent decades.
Unfortunately, a large proportion of urban infrastructure (such as impervious surfaces and storm sewer systems) is encouraging the continued drying of the landscape ecology, which not only compromises the balance of water, but also causes an increase in urban heat islands; subsequent changes in rainfall distribution indicate an altered local and regional climate. The loss of water into rivers also contributes to rising sea levels. By not taking these effects into consideration, high level decision makers and global stakeholders are operating under the inaccurate concept that all climate change can be mitigated solely through the reduction of greenhouse gases.
Forecasts suggest that stable hydrological regimes in landscape ecosystems are the key determining factor of economic, social, and cultural welfare of all human communities, from local to global scale. Such landscapes are far more equipped to absorb rainwater and withstand extreme weather such as intense rains and drought. Such a desirable state can be achieved only by ecosystem improvements that strengthen biodiversity and soil production potential through improved hydrological regimes.
Current knowledge of hydrology in ecosystems worldwide, indicates that without a fundamental change in land and rainwater management, especially in urban areas, the risk of extreme floods and droughts will rise in coming years. Problems of overheating and drying will increase exponentially if we do not stop the perennial surface drainage of landscapes. The solution is to restore degraded landscapes by means of natural regeneration of soil moisture to benefit small water cycles. This will create favorable conditions for prevention of floods, droughts, and other natural disasters.
Massive rainwater retention is necessary to achieve a state of sustainable life on our planet; it is time to mobilize politicians together with citizens. The challenge is to make urgently needed decisions to achieve an integrated, holistic system of rainwater management. By doing so, in addition to preventing floods and droughts, we will also strengthen biodiversity, increase soil fertility and productivity, and restore a more healthful climate.
The New Water Paradigm presents a very useful way to view drought and other climate change, a way that shows how humankind can influence climate for the better simply by restoring natural water cycles that help to regulate climate. Reading this book will greatly enrich your understanding of the Global Action Plan. Learn the critical importance of the short, or small water cycle that relies on transpiration, the natural cooling effect of trees and other plants through evaporation of rainwater through their leaves.
Excerpt from:1 THE REASON FOR THE FORMULATION AND THE MISSION OF THE NEW WATER PARADIGM
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. ~ Albert Einstein
Possibilities for individuals (pp 9-10)
At present, the individual is placed in the position of consumer of water and for the most part is neither aware of his own share of responsibility for the protection of water nor of the possibilities or threats which water (or the lack of it) may bring. And yet each roof and each yard of a family home is a microwatershed on which the annual sum of precipitation represents a surprisingly large volume of water. Water is an asset which the individual citizen can use to improve his own life in a variety of ways. He can also, however, without any profit and for a fee, flush it into rivers and into the sea and thus slowly contribute to the desertification of his own environment and microclimate and, in time, to macroclimatic changes. The new water paradigm makes this choice a conscious one.
The common good (p 10)
The publication of the paradigm is, in the opinion of its authors, a step towards a responsible approach and greater critical thinking with no intention of offending anyone associated with the “old paradigm” or hurting anyone associated with the changes that could result from the change in paradigm. The new paradigm should be accepted in the spirit that it is offered. The authors provide an independent view on the global scenario of the circulation of water with its effects on a continental, national, regional or town level, so that this knowledge will contribute to the common good. The acceptance of the paradigm, besides other suggested activities, ultimately means the acceptance of a new higher culture in relation to water and thus also a total overhaul of the cultural character of our civilization. In the end result, it’s about much more than just water.
