As we bid farewell to 2019 and usher in a new decade, we would like to reflect on some memorable events from this past year. Biodiversity for a Livable Climate’s mission is to tell the stories of local and global eco-restorative efforts, encourage action across scales, and collaborate with individuals and organizations to bring nature-based climate solutions to the table.

Needless to say, so much of what we have accomplished this year would not have been possible without your enthusiastic support! 

First and foremost, we are pleased to announce the publishing of the fourth (January 2019) and fifth (July 2019) issues of our Compendium of Scientific and Practical Findings Supporting Eco-Restoration to Address Global Warming this year.

Check out an excerpt from our most recent issue in this newsletter concerning community watershed education and protection in the United States.

This year, the Bio4Climate team attended and tabled at attended and tabled at six Northeast Organic Farmers Association (NOFA) conferences in New England and New York State introducing the work of Bio4Climate, and the biological solutions that we promote to address climate change. I was thrilled to attend the conferences in Massachusetts and New York, where we met many farmers, ranchers, bee keepers, seed savers educators and community builders in the region. The diversity of workshops and keynote presentations was impressive, and it was exciting to see so many young farmers in attendance as well.

We are also pleased to announce the launch of the WGBH Network Forum Bio4Climate Lecture Series with video talks this year by our friends and colleagues Walter Jehne, renowned soil scientist, and Judith D. Schwartz, author of Cows Save the Planet. Both were phenomenal talks that can be viewed in high quality here.

Speaking of excellent talks, here’s a podcast that makes for great listening for all things regenerative! Greendreamer's podcast with Kaméa Chayne has been a recent favorite of mine for conversations in the regenerative space. Our very own Adam Sacks, Executive Director of Bio4Climate, recently spoke with Kaméa about how climate change is actually a symptom of biodiversity loss. 

Stay tuned for a more comprehensive list of our accomplishments for 2019! Much, much more to come in 2020 as we gear up for our next weekend conference in April, Blessed Unrest.

As the year comes to a close, we hope you will continue to feel inspired by millions of people around the world who are working to heal the planet, one ecosystem at a time. 

Very best wishes for a Healthy and Happy New Year!

For Regeneration,

Manjulika Das, Curator and Editor

From left: Manjulika Das (Newsletter Editor),

Adam Sacks (Executive Director), Paula Phipps (Associate Director) at NOFA NY, January 2019

How Permaculture Makes Communities Self-Sufficient

The Permaculture Research Institute defines permaculture as "the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems." Increasingly, people all over the world are using permaculture to re-think how to manage our land and local food systems. 

A remarkable feature of permaculture is in its versatility. From the temperate climate of North America to the hot and arid regions of the Middle East, people can use permaculture successfully almost anywhere. It is cost-effective, as it makes do with few resources and requires no chemical fertilizers. It can also be practiced in places like Jordan where agricultural space is limited.

The Greening the Desert Project in Jordan, started by Geoff Lawton, is an extraordinary example of how permaculture builds community resilience. With the support of Muslim Aid Australia (MAA), the project has expanded to local schools and homes in the surrounding communities. Permaculture has made the land more productive as the project introduced organic composting and greywater recycling, and collects runoff from the nursery to be used in the kitchen gardens. Everything within a site is recycled so fewer resources are used. The project is also teaching permaculture to schools and communal gardening groups. The results have been beneficial both nutritionally and economically, as young children are growing vegetables in their own gardens and selling produce. Click here to read more about permaculture practices in Jordan's communities.

Regreening Project in Jordan.
Permaculture Research Institute

Michael Hoag, an experienced permaculturalist and educator, makes a strong case for permaculture. Compared to industrial agriculture, he says, permaculture helps to sequester carbon, allows for better infiltration of water, reduces resource consumption, and protects biodiversity. According to Hoag, time spent gardening or farming is drastically reduced when we understand and work with the land. Drawing inspiration from Bill Mollison, popularly known as the "father" of permaculture, Hoag has built on the "naturally occurring food forest model" that requires little labor to maintain. Click here for the full article and his documentation of long-term stable no-work food systems through his travels.

The Regenerative Development Manifesto - A Summary

The Regenesis Group is a leading consultancy and educational think tank for regenerative design and development. They propose "The Regenerative Development Manifesto" to emphasize the need for current development practices to prioritize living in harmony with nature for mutual benefit.The manifesto is summarized below.

"The world is complex. We need to stop dumbing it down."

We cannot address the complexity of nature and its feedbacks if we continue to oversimplify and isolate phenomena from their contexts. In other words, we require solutions that start by understanding the complex dynamics and inter-connectedness of living systems, and then work to address problems with this understanding.

"We can’t get where we need to go by making compromises."

Regenerative development works to address the health of ecosystems, which directly affects the well-being of humans and other living beings. It discards the idea that one system must be compromised in order to benefit another. For example, soils do not need to be degraded in order to feed our population.

"Nature doesn’t need our protection. She needs our collaboration."

Many accounts have shown that nature thrives with the careful management that indigenous people have carried out for centuries to ensure the health of ecosystems. Cities, towns, and villages can be developed in ways that protect and nourish this symbiotic relationship between humans and nature so they can all survive.

"The only appropriate response is a local response."

The collective outcome of several local regenerative efforts can be significant. Local action can better take into account the unique life processes of a particular place.

"Everyone has a role."

We must be committed to changing how we think and do things. It is essential to understand that there is no human resilience without ecological resilience. We must use newer, and more innovative, local approaches in order to bring about real changes in the health of our ecosystems, and ultimately, our planet.

Read the full manifesto here.

Photos taken from The Regenesis Group

Meet Bill Reed - Regenerative Design Practitioner & Visionary

Bill Reed is an internationally recognized practitioner, lecturer, and leading authority in sustainability and regenerative planning, design and implementation. He is a principal in the Regenesis Group – an organization working to lift green building and community planning into full integration and evolution with living systems. Bill has written many technical articles and has contributed to a number of books as co-author including the seminal work, Integrative Design Guide to Green Building. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the US Green Building Council and one of the co-founders of the LEED Green Building Rating System.

Bill first began his whole systems approach through the lens of permaculture ("permanent agriculture"), or the practice of working with the land as an integrated whole. "Permaculture wasn't having large scale effect or spreading as a systematic world-view - it was being implemented on small areas of land and as an interesting agricultural practice at best. The culture was not engaged or inspired to shift into this way of engaging with life," Bill recounts.

In the early 1960’s through the 1980’s various groups of business and engineering leaders had been investigating and implementing deep, organizational development work. Instead of simply looking at increasing the efficiency of technology, they looked at the more powerful force of human creativity and motivation. In other words, how to create an environment that allows for the unleashing of each human being’s unique potential.

Often, it is only by recognizing one's own motivations for personal fulfillment that we can go on to thinking about and being effective with the group as a whole. From "self-actualization" (first-line work) arises "organizational actualization" (second-line work). Bill explains "systems actualization" as the third line of work that needs to be addressed to help us recognize the role that humans play in the health of the whole system. 

The Regenesis Group was founded to create a community development practice that merged a whole systems approach with "nature" (permaculture) and a whole system approach with "human nature" (human and organizational development).  The premise is that humans are nature; yet, living in large civilizations, we have forgotten how integral our role is in supporting and participating in the co-evolution of life in the places we live.

As it turns out, based on research over the last sixty years, the "healthiest" ecosystems in the world have been those in which humans were in a co-evolutionary relationship with the living system they inhabited. Healthy systems depend on a great diversity of species and species interrelationships. Out of self-interest, when humans support the conditions conducive to this richness, we create conditions of "dynamic stability" - able to be resilient and handle a variety of disturbances. This is why a healthy and diverse prairie for example can bounce back after fire, drought, a stampede of buffalo, a plague of locusts, or a flood.   

In many urban spaces, the practice of "sustainable design" has been gaining traction, as architects and builders are forced to consider the impact that urban infrastructure has on surrounding ecosystems. As a regenerative design practitioner, Bill points out the differences between sustainable design and regenerative design -- terms people often use interchangeably. Whereas sustainable design attempts to get as close to zero damage as possible, regenerative design asks us to "continually rebirth our knowledge of our relationship to the system because it is constantly evolving."

"Life is continually evolving," Bill says.   "Regeneration is about consciously staying in the game of evolution. So that means we consistently explore what happened this last year? What was our role? What do we need to change? We can’t save the planet as a whole, it is too abstract to get our hands around it. But we can heal each place we live; and therefore save the planet as a result."

Bill outlines seven principles at the core of living systems thinking, and therefore regenerative design: wholeness (we cannot understand how life works if we depend on studying fragments and pieces of life, i.e., reductionism), essence (we need to understand the core patterns that make something uniquely the way it is), potential (working with the potential of the system, not just the problems), nestedness (there are no boundaries to the system; complex interrelationships and interactions are always present), reciprocity (nature doesn’t work transactionally; there's a continual dance of mutual gifting - entities evolving together), nodal (looking for significant leverage points, like a keystone species or systemic issue), and developmental (the process is continual and takes conscious effort to participate and evolve).

Using these principles, the Regenesis Group has taken up large-scale projects around the world that are working to heal socio-ecological landscapes with the help of local communities. One involves the city of Viña del Mar in Chile. This is was one of the world’s great “Garden Cities” from the English planning tradition.  Over the last thirty years it has gone into a state of decline. The community activists blamed developers. In the face of this a large corporation wanted to give a ‘gift to the city’ of a new mixed-use development on land that was formerly an oil tank farm. Twenty-five activist groups prepared to go to the courts to fight the project.

Regenesis was hired because of the principle: nature harmonizes, it doesn’t compromise.  The developer told them, if you can harmonize this situation it is worth fifteen years of lawyers.   

In the first two weeks of working in the city, Regenesis helped the activist groups see that even if they stopped the development from happening the city would still be in decline.  Instead, the potential for the city to recover its healthy habitat and social fabric depended on everyone working together in an integrated way. The developer also had to realize they were an equal stakeholder with all the other groups - no more or less important. 

The Regenesis Group's work involved research into the critical nature of the social, ecological, and economic dynamics of the community. This engaged the activist groups and residents to help them verbalize a bigger vision for their city. That vision led to the development being designed with the community's needs in mind: ensuring effective water management, restore critical ecological connectivity and diversity, engaging the youth and neighborhoods in co-creative work, and so on.

Continued with Bill....

This work does not happen with one or two visits.  Like anything in life, change and new learning takes practice.  Every six weeks, for three years, Regenesis and the developer met with the groups in the city to come to a common understanding of what was meaningful to the people.  After the first ten months, the Director of the Chamber of Commerce, who refused to engage in the beginning, called the developer to say, “I don’t know what you guys have been doing, but count us in; this is the first time this city has been able to dream in thirty years.” 

The process is very much still ongoing, and shifts in thinking and being take time, Bill notes. But the neighborhoods and city are actively engaged around issues of mobility, coastal restoration, habitat connectivity,  urban forests, organic farming practices, youth involvement, brownfield restoration, and restoring the Margamarga Estuary, currently 80% filled with a kilometer long parking lot.

Click here to read more about the Las Salinas case study by the Regenesis Group.

...And Catch Bill at This Event!

Healing the World in 18 Months

(truly possible, if...)

When: 6-9 PM on Sunday, January 5, 2020

Where: Cambridge, MA

How can we shift our organization and business practices to effectively engage, motivate, and learn what’s required for meaningful and rapid change?

The answer is Regenerative Development and Design. Bill Reed will introduce the foundational living system processes that form the basis of this practice. These have been proven to invite massive change, and alignment between human-to-human and human-to-nature relationships.

Can we heal the world in 18 months? Can we shift our thinking in time? How can our engagement with nature help it thrive?

Bill will answer these questions and more!

Click here to find out more about the event on our Meetup page.

Compendium Notes

Here's another excerpt from our Compendium of Scientific and Practical Findings Supporting Eco-Restoration to Address Global Warming. The article below is from our fourth issue, January 2019, Vol. 2 No. 2 (pp. 13-14):

Community-based watershed stewardship programs, USA 

From California to Minnesota, and in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Washington DC, people are coming together in their communities to learn about their local watersheds. A watershed is an area of land over which any rain that falls drains into the same river or water body. For example, all waters falling onto the eastern half of Washington DC flow into the notoriously polluted Anacostia River, while rain on the western half of the nation’s capital drains into the Potomac River. Thus, the city is split into two watersheds. 

People are now becoming educated about the urban stormwater management that has impaired their rivers, and how river-floodplain ecosystems can be restored through a grassroots approach.

The Anacostia River was once surrounded by forests, meadows and wetlands that absorbed, filtered and slowed the water that made its way down to the river. Over time, these natural sponges were paved over for urban development. The area of tidal wetlands surrounding the Anacostia has shrunk from 2,500 acres in the 1800s to 150 acres today. Today's stormwater catchment is made up of asphalt streets, parking lots and rooftops; that leaves water with nowhere to go but into storm gutters. Furthermore, parts of Washington DC still uses CSOs (combined sewer overflows) in which storm water goes down the same pipes as sewage. This clearly makes it harder to treat the water.

The Anacostia Watershed Society (AWS), a DC non-profit, has an ambitious mission to make the river “fishable and swimmable by 2025.” To do so, it engages school children and other community members in restoring wetlands along the river. Along with several other communities around the country, AWS partners with the D.C. Department of Environment to train community members to be ambassadors for the river. Over several weeks, Watershed Stewards learn how impervious surfaces in urban developments prevent water from infiltrating into the soil and instead direct rain water straight into storm sewers. They then learn about absorptive green rooftops, and the possibility of redirecting water from a downspout to a rain garden or a deep-rooted perennial bed, where the water can percolate into healthy spongy soil, ultimately recharging the groundwater.

Primed with knowledge, enthusiasm, and the camaraderie of fellow stewards, participants are expected to implement a project of their own, to teach their neighbors what they’ve learned, and to volunteer in related community projects focusing on watershed restoration. In Minnesota, watershed steward projects redirect rainfall from gutters into gardens, where it can hydrate plants and recharge groundwater, at a rate of more than 1 million gallons per year.

The program website traces this outcome to the efforts initiated in 2013 which now include 141 stewards working in partnership with seven watershed districts and one municipality. The program in Anne Arundel county in Maryland started in 2009; it has planted nearly 100,000 native plants, trees and shrubs, led by some 200 stewards in 100 communities engaging 134,000 of their neighbors in watershed restoration efforts.

------

Minnesota : https://masterwaterstewards.org/
Washington DC : https://www.anacostiaws.org/
Maryland : http://aawsa.org/

https://www.mdsg.umd.edu/topics/watershed-stewards/watershed-stewards
Pennsylvania : https://extension.psu.edu/programs/watershed-stewards
California: https://ccc.ca.gov/what-we-do/conservation-programs/watershed-stewards-program/

Last But Not Least. . .

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