[P2P-F] from extraction to (re)generation, the core shift today

[Michel Bauwens]

it's about this core shift fro extractive to generative, very much worth
reading  see

http://regenerationinternational.org/2016/03/07/meet-john

as suggested by Kevin Barron in fb:

Stop what you are doing and read this now.

"You can get higher yields of monocultures for a short time but you
ultimately destroy the basic fundamental viability of the entire system. So
you are creating deserts. This is what happened in the Loess Plateau and
this is what happened in every cradle of civilization."

Michel Bauwens <https://www.facebook.com/mbauwens> you will be interested
in what he has to say about economy, and specifically money.
<https://www.facebook.com/wesley.roe.56?fref=nf>
Wesley Roe <https://www.facebook.com/wesley.roe.56?fref=nf>
<https://www.facebook.com/wesley.roe.56?fref=nf>
11 hrs <https://www.facebook.com/wesley.roe.56/posts/10154309456679593> ·

Meet John Dennis Liu <https://www.facebook.com/john.d.liu>, the Indiana
Jones of Landscape Restoration

He’s known to some as the “Indiana Jones” of landscape degradation and
restoration.

John D. Liu, ecosystem restoration researcher, educator and filmmaker, has
dedicated his life to sharing real-world examples of once-degraded
landscapes newly restored to their original fertile and biodiverse beauty.
Liu is director of the Environmental Education Media Project (EEMP),
ecosystem ambassador for the Commonland Foundation and a visiting research
fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology of the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences.

We recently sat down with Liu, the newest member of the Regeneration
International (RI) Steering Committee. In this interview, Liu walks us
through large-scale ecosystem restoration projects in China and Rwanda. We
learn that when humans work with nature, degraded landscapes can be
restored in a matter of years, and economies can be regenerated, putting
food security and climate change mitigation within our reach.

In order to survive as a species, Liu explains, humanity must shift from
commodifying nature to ‘naturalizing’ our economy.

Interview with John D. Liu, February 4, 2016

RI: What is the significance of the Paris Agreement, reached at the COP21
Climate Summit in December (2015), for the pioneers, such as yourself, of
the landscape restoration movement?

Liu: There is now recognition of soil carbon, which was not the case in the
past. The best and perhaps only way for humanity to massively affect carbon
disequilibrium in the atmosphere is to restore natural ecological function
of soils through the restoration of biomass, biodiversity and accumulated
organic matter.

One of the things that I have been learning about, and that has most
impressed me, is the difference between natural systems, which have huge
organic layers, and human systems, which are massively degraded and
actually have lost their organic material.

In Paris, we’ve started to turn the corner. Instead of just talking about
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, we’re now seeing [climate change] spoken
about as a holistic problem. When you see it holistically, you find out
that CO2 and GHG emissions are a symptom of systematic dysfunction on a
planetary scale… Human impact on the climate is not simply emissions; it is
degradation.

There is a way forward. That is why I am so excited about the early work I
did in the Loess Plateau and in Ethiopia, Rwanda and other countries. When
you increase organic matter, you increase biomass and you protect
biodiversity. You get a completely different result than if you just
totally destroy those systems. So I don’t think that the political
agreements go far enough, but they are starting to reflect reality, which
is better than before.

RI: In Paris, RI encountered skepticism about the potential power of
regenerative agriculture and landscape restoration to restore climate
stability and feed the world. Can you tell us about your experience with
the Loess Plateau restoration project in China and how it impacted your
perspective on the potential of restoration?

Liu: There was a moment in the mid-1800s when Thomas Malthus reported that
the rate of agricultural increase was happening arithmetically while human
population growth was logarithmic. He posited huge famine and this pushed
the development of industrial agriculture. But what I’ve seen is that this
is based on huge assumptions and those assumptions are basically false. If
you think that you can get higher productivity by reducing hydrological
function, or the natural fertility in the land or the biodiversity of a
biome then you are just sadly mistaken. You can get higher yields of
monocultures for a short time but you ultimately destroy the basic
fundamental viability of the entire system. So you are creating deserts.
This is what happened in the Loess Plateau and this is what happened in
every cradle of civilization.

Landscape restoration does not only change ecological function, it changes
the socio-economic function and when you get down to it, it changes the
intention of human society. So if the intention of human society is to
extract, to manufacture, to buy and sell things, then we are still going to
have a lot of problems. But when we generate an understanding that the
natural ecological functions that create air, water, food and energy are
vastly more valuable than anything that has ever been produced or bought
and sold, or anything that ever will be produced and bought and sold – this
is the point where we turn the corner to a consciousness which is much more
sustainable.

RI: It’s almost as if a global paradigm shift is needed to start accounting
for nature in the economy. ‘Naturalizing’ the economy as you would say.

Liu: We have to be very careful not to commoditize nature. We need to
naturalize the economy. What this means to me is that natural ecological
functions are more valuable than ‘stuff.’ When we understand that, then the
economy is based on ecological function. And that is exactly what we need
in order to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to ensure food security,
and to give every individual on the planet equal human rights. Suddenly we
are in another paradigm. It’s similar to the shift from flat earth to round
earth paradigm.

We need to realize that there is no ‘us and them.’ There is just us. There
is one earth and one humanity. We have to act as a species on a planetary
scale because we will all be affected by climate change. We have to come
together to decide: What do we know? What do we understand? What do we
believe as a species?

RI: Apart from the ecosystem benefits, the Loess Plateau project also
helped lift 2.5 million people in four of the poorest provinces in China
out of poverty. Is that correct?

Liu: Well, there are different ways to look at it because the Loess Plateau
project influenced more than just the project areas. It changed national
policy. Some of the negative behaviors, such as slope farming, tree cutting
or free ranging of goats and sheep—behaviors that were devastating to
biodiversity, biomass and organic material—were banned nationwide because
of the work done on the Loess Plateau.

Landscape restoration does not only change ecological function, it changes
the socio-economic function and when you get down to it, it changes the
intention of human society. So if the intention of human society is to
extract, to manufacture, to buy and sell things, then we are still going to
have a lot of problems. But when we generate an understanding that the
natural ecological functions that create air, water, food and energy are
vastly more valuable than anything that has ev

RI: Tell us about your work in Rwanda.

Liu: Rwanda is an interesting case study because of the 1994 genocide. This
sort of a situation is ground zero. It is a reset. Every family, every
person was affected. In 2006, I was invited to Rwanda by the British
government and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). What I saw in my
travels were bare hillsides, erosion and sediment loads in river systems. I
presented my findings to the president, prime minister, parliament,
cabinet, ministries of environment and agriculture, universities and press.
We put films on TV. I explained each of these natural systems and what you
have to do to correct it. And at the same moment in time, everyone in
Rwanda was talking about ecological function.

Several weeks later, the government wrote me a letter saying thank you for
coming to Rwanda to share your experiences. Then they wrote me a second
letter, in which they said we believe you and we’re rewriting our land use
policy laws to reflect that economic development in Rwanda must be based on
ecological function.

The measures Rwanda has taken have led to regeneration. They had food
security when there was famine in East Africa. They have had increasing use
of renewable energies and lessening of dependence on fossil fuels. If human
beings can go to hell yet they can somehow come back and work to build a
fair, equitable and sustainable society, that is a good thing. We need to
watch carefully how Rwanda develops, as a lesson for the world.

RI: Can you tell us about the widespread detrimental impacts that
industrial agriculture is having, particularly with regards to loss of
biodiversity? Why is biodiversity essential to sustain life as we know it?

Liu: Evolutionary trends favor more biodiversity, more organic matter. The
industrial or degenerative agriculture model favors less biodiversity, less
biomass, less organic matter. This disrupts photosynthesis, hydrological
regulation and moisture, temperature and it artificially elevates
evaporation rates. Industrial agriculture sterilizes soil with UV
radiation. It is just wrongheaded.

Humans went down the wrong path. But once we begin to understand these
evolutionary trends, we understand that we have to get back in alignment
with them. That is where regenerative agriculture and landscape restoration
come in. We’ve seen the results at large scale and we’ve seen them on a
smaller scale. This is the way forward for sequestration of carbon, this is
the way forward for fertile healthy soils, this is the way forward for food
security this is the way forward for meaningful work for everyone. We
understand this. This is the basis of wealth and sustainability for
humanity.

RI: If there were one behavior or habit of humans that you could magically
change, what would it be?

Liu: It is clear right now that economics is driving today’s problems.
There are a lot of assumptions in economics that are simply false.
Economics now says that extraction, manufacturing, buying and selling can
create wealth. This is bullshit. We are creating poverty by doing this. We
are creating degradation of the landscapes. So few people in a tiny
minority are accumulating vast material possessions in this system, while
billions of people are living in abject poverty at the edges of large
degraded ecosystems. Others can no longer even stay in their homes, and
millions of people are migrating to escape from the horrible conditions.
Well this cannot work. This must change.

What I have noticed is that ecological function is vastly more valuable
that extraction, production, consumption, and buying and selling things.
What we really need to understand is: “What is money?” If I were going to
leave one thing for the people to think about it is this: What is money?
What is it? It is basically a storehouse of value, a means of exchange, and
a trust mechanism. That means it is an abstract concept; it can be anything
that we want it to be. If we say that money comes from ecological function
instead from extraction, manufacturing buying and selling, then we have a
system in which all human efforts go toward restoring, protecting and
preserving ecological function. That is what we need to mitigate and adapt
to climate change, to ensure food security, to ensure that human
civilizations survive. Our monetary system must reflect reality. We could
have growth, not from stuff, but growth from more functionality. If we do
that and we value that higher than things, we will survive.

***

Alexandra Groome is Campaign & Events Coordinator for Regeneration
International, a project of the Organic Consumers Association.

MY RESPONSE:

 wonderful indeed kevin, and I would say that this shift from extraction to
re-generation is exactly what the p2p foundation, like many other forces in
this transition, stand for; the only difference is , that our strength and
focus is less on nature and the environment, than on human communities,
i.e. how to generate social and economic models that are generative towards
communities and their commons, and that includes nature. It's just that it
is not our core skillset. This being said, one of our 3 strategic
priorities is sustainable manufacturing and we have a research project, led
by Xavier BlaqSwans
<https://www.facebook.com/xavier.blaqswans?hc_location=ufi> andCeline Trefle
<https://www.facebook.com/celine.trefle?hc_location=ufi>, on the
'thermodynamics of peer production', to show how crucial p2p/commons is for
the ecological transition as well.
-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org


P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
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#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
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