Our Thirst for Life In a Time of Great Caution, by John Allen – Part Two: Why Do We Care?

Lost in these thoughts,  I also got lost in the mountains without reception for smartphone mapping. Visibility diminished as the smoke grew thicker, and the day grew later. The sun was just a dark orange ball through the desiccated pines. I didn’t see another car or person for hours. I was a long way from a gas station when I realized I had gone in a big two-hour circle.  

I finally did see another vehicle coming my way. I stopped and waved my arms out the window. I must have looked half crazy, especially without a mask. In the twisted logic of the times, wearing a mask was normal, and a sign of respect. He stopped, eventually, having picked up speed as one does down a long stretch of mountain road. I made yet another U-turn, pulled up on the dirt siding next to him, and he gave me proper directions out of there.  It seems I had been heading back toward the fires. 

As I drove, I found relief passing the occasional farmhouse on the rolling plain. I even slowed down to wave to a gathering of farm workers tipped back with beers on a roadside porch. They probably didn’t understand my enthusiasm for seeing living souls.  I was pleased and surprised to see the Naked Ladies still standing strong and tall in the jar wedged between the seats. 

Finding my way out of the fire-filled mountains, I remembered how one night, sleeping over at my sister’s house, I’d found a little book that I could read in a night. The Man Who Planted Trees moved me to tears.  It is the true story of a Frenchman who lived in isolation after losing his wife and kids to the war. It occurred to him that there weren’t enough trees in the valley. With nothing better to do, he took it upon himself to plant some.

He planted one hundred acorns a day, day after day, year after year. A number of years later, once the trees had grown above his height, a strange thing happened. The land which had been hardened by sun and wind, had become cool and inviting. Birds started to return. Streams he hadn’t seen since he was a boy began to flow once again. The people prospered and there was happiness in the land. Church, university, and government representatives were sent to study this “miracle”. With nothing better to do, the old man kept planting trees until the day he died. 

You see, this story gave me hope. This old man was intuitively doing the great work.  No matter where we look, Nature wants to come back—and it does, if given a helping hand. I attended the Kiss The Ground Soil Advocate Training, which is available to anyone attracted to life-affirming solutions. The training opened my mind to how these things work and how we all could become that helping hand. Alone we are nothing. Together we are strong. 

I’ve begun to ask, “What could possibly be more valuable than clean air, drinkable rivers, and the abundance that comes with a robust ecosystem?” The answer that comes to me is, “No shiny machine-made thing—no matter how smart, entertaining, comfortable, or convenient—could compare to the value of an irreplaceable species.”

Growing trees and grasses everywhere is the most important land-based leverage for cooling the planet, ending the destructive drought and flood cycles, and for restoring the biodiversity of plants, animals, and insects.  The answer to climate change is Drawdown—”the point in the future when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline, thereby stopping catastrophic climate change, as quickly, safely, and equitably as possible.” That’s what science is calling the magic of photosynthesis.

If you haven’t heard about Drawdown yet, this will not be the last time.  Science is now just beginning to be humbled by the extreme importance and majesty of the soil carbon cycle.  

I had set out on this road trip with the intention of making connections with the people behind the growing number of Ecosystem Restoration Camps, and to spend time with John D. Liu, the founder of the movement, who was visiting the newly established Camp Hotlum in the forest at the base of Mount Shasta. 

He came for a month and stayed for five, bringing attention to this 200-acre forest restoration and management project. The day I met John was the first day of the Covid-19 lockdown. When he saw the amount of work there was to be done here, he chose not to return to his home in China.  

That evening we realized that due to the pandemic, we would not be gathering people to hear John speak in person anytime soon. Instead, we committed to an online livestream event, dubbed The Great Work of Our Time.  It turned out to be an epic five-hour event with hundreds of John’s friends, including the infamous Jane Goodall, and many important players in social, financial, and environmental restoration. Each of them bring stories of success and possibility.  

For 30 years, John D. Liu has travelled the globe making films and speaking on behalf of the living planet.  He is galvanizing our human capacity to collectively restore biodiversity, biomass and accumulated organic matter, to cool the planet and restore biological function everywhere. People listen to him, as they have in the United Nations. 

John has been instrumental in the redesign of land use policies in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and now Egypt, where large-scale restoration is taking place—evidence that it can be done anywhere.  Ironically, the West is now looking toward these successful examples in the “poor African nations” we have patronized for generations.

To spend a week with John at Camp Hotlum at the edge of a mountain forest, was an honor and an opportunity. We cooked on a camping stove. We washed in galvanized tubs with water we fetched from a spring “in town”, which gushed water as pure as it gets.  At night we sat around the camp and, for the few nights before the fires stormed through the region, we watched the sky, thick with stars.

We traded stories, but mostly I listened to the yarns of his career as a journalist covering wars, social uprising, and restoration of the desert which was once the cradle of the Chinese civilization.  How did this once populated and abundant region become a dry, dusty wasteland, unable to support a handful of dirt-poor people?  It happened in the same way most deserts of the world were created—by humans cutting down the forests, plowing the land, and by overgrazing domesticated animals—as we continue to do here, where we still believe America to be “the greatest nation”. 

They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. The illusion is that we know no limits. The story that we should one day become complete in our separation from Nature is losing its power to persuade. Meanwhile, the land is quickly becoming—has become—like the poor African countries that suffer from drought and political strife that we’ve always looked upon with pity.   

Where the soil is poor, the people are poor. Who wants to stand by innocently and watch something beautiful die? 

With a solar panel to charge the computer, we watched John’s film for the BBC, Hope in a Changing Climate, and witnessed the miracle of life returning to the Loess Plateau.  It brought me, not only hope, but the very proof of successful restoration principles executed on a monumental scale in China and Africa. 

This is just the beginning of a new relationship to the living world, one of stewardship and care.  Reciprocity is returning, and the people prosper along with land. 

You might also remember the vast restoration work done by Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) from 1933-1942.  Most of that work was environmental restoration.  

This is why the BirdHouse is honored to be the first urban Ecosystem Restoration Camp, acting as a hub for a growing number of people longing to restore the desiccated canyons and flatlands of Los Angeles to a lush and vibrant urban landscape where people are cooperating with nature to attain health and wellbeing, born of genuine concern for each other and the environment—and to have fun doing it!

Once a week, several of us gather as the Band of Singers to write and sing songs that tell the story of interdependence and our love for the living world.  This story is one of them: