Online Living Climate Discussion Course Starting July 22nd.
The Soil Sponge Workshop: How the biological workforce provides resilience to floods, drought, heatwaves and wildfires (and how you can help). Mondays, July 22nd to August 19th.
Some of you are here because you have already taken an earlier version of this 5-week course, but for many of you, this is a new opportunity to meet people around the world who are interested in the topic of land-based approaches to climate mitigation and resilience—through plants, soils, microbes, and other life—and the role of living systems in regional and global climate cooling through the water cycle as well as the carbon cycle. The course has evolved to include much more place-sourced discussion, with real-time case studies of the places where participants live and work. It is called The Soil Sponge Workshop: How the biological workforce provides resilience to floods, drought, heatwaves and wildfires (and how you can help).
We meet on five Mondays, (with two options of times, as we attract an international audience) and go deep into a number of topics:
Landscapes that Work for All Life
A living “soil sponge” can soak up rain, store and filter water; and provide health, resilience, and thriving economies for the communities that grow from it. What is the "soil sponge" and why is it essential infrastructure for life on land? How does biology slow and sink water on a total landscape scale? How does nature grow a soil sponge, and how can we participate? How does a healthy soil sponge provide resilience to flooding, drought, and wildfires?
Collaborating with the Essential Workforce of Other Species
What is the essential work of other species, and what are the job descriptions in a functional landscape? How does biological work regulate local and global temperatures, create rain, and drive the water and carbon cycles? What are the principles of land management that this natural workforce uses, and how can we apply those principles to farming and ranching?
Measuring Change for Long Term Success
How do you know if your land's soil sponge structure and function is improving? What tests are useful and affordable? What apps can you use to save your data? Should you share your data or keep it private? When should a project use monitoring, and when is it safe to trust in computer-simulated models of landscape function?
Money, Life, and Land
How can we deepen our understanding of the relationship between the soil sponge, and functioning ecosystems and economies? Where will the money for regeneration come from? What are the costs of degraded land and who is paying those costs? Can we redirect those funds toward land regeneration? Are the emerging markets for soil carbon, water, and ecosystem services actually working from a living systems perspective or are they yet another way to extract profits and control resources? If not, how can we improve them?
Choosing Effective Intervention Points
Why are some regenerative land projects gaining enormous momentum while others are stalling? What role do human relationships play in effective projects? When do "experts" and research studies help make change, and when do they disempower people from taking action? How do we design projects and policies that grow human and ecological capability, and engage people for the long haul?
(Note: these topics may change somewhat based on our discussions, but this gives an idea of where we will likely go.)
Here are some comments from participants.
Read more about the course and sign up here.