Cooling the Climate: Mini Workshop with Rob de Laet and Didi Pershouse
How to Revive the Biosphere and Cool the Earth Within 20 Years.
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Cooling the Climate Mini-Workshop
Friday, October 24th, 1 PM to 2:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time (New York, USA).
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Join Dutch author Rob de Laet and US author and educator Didi Pershouse for a live online participatory workshop about the potential to cool regional climates through reviving the biosphere. (The workshop and a written transcript will also be recorded for those who can't make it live.)
Rob de Laet is coauthor - with Peter Bunyard - of the book ‘Cooling the Climate - How to Revive the Biosphere and Cool the Earth Within 20 Years, and is project lead of the Cooling the Climate project. Didi Pershouse is author of The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities, and Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function.
Pershouse, de Laet and Bunyard have all been leading voices in the message that to address the climate crisis, we must transform our social and economic approaches, while gaining a much more holistic understanding of climate.
Cooling the Climate draws on James Lovelock’s Gaia Theory and Indigenous cosmologies, positing that Earth functions as a living organism, with ecosystems maintaining life-supporting conditions.The book explores the atmosphere's role within this living planet, emphasizing water's critical function, based on Peter Bunyard's earlier work, "Climate Chaos." It shows how the interaction between the biosphere, soils, water, and the atmosphere stabilizes weather and cools the planet, but ecosystem destruction disrupts these cycles, contributing to global warming. Restoring ecosystems and transitioning agriculture can quickly stabilize the climate, offering effective solutions. Implementing these strategies globally can mitigate the worst effects of climate change within decades, protect biodiversity, and address social inequities. While reducing emissions is essential, repairing nature and water cycles through regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, and ecosystem restoration is equally vital. These efforts can restore the planet’s natural balance, leading to a sustainable and abundant future.
Rob is a world traveler, serial-entrepreneur, philosopher, and climate activist. He built an international ecotourism company with partnerships in seventeen countries, and is currently working to rewild a damaged part of the Brazilian rainforest and avert the dieback of the Amazon Rainforest by strengthening the biotic pump over the area.
The Cooling the Climate pilot project in Araribóia, Brazil, aims to empower the indigenous Guajajara people to regenerate their territory, which has been severely degraded by fire, logging, and land invasion. Supported by Indigenous leadership, cutting-edge technology, and innovative financing, the project hopes to not only restore the forest by planting 16 million trees on 8,000 hectares but lift 15,000 people out of poverty through direct employment.
Sign up below to join us live (or get the recording) for this exciting mini workshop exploring these ideas and their practical application.
It's also possible that Peter Bunyard may jump into the workshop at the last minute! Fingers crossed.
Your Instructor
Didi Pershouse is well known as an innovative international educator both in-person and online. She is the founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative. Her facilitator's guide Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function is used in over 90 countries.
She became deeply involved in the intersection of food systems and health systems while providing rural health care for two decades at The Center for Sustainable Medicine, and wrote The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities.
She has written a field training manual for the UN-FAO Farmer Field School Program and the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming Initiative in India, involving over 1,000,000 smallholder farmers. She was a contributing author to The Climate Emergency: How Africa Can Survive and Thrive; Climate Change and Creation Care; and Health in the Anthropocene. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.
She serves on the Planning Commission for her town, is a board supervisor for the White River Natural Resources Conservation District, and is on the board of directors of Regenerate Earth, Soil Carbon Coalition and the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition. While serving on the state appointed Payment for Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group, she helped to reorient the program back to its public roots. She led a successful effort to conserve the Zebedee Headwaters Wetland while serving as a Vermont Conservation Commissioner.
She is on the Vision Council of the Global Earth Repair Convergence, and a member of the Ecosystem Restoration Alliance. She is a lineage member of the Change Agent Development Community (stewarded by Carol Sanford), and is seeding new communities of practice in a Wisdom tradition that uses living systems thinking.