
It is not a little ironic that USAnians take a national
holiday to celebrate the lifesaving generosity of indigenous peoples towards
the Pilgrims while simultaneously unleashing water cannons, pepper spray and
dogs on those same peoples as they try to protect our shared patrimony, in
this case a river that affects the lives of 40 million people. We bless the
sacred water that makes our life possible, here, as well as there.
Two years have passed since we produced a video
mashup for a winter Indiegogo campaign, our last big crowdfunding effort. It
was a trifle dour, we admit, but as the Earth tilts its Northern Hemisphere
away from the sun and daylight gets scarcer, the plant-world moves underground,
and we bundle from the cold, it is easy to fall into thoughts of contraction
and decline.
Being overstretched from recent efforts, we could use some
serious donations again right now, but we find that there would be no point in
trying to revise or update that short video, because it is just as true today
as it was then, the US election notwithstanding.
Since we made that mashup, we went to the Paris climate
conference and watched as the world finally agreed to take some baby steps in
the right direction, which we, after Paul Hawken, now call “drawdown” — as in
taking carbon out the atmosphere and putting it back into the soil.

That 2014 COP-20 proposal, “Soil for food security and climate” became part of the “Lima-Paris Action Agenda” and then, two weeks ago at COP-22, the “Global Climate Action Agenda,” but the word 'soil' only made it once into the Marrakech Action Proclamation at the end of COP-22, and that was in reference to the venue being "on African soil." The word 'agriculture' was completely absent.

While the 4 per 1000 initiative gained no new additions to the 37 nations who endorsed in Paris, many NDPs are starting to reflect the realization that putting carbon back in the ground might be a cheap way to meet their goals. This includes the United States, which last May issued a “Climate Smart” agriculture and forestry plan. The word 'biochar' does not appear in that 60-page plan. Pyrolysis is only mentioned in the context of a way to reduce methane from concentrated animal farming wastes. This is the US-DUH, remember?

Last Christmas we produced The Paris Agreement: The Best Chance We Have To Save The Only Planet We’ve Got, a short book telling our eyewitness account of the treaty’s
creation, including most of the new evidence as of that date, and making for
the first time a copy of the actual treaty available on Amazon.com or in any
bookstore.

In March we taught the tenth annual permaculture course at Maya
Mountain Research Farm in Belize. Maya Mountain is significant to us because it
has it all: starting with poor soils and hilly terrain that had been in corn
and cattle too long, Christopher Nesbitt transformed it into one of the best
examples of integrated agroforestry and carbon drawdown on the planet, with
aquaponics, biochar and some of the best permaculture design that we can point
to. The more students from all over the world we can run through that place
every February, the better.

In the fall we put together a team to go after the MacArthur
Foundation’s 100 and Change prize. Our proposal is, after the fashion of El Valle or Puertas, to transform the lives of
100 million farmers with biochar, B-corp cooperatives, and climate ecoforestry.
From there we flew to Corvallis, Oregon and the NorthAmerican Biochar Symposium and a meeting of the U.S. Biochar Initiative.
Biochar holds the key to unlocking our climate predicament. Like the first
Thanksgiving, it was a gift to us from the landlords, who learned how to make biochar-rich soils 8000 years before the Columbian Encounter, in the process building rich,
deep, living soils where none had ever existed.

After a quick stop at The Farm to change wardrobe, we
crossed the ocean again, this time at the invitation of the Secretariat of the British Commonwealth,
to join with many esteemed colleagues pulled together to talk about
regenerative design strategies for reversing climate change.
Some of the
speakers who appear in our climate mash video were there with us. The suite of
tools we offered should by now be familiar: biochar, agroforestry, permaculture,
community stakeholder empowerment; ecovillage; cooperative microenterprise; and
a closed-loop, circular economy based on building real security for an
uncertain future.



We managed to sign an MOU with Morocco for the
implementation of government sponsored ecovillages, starting in the most
Northern region. We also negotiated MOU’s with Mauritania and Senegal, and
ICLEI Africa. We made meaningful links with interested governments in 22 countries
and with the Green Belt Movement, African Development Bank and British
Commonwealth. We found out about existing ecovillage networks in Nepal, Sri
Lanka, India and Bangladesh that were not yet linked to GEN and now can’t wait
to connect. Many individual projects present are also now keen to become part
of our network.


In our humble opinion something like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle has to be included in the equation. Heisenberg theorized
that in all wave-like systems the more you can say about position or
some other single attribute the less you can know about momentum or some other
attribute simply due to the matter-wave nature of all quantum objects. Applying
that to the complex of factors that determine our future, the more we can say
about a particular element — the certainty of financial collapse or ecological
crisis, for instance — the less we can know about the timing of such
things.


Are we too late? Maybe.
Should we stop trying to make a difference when we see a way
to solve this that can actually work? We don’t think so.
That said, we could use some serious financial help about
now. It is not like rural Mayan, African or Chinese permaculturists have money to pay
for instruction. We have spent everything we have, everything we had saved. Nothing
was held back. And now, when we have nothing left with which to keep going, we are
depending entirely on the good will of our friends. Perhaps you would like to
make us prove what we say, and to actually reverse climate change. Will you dare
us to try?

This holiday season, our heart is filled with gratitude and
as we look around, we are overwhelmed with the opportunity for profound
change. We'd get by with a little help from our friends. Thanks!