A 2061 Timeline: Restoring the Earth

Ecosystems Restoration Camp Symposium

9 min readFeb 3, 2021

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On January 28th, 2021, the Ecosystems Restoration Camps Foundation, teamed up with ‘Biodiversity for a Livable Climate’ and the ‘UN Decade on Restoration’ to host the first in a series of symposia on how to turn the intention behind the decade on ecosystems restoration into action on the ground. I will get back to this seminar and link the recording below.

The success of Ecosystems Restoration Camps rapid spread over the last couple of years shows that there are people all over the world ready to take an active role in restoring the ecosystems they live in. It is this committed action on the ground, community by community, ecosystem by ecosystem, bioregion by bioregion that will get us closer to the goal of restoring the Earth and her people.

“You can’t heal the Earth. You can only heal places!”

— Bill Reed

Ever since taking part in the Restore the Earth conference at the Findhorn Foundation in 2002 — where we declared the 21st Century as ‘The Century of Restoration’ — I have been working in different ways to build momentum and capacity behind this task of generational importance: to heal our human relationship to place, to bioregion and to planet. Since “place is fractal” (Regenesis Group), by starting to heal our relationship with place through place-sourced “co-evolving mutualism” we are also embarking on the road of ecosystems restoration and working to increase ‘planetary health’.

In this video, recorded in October 2018 I spoke in some more detail about “Human and Planetary Health: Ecosystems Restoration at the Dawn of the Century of Regeneration”. I highlighted both why this is so urgently needed and how many amazing initiatives are now beginning to link up to finally get on with the task. I have been writing about the importance of the UN Decade on Ecosystems Restorations ever since I first heard about the idea to propose it:

I was delighted to see the decade being endorsed by many organisations even before it will be publically launched by UNEP in June this year:

Here is the link to the 2hr 20mins recording of the ‘Counting down to restoring the Earth’ Symposium:

Do enjoy this 2hr25mins recording with all the beautiful contributions (presentations, music, poetry, and great dialogue) — my presentation starts around 1hr26mins

I personally really appreciated the invitation to contribute to the symposium for many reasons. I deeply appreciate the work of many of the other contributors, some of which I had the pleasure of collaborating with in the past. I also feel that these events give me an opportunity to support Ecosystems Restorations Camps as a member of their international advisory board (for full disclosure).

What’s more, I was intrigued by the invitation to speculate in a decade steps time line to 2061 that would highlight some of the things that would have to take place each decade in order for humanity to achieve this monumental task of avoiding the current trajectory towards run-away climate change, cascading ecosystems collapse, worsening mass-extinction and collapse.

Below are the slides we were invited to prepare based on a template provided by ERC. I knew that I wanted to add more detail as could be shared during my 15 minute presentation and so decided to break all the rules of good presentation slides by adding a substantial amount of text and detail on each slide.

I am sharing them below, as I promised during my presentation and want to highlight that this is a ‘first draft’ and not in the slightest meant to suggest that the named steps are the only ones or that I might not have missed some other very important steps. One of my intentions was to get us out of the danger of ‘carbon mypoia’ in dealing with climate change and beyond the habit of treating symptoms — climate change and ecosystems collapse are symptoms! — rather than causes.

This slide is best understood by dipping into the video linked above at 1hr 27mins when I speak to some of the images and bullet points

Some relevant links:

… the list could continue for a long time, including many great offers to learn permaculture design, agroforestry, holistic land management, syntropic agriculture, analog forestry, and much more. It is time to join the ReGeneration Rising!

Here is a site where you can find many inspiring videos and websites of established and effective regeneration projects around the world:

Join us! Let’s make the ‘Decade for Ecosystems Restoration’ count as the point of inflection away from degeneration and the march towards collapse and towards regeneration and the healing of the Earth and her people!

If you like the post, please clap AND remember that you can clap up to 50 times if you like it a lot ;-)!

Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.

Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures

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My intro slide:

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Catalysing transformative innovation, cultural co-creation, whole systems design, and bioregional regeneration. Author of Designing Regenerative Cultures