The Heartbeat of the Forest: A StoryWeaving Salon with John D. Liu and Anastassia Makarieva
In our StoryWeaving Salon for the upcoming Global Earth Repair Convergence (and just in time for Earth Day!), we were lucky to have the honor and joy of speaking with two inspiring visionaries.
Anastassia Makarieva is a Russian atmospheric physicist who investigates how natural ecosystems sustain a habitable climate on Earth. She co-developed the concept of the biotic pump with Prof. Victor Gorshkov, which describes how complex forest ecosystems actively pull ocean moisture inland to shape their own life-sustaining water cycles on land.
John D. Liu is a Chinese-American filmmaker, ecologist and ecosystem restoration champion. A journalist and cameraman by trade, he opened news bureaus in China and covered major geopolitical events of the late 2oth Century, until a work assignment brought him to the heavily degraded Loess Plateau in China, where his observations of human-induced destruction of natural life support systems launched him on a new trajectory towards restoring damaged landscapes.
We started our StoryWeaving Salon with Anastassia and John by asking them both what fascinates them about each other's work. As Anastassia noted, the time she has spent in the boreal forests of Siberia amounts to years. Yet much of her work is theoretical. So she appreciated how John's work and his films have inspired people around the world to translate the science into action, for example through the Ecosystem Restoration Communities movement.
You can watch our full conversation here (or scroll down for some time markers):
You can also listen to it as a podcast episode here:
Anastassia evoked for us the feeling of standing in the boreal forest. The living forest ecosystem "is basically the most complex thing or process you can imagine... It sets a standard for understanding what complexity is, and what complexity is required for function," she said.
John shared how his own ecological understanding developed through his study of dysfunction. Like most of humanity, John initially didn't initially connect the world's deserts and degraded landscapes with a pattern of ecological destruction that stretches back over thousands of years. "From being a professional observer, trying to tell the truth and to understand what I was seeing... what I found was that the Earth systems were degraded in all the cradles of civilization," he said.
"Filming the rehabilitation of the Loess Plateau, I realized it could not have been like it was. I had to do a type of forensics and look at the crime scene," he said.
From tracing the destruction, he developed his understanding of how natural complexity can be restored, and how quickly this can happen. And from there, a deep appreciation arose of functional biodiversity, the forest canopy that intercepts sunlight, and how disrupting the biology on land also alters the physics, producing extreme temperature differentials between areas of rich vegetation cover and areas of exposed soil.
The conversation turned to deep ecology and eco-philosophy, as both Anastassia and John reflected on the deep beauty and power of nature's complexity and elegant simplicity. "Every human being needs to understand that we're in symbiotic relationship with all other life forms," John said. Nature is breathing, and so are we. As Anastassia observed, the biotic pump is like the heartbeat of the forest, retaining and circulating the water that keeps the whole system alive. We can take inspiration from nature's complex yet elegant simplicity in order to feed everyone, eliminate greed, poisons and other harmful and destructive practices. "True wealth is restoring ecological function to everything," John said.
Earth repair must be a delicate dance of both doing and not-doing, Anastassia said. Both action and restraint: "Not doing what shouldn't be done." Where ecosystems are already degraded, John's work has shown the vast potential of restoring them. Yet equally urgent is the need not to interfere where the natural complexity still functions uninhibited – to preserve and protect all the large, wild and complex forest ecosystems of the Amazon, Canada, the Congo Basin, Siberia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea that remain.
"Humanity are doers," Anastassia said. "It is really important that once we energize ourselves to restore something that we destroyed as doers, that we also put a limit to the destruction of this beating heart, of the biotic pump of the world's great forests."
The forests are alive, she said. "They can teach us this complexity, simplicity and elegance. We can't invent nature, but we can learn and let it guide us through self-restoration."
The experiences of the Ecosystem Restoration Communities, and from China with its large-scale efforts toward an ecological civilization, are demonstrating this in action, John said. Like the beehive or the swarm, he said, "physically and mentally, in terms of imagination and intelligence, together we are stronger."
As we came to the end of our conversation, Anastassia shared her preparations for her extraordinary retreat to the Taiga Forest in Siberia, where she immerses each year without internet as the Siberian winter rapidly retreats into an exquisite abundance of summer life, with plenty of mosquitoes too! Living on fish and forest herbs, this will be a time of deep connection, beauty and challenge, and we will be honored to weave again with her upon her return.
We hope this will be the first of many StoryWeaving, StoryHealing conversations with Anastassia and John, and encourage you to join us at the Global Earth Repair Convergence, where an extraordinary assemblage of more than 120 speakers will bring their wisdom and diverse perspectives to the collective vision of repairing a billion hectares of land in the next three years! You can register here to attend online or in person in Port Townsend, Washington in Cascadia.
If you don't have time to listen to the full conversation, here are the time markers for some key moments:
Anastassia introduces the biotic pump theory (3:20)
John describes his trip to the Loess Plateau and search for understanding of degraded and living ecosystems (5:45)
Anastassia describes the complexity of the boreal forest (15:30)
John evokes the elegant simplicity of nature within the complexity, the beautiful logic of ecology (19:30)
Anastassia speaks about the importance of doing and not-doing, restoring degraded ecosystems but also protecting those that remain intact (28:00)
John recounts how ecological knowledge can be made accessible, "if I can understand it anyone can understand it" (30:00)
True wealth comes from the natural functioning of the Earth, it is not in the fabrications of buying and selling things, says John (32:40)
John discusses Ecosystem Restoration Communities (34:30)
More details of the Global Earth Repair Convergence (38:00)
Anastassia talks about her departure to the Taiga Forest in Siberia in May (40:54)
John tells of her travels through the Soviet Union, including 35 trips to Mongolia and travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the peatlands surrounding Moscow where the beavers have been returning (44:40)
John mentions the Sponge City and Sponge Planet work of the late Professor Yu Kong Jian to restore wetlands and estuaries (46:00)
Our StoryMoss vision is to be a heart-centered StoryWeaving, StoryHealing collaborator, engaging with regenerative artists, scientists, healers, practitioners and communities around the world, co-weaving stories from different perspectives and ways of knowing, and infusing them with joy, creativity, beauty, deep ecology, eco-spirituality and Active Hope.
