Friday Plenary Speaker: John D. Liu

Streamed in live from Marin on Friday: John D. Liu. His talk is titled Restoration Writ Large: Unleashing the Potential of Nature and People for Large-Scale Ecosystem Restoration.

Liu is a Chinese-American environmental filmmaker and ecological field researcher. He helped open the CBS Beijing News Bureau as producer-cameraman and his documentaries have aired on CBS, National Geographic, and BBC. Best known is his award-winning Hope in a Changing Climate, which explores the true potential of ecosystem restoration.

Liu will tell of his work chronicling China’s journey to revitalize the immense Loess Plateau. The stunning restoration of the Plateau’s deeply degraded ecosystem shows the power of transformational change once we expand our perspective of production and embrace local, living economies.

For the past 10 years, Liu, the Environmental Education Media Project, and colleagues around the world have been identifying and documenting methods for large-scale restoration of damaged and destroyed ecosystems. For example, the Loess Plateau by China’s Yellow River (an area the size of Belgium) was successfully restored over a ten-year period.