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Duncan Crowley – Design is the Framework, Not the Goal
Regenerative community practitioner and eco-architect Duncan Crowley shares a fascinating and inspiring overview of his evolving work as a community facilitator where architecture moves to city planning, then community design, opening the way for community organizing and activism.
Maddie Akkermans – Bringing Back the Rain
Regenerative soil practices are starting to attract more mainstream attention, and hold real promise for restoring the natural capacity for land to moderate water content and quality, store excess carbon and improve local human economies. Progress is being made...
Didi Pershouse – Healthy Soil is Like Bread
Compare a pile of flour to a loaf of bread and you will begin to see the difference between dirt and healthy soil. How do you move from flour to bread or dirt to soil? Add microbes. There is plenty of life (including that metaphor) in the conversation between...
Judith Schwartz – Getting Personal About Land Change
How does loss of coastal vegetation drive disappearance of summer rains? Can restoring the forest on as small a parcel as 10 x 10 km bring back the rain to an area it has fled? Climate change is as much about soil moisture and land use as it is about CO2. How do we...
Albert Bates – Using Fire to Cool the Earth
Albert Bates was working as an attorney on a water pollution case in Tennessee - agriculture chemicals polluting an aquifer. What he saw left him deeply shaken and changed the direction of his life. He tells this story and more to Designers of Paradise host Erik van...
Sarah Harrison & Marc O’Brien – Make Me Care
Why do we talk about two degrees Celsius when we think in Fahrenheit? How do we get past fear and move to learning? How do we think bigger, act now, work together? These are the kind of questions Designers of Paradise host Erik van Lennep discussed with Sarah Harrison...
Chistopher Peltz – Biochar is for Everybody
"They showed up with a truck full of what looked like the remains of a campfire. It even smelled like a campfire." During a series of field trials Peltz realized that carbonized wood can help revitalize dramatically degraded land. "Stuff would grow on mine sites where...
Julie Brunson – School Gardens, Building Community and Growing Hope.
H.O.P.E. - "Helping Other People Eat". The vision came while Julie's husband Rich was a homeless teenager, wondering why it was so hard to find food. He kept thinking if people knew how to grow their own food, there would be so much less hunger. Many years later a...
Melissa Ruckmick – Communication for Deep Change
People know something is going on. "Global Weirding" : all the snow, the tornadoes in strange places, bigger hurricanes, disappearing salmon ... With so much evidence, so much urgency, why do we stay in 'avoidance' mode? What can we do about it? That was the topic...
Daniel Christian Wahl – The Water Tastes Good There
How does "learning from nature" differ from "designing as nature" ? Can we overcome the "nature culture divide" ? What will it take for people to fall in love with the planet again? These are some of the topics Designers of Paradise host Erik van Lennep discusses with...