Terra2

The Terra2 meeting was initiated by Frank Heckman (Embassy of the Earth) Leo van der Vlist (NCIV- Netherlands Centre for Indigenous Peoples) Frank van Beuningen (Pymwymic) Jan Huisman Iona Stichting, Noor Bongers (Powerplay Leadership program).

The discussions explored two main topics:

dilemmas - what are the main obstacles you encounter in your work to restore natural processes and landscapes?

opportunities - what would be needed to up-scale current practices?

My notes mainly consist of challenges. I'll just pick out what seemed the most dominant to me:
- time: Financing sustainable and restorative practices can take years, that takes a huge toll on local participants and slows down the process of bringing landscapes back to health, or sustaining best practices.
- value: Soil prices have become deposits for capital in a way that is no longer linked to their productive value. This undermines best practices and creates a financial bubble that obstructs forces for change.
- restoration: The irony that capital is currently available only to restore forests after they've been destroyed, not while it is still intact.

In terms of opportunities one particularly interesting idea that is being explored by some in the group is to take the worlds available fresh-water reserve as our new gold standard.

Next steps for the network would be to effectively become a network of peers, to expand it in the Netherlands and then internationally.

I've been interested in the role of capital in environmental practices and conservation for a number of years, especially since the rize of 'ecosystem services' as a way to value our landscapes. When webservices like 'Ecosystem Marketplace' and 'Ecosystem Banking' appeared these sounded to me like webshops for the super rich. So I made my own webshop for neo-conservation: the ECOSYSTEMSTORE® to externalise of the nausea I felt: http://ecosystemstore.com/

I think its a bit dated. A new version would probably show almost all 'products' (species and ecosystems) as no longer available. The ecosystemstore mainly gets spammed by solicitors offering their services.