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John Dennis Liu inspires people to saveEarth's ecosystemJohn Dennis Liu says humans can stop destroying their planet. He's documentedecological restoration projects around the world to prove it.

By Debra Bruno, Contributor SEPTEMBER 13, 2013

BEIJING — John Dennis Liu doesn't do small talk well. Even a brief

telephone conversation about setting up an interview launches him into a

speech about ecological restoration, Earth's future, and the errors of

humanity's ways.

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10/10/2014 John Dennis Liu inspires people to save Earth's ecosystem - CSMonitor.com

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He simply can't help himself, and he knows it. "It's pretty much the same

thing I say each time," he says. "People ask me, 'What are you on?' "

What the Beijing (/tags/topic/Beijing)-based ecologist and filmmaker is

"on" is the fervent belief that our planet is heading toward environmental

disaster. But it is a disaster that can be averted. He argues that humans can

stop the ecological destruction of the planet, and that they have a moral

obligation to do so.

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Just don't try to distract him with talk about anything less than the future

of humanity. "We're facing catastrophic outcomes from climate change," he

says.

In fact, Mr. Liu sees the destruction of Earth's

natural resources as a fight of biblical

proportions, a tragic step that takes humanity

away from the Garden of Eden that is

biodiversity.

For the past 17 years, he's been involved in

projects such as the restoration of China

(/tags/topic/China)'s Loess Plateau, a roughly

250,000-square-mile area across north-central

China nearly the size of Texas that had been

reduced to barren sands as a result of

overgrazing and improper farming. Through a

project of tree-planting, tiered agriculture, and

setting land aside, the erosion has been

stopped and the area is fertile again.

Liu has moved on to document ecological

restoration projects in Rwanda, Haiti

(/tags/topic/Haiti), Mozambique, Jordan, and

a giant panda habitat area in Sichuan Province

in China.

"This is the epic story of human history," Liu says. When people ignore

ecological consequences, they're "committing long-term suicide."

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Liu, who speaks with his eyes fixed steadily on his listener, has never been

accused of understating matters. He has lived in China, his father's

homeland, since 1979. (His parents, an American-born mother, Eleanor,

and a Chinese-born father, John, have been visiting China from their home

in the United States since 1978, when China opened up after the Cultural

Revolution.)

About that same time, Liu decided to learn Chinese. He started work as a

cameraman in 1981, helping CBS News set up its first Beijing bureau. Later

he worked for Radiotelevisione Italiana and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen,

a German TV station.

In 1990, Liu and his German-born wife, Kosima, built a traditional Chinese

courtyard-style house on the outskirts of Beijing, which they now share with

his parents, who spend half the year with him and half with his sister in

Kansas.

Although the city of 20 million is slowly expanding out to where the Lius

live, their home is still an idyllic sanctuary where China's boisterous tree

crickets make conversation almost impossible on a summer afternoon.

One side of the courtyard is devoted to his film studio. Liu's evolution from

cameraman to ecological evangelist began in the Loess Plateau. On a trip

there in 1995 he witnessed a devastated landscape, so barren and wind-

swept that millions of tons of silt from the once-fertile soil was being

washed into the Yellow River.

"I would say, 'Somebody should do something about the environment,' " Liu

says. "But I really meant somebody else." Slowly, it dawned on him that the

"somebody" was him.

He signed on to film a project conducted by the World Bank and the

Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection to restore the Loess. The

result was his film "Hope in a Changing Climate."

The success of the restoration project there led the Chinese government to

adopt policies of restoration in other places in China, says Gabrielle Harris,

executive director at PlaNet Finance China, a nonprofit group that uses

microfinance to help eradicate poverty.

For Liu, that initial project set in motion his lifework. In 1997, he and

Kosima founded the Environmental Education Media Project, a nonprofit

group that seeks to distribute films and information about the environment.

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On the EEMP website he writes, "The inquiry that began with a short

assignment to document a project in China has led me to every continent on

Earth and to cast my thoughts across historic, evolutionary, and geologic

time."

Today, Liu has gathered film footage in almost 80 countries and has given

more than 300 talks, speaking to groups as wide-ranging as the

International Water Symposium in Tamera, Portugal; the World

Conservation Congress of the International Union for Conservation of

Nature (/tags/topic/International+Union+for+Conservation+of+Nature) in

Jeju, South Korea; and the United Nations Framework Convention on

Climate Change in Durban, South Africa. Over the next few months, he's

slated to speak in Zurich, Switzerland; Calgary, Alberta; Madison, Wis.;

Quito, Ecuador; the Galápagos Islands; and Amsterdam

(/tags/topic/Amsterdam).

The connection between restoring devastated landscapes and the

eradication of global poverty is one of Liu's primary messages. Humanity's

thinking about wealth is skewed, he argues.

"Wealth is clean air, clean water, food with no chemicals. We don't really

have wealth," he says. When a landscape is degraded, the cycle of poverty is

perpetuated, he says. If we value products above the wealth of nature, our

belief systems are skewed.

One of the groups he's influenced is the Global Issues Network, an

organization that encourages young people who attend international

schools to create solutions to global issues, bringing them together at

conferences on topics ranging from biodiversity to property rights.

Linda Sills, the Berkeley, Calif.-based program development director for

GIN, says that several years back, she invited Liu to speak to the students.

"He does a keynote speech that changes kids' lives," she says. "I've had

more kids come up to me and say, 'Now I know what I want to do' " because

they've met Liu.

Rather than being overwhelmed by the prospect of global warming, Liu

"was one of the main ones who offered [the students] hope," Ms. Sills says.

Rhamis Kent, a London-based consultant at the Permaculture Research

Institute, helped introduce Liu to a new region for his 2012 film, "Green

Gold," produced for the Dutch television network VPRO. "Green Gold"

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focuses on Jordan, where the desert is advancing and ecologists are working

to limit overgrazing and bring the arid climate back to green.

"He has a willingness to go to any and all places to cover this," Mr. Kent

says. "It doesn't matter the continent, the time. He has really dedicated his

life to doing this."

Willem Ferwerda is an Amsterdam-based adviser at the Commission on

Ecosystem Management, part of the International Union for Conservation

of Nature based in Gland, Switzerland. He first met Liu at a conference in

2009.

The two talked over the course of two days, and Mr. Ferwerda proposed

that the two of them work together "for the rest of our lives," he says. Many

ecologists understand the science behind restoring the natural world, but

few can tell the story the way Liu can, he says.

Ferwerda is beginning a new project that will encourage companies and

investors, including mining and oil companies, to invest in land restoration,

and will use Liu's storytelling talents for that effort as well.

Ms. Harris at PlaNet Finance China says that her work brought her to

China's Gansu Province, where the effects of dry soil and desertification

were partly the result of bad policies by the Chinese government. After

spending much time talking to and working informally with Liu and EEMP,

Harris says, "I started getting pulled into his way of thinking, which has

become my way of life.

"I call him the ancient ecologist, instead of the ancient mariner," Harris

says. "And now I've become an ancient ecologist myself."

• For more info, visit http://eempc.org (http://eempc.org).

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