Description
The GAIA community reconvenes to focus on the soil beneath our feet, with two 90-minute sessions that you can join for free.
- 9am EDT (Restoring our Collective Connection to Soil)
- 12pm EDT (Business and the True Cost of Regenerative Agriculture)
Soil holds a key to global ecosystem transformation. Industrial agriculture releases significant CO2 into the atmosphere, but farming practices that regenerate rather than degrade the soil increase its capacity to sequester carbon instead—to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in the soil.
Why are these practices not more widespread? To transform agriculture, we first need to tend to our collective soil. Western civilization has taught us that we are separate from nature: it’s anchored our philosophy for centuries, and shaped today’s global economic systems.
What happens when we step out of that colonial paradigm, and step into our relationship with the earth? And in cultivating this relationship, can we grow the courage to turn towards the challenge of responding to the climate crisis?
Join GAIA for a collective sensing experience, with farmers as well as systems thinkers from Commonland and Soil & More Impacts. In the 9:00am EDT session, we will look at restoring our collective connection to soil, and building awareness everyday of our relationship with nature as it cycles through our bodies. In the 12:00pm EDT session, we will look at the hidden costs of our current agricultural paradigm, and what it means to shift to a regenerative approach.
Session One, 9:00-10:30 am EDT: Restoring our Collective Connection to Soil
What are the human consequences of a colonized view of nature? How do we sense into the possibility of our relationship to earth, beginning with the food that cycles through our bodies? In this session, Dieter van den Broeck and Pieter Ploeg, who work through Commonland to steward large-scale landscape restoration projects, will speak with Aboriginal Nyungar leader and landholder Oral McGuire about cultural land management practices to invite us to sense into a healing relationship with soil.
Session Two, 12:00-1:30 pm EDT: Business and the True Cost of Regenerative Agriculture
How do we work within the parameters of current agricultural markets, to transform the system from within? Can we put a cost on nature? In this discussion with Tobias Bandel, founder of Soil & More Impacts, we will reflect on the nature of systems work in the agriculture industry while asking what value each of us places on our own connection to nature.