Hope in a Changing Climate - by John D. Liu (2009) 

While the political outcomes of the COP were negligible the film has continue to inspire millions around the world for the last 4 years. During this time not only the Climate Change Convention but the Convention on Combating Desertification and the Convention on Biological Biodiversity has also begun to enshrine ecological restoration as a global priority. It is very important that these types of materials get produced. We can make them but who will finance them? This remains a dilemma.

It is a crime that this video has less than 100k views.

Yes. Let me echo this again. Why are there only 129k views?? For the sake of the world's future well being, there should have been 129 million views over its 10 years.

6 years after this was posted and only 40,000 views. What can be done to get this video and others like spread to the masses as they should?

Even stranger is the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture. I think that actually many people have some Karma that they need to work out and it is very hard to finance this type of film. We premiered the film on BBC worldwide the day before the 15th convening of the parties (COP 15) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) known mainly as the COPENHAGEN CONFERENCE and then showed the film several times at the COP in Copenhagen.

very educative firm, John. Thanks so much for this documentary and it was recommended by one of my professors. I have a great passion for ecological restoration especially in my native land of Africa. I'm tirelessly trying to seek support out there to implement restoration activities in Liberia where I come from. This firm has added something more to my ever growing desire to protect the environment.

I loved this film! We have a region here in Brazil, where drought and hunger lasts for decades....Almost everything went wrong there, mainly because they tried "political, magical and quick" solutions. I asked myself for yerars if something like those could work there and now I'm sure it will.

Amazing film! I've watched this now at least a dozen times and post it for others to be aware of, while hoping for more change like this.

Wow, how wonderful!! Whenever I look at photos of the denuded hills of Afghanistan and Iran, hills denuded by overgrazing, I wonder what can be done? This is what can be done.

I love this film. I wish everyone could watch it and open their eyes to the ecoside that is around them and the potential for natural climate solutions. Moronic how so few people have viewed this - Greta is right, we all need to wake up about this and our leaders should be doing more rather than shouting benign impotent empty rhetoric on carbon counting. I hope you're still making these films John. Great work all of you!

Thanks for this amazing, and uplifting docfilm. The low view statistics in relation to those of more harrowing and negative doc-films is illustrative of a mindset that thas harms us as a species.

Eye-opening, fascinating and hope-restoring, this movie needs to be watched in schools. Protesting makes sense (Greta...) but Mr.Liu is showing solutions.

Wonderful and Inspiring work, the knowledge being shared gives power back to people who live in arid and debilitating environments.

Interesting analysis on Ethiopia and how the greening of the European hills and mountains directly benefits Egypt

"Why don't we do this in a global scale?" Because people are selfish.

This is an amazing documentary. If the Chinese could restore that huge expanse of land with their bare hands, we all can. We need the political will of our elected officials to start the ball rolling. Ultimately, humans need nutritious organic food to survive, not rockets. Thank you very much for this eye opening series.

Astoundingly amazing what human determination can achieve. I'm saddened that this great human achievements will never be acknowledged by most western powers just cos it is a Chinese product. At least there good human beings like John D Liu to carry on the good work. Thanks

Very educative and persuasive.

Uzbekistan needs someone like John D.Liu.

Because our attentions are else where. By shifting our attention and acknowledging we are and will be facing issues. We can make a change happen.

An excellent documentary! It's worth noting that China has been doing the same at the national level for four decades. The result? "Between 2000-17, China alone accounted for 25 percent of the global net increase in canopy area with only 6.6 percent of global vegetated area." per forestdeclaration.org/the-latest/case-study-china Of course, it's not the kind of image about China that the American and European media want you to know.

Just what we need, hope.

very interesting and inspiring 🎉 watching from Kenya

More people really need to watch this...... will do what I can to spread the video...Thanks for the post....

It's time to properly look after the environment so we can create a world of abundance and harmony.

Excelente documental gracias por lo que haces

Abdolutely phenomenal..very inspirational! There is Hope!!

Our hearts are in tune

Mother Nature is the key to life . Trees and water

8:30 amazing changes!

Good for them! This is wonderful:) They are being good stewards of the land and are prospering and learning valuable lessons. The idea of human induced climate change is ridiculous, but other than that comment throughout the video this was worth watching.

thanks

Awesome video! Who can I work for to help make more of this stuff happen on Earth?

Also see James DeMeo from the USA about it and "desert greening "and Wilhelm Reich and Orgon and Viktor Schauberger.

PERMACULTURE is not just an unfortunate nomenclature but paradoxically part of a greater problem. As long as we continue to promote the hypocritical practices of greedy industrialists, we will continue to live as hypocritical greedy parasites on this planet. Our struggle for permanence, whether through religion, science or technology, is and has been for generations producing disastrous consequences, because, ironically, the desire for sustainability is actually counter-productive and ultimately self-defeating. Developing economies and policies of scale to support billion and evermore billions of human beings is exacerbating an ecology already out of balance. The situation is analogous to the already wealthy hoarding more and more wealth in order to sustain the sensation of getting wealthier. Only when we abandon our anxieties about permanence become ritualized as a “will to survive” through archaic belief systems, can we remember the simple joy of living. (The will to survive is diametrically opposed to the joy of living!) Only then can simple understanding become the potential to live well and living well, a manifestation of simple understanding.

Goats are the biggest problem in deforestation, besides man directly cutting trees down. Goats can denude a mature tree and kill it and leave soil truly vulnerable. Other livestock can pose some threat to trees and shrubs by sometimes girdling the bark, which can also kill a tree. If shepherds choose to let livestock graze an area, they need to protect the trees by fencing them off at the bases of each tree. Having trees allows the graze in the field to grow better and yield more. It also provides comfortable areas for livestock to linger under, reducing stress to the animals. It also reduces the impacts of dessication from wind by slowing it down. All win-wins for the herders and dwellers of these areas. Goats have their place. They can be great guardians and entertaining pets. They can be used to manage the occasional bit of undesirable growth, but they really need to be the animal least relied upon. The Chinese government wasn't the kindest in the implementation of this plan. The government needed to push farmers to grow and protect individual trees and shrubs. Having farmers protect these plants they could have accomplished greater speed of regrowth. The effect would have been wider scale, sooner. Better still is when the individuals accomplish this themselves. When they do it themselves it is because the person already knows the benefits to be reaped for personal gain among other reasons.

Good film but why is oil industry (Rockefeller Foundation) and GMO industry (syngenta) producing it?

I wonder if the elderly who was opposing at the beginning of the video seen the changes?

I would like to find a project like this in the United States to help work on. It's hard to get communities here to come together to do big projects like this but maybe there's something going on somewhere. If anybody knows of anything I can help with in greening deserts or corroded places please let me know.. Thank you!

Why DON'T we do this on a global scale?

I have been hugely inspired by the work of Mr Liu but I have one major misgiving. That the film is financed by the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation and Syngenta. Now, you could perhaps be blind to the many shady practices of the WB and RF but Syngenta?! This is a company that produces pesticides and GMOs - surely not a company you'd want to be associated with? I cannot understand this. Yes, of course I understand why companies do it - 'greenwashing', but Mr. Liu? There are ethical companies out there, there are initiatives like Crowdfunding. Are the ecosystem regeneration camps (an amazing idea, by the way) also funded by these criminals?!

Looked like the problem is erosion and over farming/grazing. Climate change was mentioned over and over but it seemed to have nothing to do with the problem or the solution.

cheers

It wasn't several thousand years of abusive farming and ranching practices that caused the problem--it was all within the last hundred years.

thats great! You mean, if those ancestors were vegan, that means without cattle eating all the grassroots, the land would still be fertile?

The film only spent 10 %of the time on how it is done !

This is a wonderful depiction of the benefits of applying permacultural and regenerative agricultural techniques to problems of environmental degradation but the moral valence of the film is way off. Thoughout the film, blame for desertification, denudation, and erosion is placed on small farmers and described as having taken place over, or been the culmination of, millennia or centuries of these farmers subsistence agricultural activities, when, in fact, that we know the most extreme manifestations of these areas of degradation are the result of industrial and industrial-agricultural activities undertaken in the last century, especially in the last half century under the agricultural industrialization of the "green revolution".

where can u see that?

Even inside a hotel ecology lots of trees natural habitat

Mr. Liu, in 17:17 there is a pattern on the land: small ridges on contour and then sunken squares uphill from the ridges. Is this a water infliltration method? A sunken place for planting? If anyone can direct me to more information about this technique it would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, Lucía

watch "cowspiracy"

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Let's share it on our WhatsApp 😁

hola como podemos conseguir este vídeo subtitulo en español completo mi correo es moralbotanic@hotmail.com para cual quier respuesta se les agradecería buen día

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보전생물학 과제하시는 분~~

Comment for popularity

POV:nandito ka para sa ap

This video promotes several myths that deserves it to get a dislike, while usually these kinds of magnificent efforts are being liked by people. 1- climate is always changing, has been changed and will be changed. That's called natural cycles. 2- Chinese dry regions are certainly located on the arid belt of the world and they are naturally 'deserts', and have been existed as deserts for long geological periods. 3- The loess soils are produced over millions of years from wind erosion, and thick layers of fine silts have been transported by very well-known processes of wind erosion and dust disposition. 4- The yellow river, as it is clear by its name, is/was naturally a high sediment transporting river. This fact can be easily understood by searching papers investigating the geology of deposited sediments in the Basin. 5- Never in the history, agricultural practices caused the already arid region to loose vegetation. Humans does not 'desertify' the deserts. They can magically 'green' the natural poorly-vegetated dust-emmiting landscapes to fertile green lands. (As can be well observed from satellite images, humans have huge influence on greening the deserts, not the other way around.) Desertification is a false term and several books and articles had been published, which discredit this 'myth'. 6- Floods and droughts are natural cycles. Humans are not the cause of natural cycles. They may be affected by them due their weakness. (lack of the existense of controlling infrastructures (i.e., dams)). It is absolutely possible to eliminate both the risk of floods, and droughts which in the real-world, and in the yellow river Basin, it actually had happened. 7- Finally, humans are NOT destroying the environment. They are the only beings that can understand the nature, and can reclaim it. Excluding this fundamental 'green' myth, and the above misconceptions, the Chinese effort is a miracle by creating a brand new environment.

A whole lot of talk and not a lot of practical info.

interesting that the Rockefeller Foundation and World Bank helped fund this film

This is the type of documentaries that I spent hours watching on Discovery channel :( now it's all about the dramatic shows to bring in profits

I'm doing homework on this shtuff

Amazing amazing!!! We all can benefit from this.. so are our future generation if we all work together!!!! Like they say it takes a village to raise a child. A good one!

DR LIU YO U ARE VERY IMPORTAN FOR YOU SUPER HUMAN JOB IN THIS PLANET THEN A NY POLITICIAN

Opinion mongolia looking nice lots of deer chicken cows land getting healthy ecology horses underwater pump get ur owm fish lij boat new gindea talk on a piece a wood greens grow on a pot apples oranges on a basket lemens ecology

I feel sorry for the Chinese people, life was so hard for them. May their hard and smart work reward them a much much better lives.

John....you're a dreamer...all these projects will fail w/o significant reduction of human numbers. ! OVERPOPULATION !

Wow

Terrific doc. Thank you for sharing it.

This podcast came apart towards the end. If Climate Change means Global Warming, then why has the Earth been cooling over the past decade? I loved the beginning about restoring habitat and ecosystems, but carbon dioxide is actually a fertiliser.

A koliko je tog tvog karbona zarobljjeno u nafti uglju plinu polarnim ledenim kapama de ne seri o spasavanju planete od zagrijavanja ako znamo da se sad nalazimo u ledenom dobu 😂

But i kept cutting trees I make a lot of money.

Permaculture GANG

Here are my questions: How can this be applied to a smaller desert environment, such as you might find in Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, etc? How much time and consistent effort might be required? Is this feasible for an individual family on a small piece of land (say half an acre up to five acres)?

"My hope is that the developed countries, those most responsible for climate change, will recognise the enormous potential of restoration" ...... 13 years in.... it is worse than ever.

This makes me want to learn more about permaculture and soil science and fix up some "wasteland" Actually inspirational. I am also pleased that this comment section isn't full of nerds who screech any time China is mentioned positively

One Love! Always forward, never ever backward!! ☀☀☀ 💚💛❤ 🙏🏿🙏🙏🏼

This is amazing doing some community land restoration in Machakos Kenya

I love this video, thank you so much! Sharing!

Stop digging folks! No till

incredible story

Excellent

Amazing...

are they replacing the "micro" nutrients? rock dust, kelp etc?