Restore Nature
Why?
We are a part of nature. We depend on the ecosystem to provide us with food, water, and everything else we need to survive! Appreciating, protecting, and regenerating Earth’s life and landscapes will help ensure a healthy and beautiful world for ourselves and future generations.
Food for thought:
Without pollinators, we don’t eat—it’s simple as that—and, at the moment, large numbers of pollinators are dying. More than 90 species of U.S. specialty crops require pollination. Bees, butterflies, moths, bats, and birds are a critical part of the pollinator-plant ecosystem.
Microplastics – tiny plastic particles – are winding up in our waterways, soil, food, and our own bodies!
Ninety percent of fish populations are fished at or above sustainable limits.
Although planting new trees is critical, old-growth forests remove and store far more carbon than newly planted trees.
Get inspired:
VIDEO: For the Birds: The Birdsong Project - Rare Birds
For the Birds: The Birdsong Project is a historic and unprecedented outpouring of creativity by more than 220 music artists, actors, literary figures, and visual artists. They’ve come together to celebrate the joy birds bring to our lives and to elevate their message about the environmental threats we all face.
The Birdsong Project was produced by Grammy Award-winning music supervisor Randall Poster. Original music, artwork, and poetry performances are available on digital streaming platforms and as a limited-edition LP box set. All proceeds benefit Audubon's mission to protect birds and the places they need. To get Birdsong Project updates, sign up here.
VIDEO: TedX - A guerilla gardener in South Central LA
Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA -- in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where "the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys."
MOVIE: Fools & Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest
Fools & Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest is a free 30-minute documentary about Hinewai Nature Reserve – on New Zealand’s Banks Peninsula – and its kaitiaki/manager of 30 years, botanist Hugh Wilson. In 1987, Hugh let the local community know of his plans to allow the introduced “weed” gorse to grow as a nurse canopy to regenerate farmland into native forest. The people were not only skeptical but outright angry – the plan was the sort to be expected only of “fools and dreamers.”
Now considered a hero locally and across the country, Hugh oversees 1,500 hectares resplendent in native forest, where birds and other wildlife are abundant and 47 known waterfalls are in permanent flow. He has proven without doubt that nature knows best – and that he is no fool.
MOVIE: Bringing Back Our Wetland
Directed and filmed by Michael Love, Bringing Back Our Wetland follows a community in Santa Barbara led by visionary environmentalists as they work to restore the upper Devereux slough in Goleta to its natural state. The wetland had been converted into a golf course in the 1960s. It took nearly a decade to restore. Chasing Coral
Coral reefs around the world are vanishing at an unprecedented rate. A team of divers, photographers, and scientists set out on a thrilling ocean adventure to discover why and to reveal the underwater mystery to the world.
MOVIE: Common Ground
From the filmmakers of Kiss the Ground (Netflix) comes the follow-up documentary Common Ground, premiering globally at Tribeca Film Festival and in theaters in fall of 2023. Sobering yet hopeful, Common Ground exposes the toxic interconnections between American farming policy, politics, and health. It does this by sharing stories of destruction and regeneration, while exploring how people from different walks of life share one thing in common – the very soil beneath their feet.
MOVIE: The Issue with Tissue
The Issue with Tissue: A Boreal Love Story documents the largely untold story of the boreal forest and the Indigenous First Nations who call it home. Protecting and conserving it is an existential imperative, especially given that the boreal forest is being clear cut for the manufacture of toilet paper.
Told in the words and voices of the First Nations Elders and Leaders of the boreal, leading scientists, and activists, the film creates a kind of talking circle that inspires storytellers to speak with candor and intimacy about the issues confronting us all. It explains that the way forward lies in elevating and supporting indigenous knowledge and stewardship rooted in an age-old connection to the boreal forest and the trees that are housed therein.
BOOK: Climate: A New Story
By Charles Eisenstein, this book flips the script on climate change. Eisenstein makes a case for a wholesale reimagining of the framing, tactics, and goals we employ in our journey to heal from ecological destruction.
BOOK: Braiding Sweetgrass
By Robin Kimmerer, this beautiful story of “indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teaching of plants” offers so many magical nuggets of inspiration. This book will help you appreciate all the ways we are interconnected - how the earth cares for us and how we care for each other.