As a filmmaker, I have struggled a lot with the idea of telling a story without getting involved. How can you not? And I don’t mean interfering while you film, but how can you not get involved and interject when you watch something unfolding before your eyes that you could help develop and positively affect?
When I was in the Amazonian jungle of Peru with Director Werner Herzog I was told very clearly that I should not, “as a filmmaker your only duty is to tell the story as is, and then leave it”.
I could not. When I filmed a rickshaw puller in Bangladesh I started a fundraiser to help him build a school in his village. I have now come to terms with the fact that doing nothing is the worst thing a filmmaker could do. Those days are over, and if I may add: thankfully. Today, it is time to be activists in whatever capacity you have, and if you tell stories through your camera, you can’t just abandon the people whose story you just told and hope that the universe will intervene, you are the universe to them, right there with your camera you are their connection to change.
So I was extremely overjoyed to meet John D. Liu an award-winning documentary filmmaker who spent decades behind the camera and then in front, going back to the very places he filmed and taking actions to create change. It was during lockdown that I stumbled upon the recording of an 8-hour conference called “The Great Work of our time” that John and other luminaries, dedicated to protecting our planet, had organized to share important knowledge. It was like a rabbit hole, took me from one book to another, one expert to another, all of them always reconnecting me back to John, to soil, to restoration.
John D. Liu carries 70 years of wisdom and experience on his broad shoulders, decades during which he traveled the world several times with a front-row seat behind a camera that recorded some of the key events of this century. If it seems overwhelming to fathom is because it totally is. In times during which our attention and memory span goes from a few seconds to a couple of minutes at best, this man is like the encyclopedia that will stand the test of internet meltdowns and electrical failure.
In front of so much knowledge and experience, you are lucky if you get to ask a few questions, but you are exceptionally blessed if you have the capacity to listen, and so listen I did, in full gratitude.
“There is essentially nothing wrong with the Earth; it is a problem of human beings not understanding how the Earth’s natural ecological systems function and acting from selfishness and ignorance.”
JOHN D. LIU
When in 1995 John filmed the “Lessons of the Loess Plateau” in China, not only he marveled at the transformation from the barren and eroded ground into a green oasis at the hand of the Chinese Government, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the broader possibility of humans restoring ecosystems everywhere, rather than destroying them.
The curiosity became an obsession, the obsession turned into research and had him back to learning, the learning turned into new ideas, papers, new films, and new connections, which manifested into tangible projects, and communities, which evolved into ecosystems of their own.
Of course, his path wasn’t a straight line, and it could have gone into a completely different trajectory that involved smoky jazz clubs, musicians, and recordings, had he not listened to his father who recommended him to go to China and learn.
“Once you begin to understand, you cannot go back – just like you can’t believe that the Earth is flat. When you understand that moisture is infiltrated into the ground dependent on the percentages and total amounts of organic material in the soil you, cannot believe that plowing is a good idea. There is great unhappiness now in human civilization because everyone knows in their heart that overconsumption, waste, and pollution are wrong. Yet the existing society and economy demand that we need more and more growth even if it kills us. “John said.
We are so interdependent and interconnected to everything around us that it’s no surprise we are in the middle of an emotional anarchy with everything that is affecting the planet.
According to John “Healing the earth heals the human spirit” and I could not agree more.
It is impossible to touch on the depth of work that John has done with a blog post or with a podcast episode, in fact, we had to record two and they feel like a simple introduction.
“We are facing a poly-crisis, many crises happening simultaneously, and it’s the first time that happens during human existence,” he said.
In his filmmaking work, he spent a good part of his life documenting transformational change and witnessing how possible it is to rehabilitate and restore damaged ecosystems.
John insists that “We must realize that we are a species, and we must act together at a planetary scale. In order to do that we need to have a collective intelligence, a collective intention, and then collective action. If we come together and we share, everybody has everything”.
John is an advocate of “collaborative inquiry for collective intelligence” a profound concept we should probably print on sustainably sourced and manufactured t-shirts, or simply humbly embrace at full power for our own good.
John’s work evolved in the creation and promotion of Ecosystem restoration communities, living laboratories that bring people, experts, learners, and teachers together with one objective: to restore the soil, to bring back life where life has been destroyed. These communities exist already in many parts of the world, they are flat organizational structures, and anyone can participate or start one where there is a space.
You can find here references to some of John’s documentaries and projects and if what you hear, watch, or read, resonates with you, I have his permission to share his contacts, as he wants to work with everyone, because we need everyone’s help and there isn’t a lot of time left to restore what we have destroyed.
Watch John’s work below
The Sekem Story: A miracle in the desert became reality
Listen, like, share, get in contact with John using johndliu at icloud dot com.
Podcast part 1
Podcast part 2
