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Restoration Planning in Developing Countries:
The Essential Integration of Conservation, Economics, Restoration, and Community to Sustain Restored Landscapes in an Age of Turbulence
Instructors:
David Bidelspach
RiverSHARED.org
Livermore, CO
John Giordanengo
AloTerra Restoration Services
Fort Collins, CO
Materials Students Should Bring: note-taking supplies
Materials Students Will Receive:
Learning Objectives:
Workshop Description:
This special session will focus on restoration of streams and watersheds that lead to an increased wonderment in global applications. Our industry has been given a gift of evaluating streams through geomorphic analysis with a process-based application of goals and objectives. We have been using the knowledge systematically accumulated recently to provide nature-based solutions for a variety of common first-world problems. These solutions are innovative, cost-efficient, and green, but how can we share the small-scale miracles of nature-based solutions to ecosystem restoration to the rest of the world, or is this miracle limited to first-world problems and concerns?
This session will provide multiple tools and an interview panel to discuss applications and opportunities to share the processes of nature-based miracles with the rest of the developing world. Expert panelists from multiple non-profits and organizations will rotate through focus groups booth in-person and virtually to address concerns and upgrades to ecosystem restoration such as:
Funding and Incubation
Economic Restoration
Restorative Agriculture
Training and Life Skills
Infrastructure and Water Security
Water Quality
Eco-Tourism and Recreational Sport
Aquaculture and Ecosystem Restoration
This presentation and activity is designed to get the participants excited about sharing the miracle of nature-based solutions with others globally and how to listen for alternative solutions coming from others globally. As a community, we can only share what has been shared with us. This presentation is targeted to cover concepts related to ecosystem restoration in four continents with connections to at least 10 non-profits or other organizations that presenters can continue to build a relationship with after the conference.
There will be 8 focus groups with eight different opportunities to use tools of nature-based restoration to try to propose and solution to the challenge at hand. While this is a short exercise, each group will have their potential solution shared with the organization or non-profit that provided the challenge.
About David Bidelspach
David has been “Beloved” since 1977 and desires on the good days to share this love with others. He has worked and played in streams since before 2002, when he was drafted by Greg Jennings at NCSU. Nomadically, his family has lived from bags, while traveling to distant lands to work with streams, rivers and mud puddles. David’s community desire is to train others, to share the gift of ecosystem restoration and to stay in wonderment and awe of nature. Mr. Bidelspach wants to encourage others to spring up among the ordinary green grass, like willows by flowing streams.
About John Giordanengo, MS
Author, Ecosystems as Models for Restoring our Economies
Owner and Principal Restoration Ecologist, AloTerra Restoration Services
John embarked on a career in ecological restoration in 1996, but his passion for conservation goes back to his early days as a business student. Studying business in the ’80s, he became intrigued by a universal challenge: preserving earth’s ecosystems while meeting humanity’s economic needs. John’s own career in conservation has tested the theory that diversity confers resilience to a system. He has managed recycling & composting programs for local municipalities, founded an import company focused on building markets for sustainable products, and has founded and worked for several regional NGOs across Colorado. The restoration branch of his career has included the economics of cloud forest restoration in Guatemala, erosion control workshops in El Salvador, erosion control design and implementation in Ecuador, and 25 years of design-build experience in the American west. Growing protests against globalization motivated John to write Ecosystems as Models for Restoring our Economies, integrating thirty years of experience and research in ecology, business, economics, and conservation. Building upon this, John has begun nurturing a deeper conservation need—economic restoration. This includes his lecture series at universities and public venues across the US, and developing sustainable business solutions for the restoration industry. In his free time, John can be found playing music, trekking, conducting research, and of course…writing. Every experience reinforces his mantra, “everything is connected, even economies and ecosystems…more deeply than we think.”