Agro-ecologist Nathan Lou is Co-founder and Executive Director of San Diego-based Mongol Tribe, a 501C3 providing hands-on education and experiences with traditional and regenerative land management practices.

With local resiliency as his rally cry and food sovereignty as its anthem, Nathan is all about taking back our autonomy, the ability of our communities to grow our own food and medicines with less dependency on external inputs.

We talk about urban food forests and public policy, seed libraries and how to develop them, community building and cultivating connection to the land, even in a city environment.

Links and resources from this episode at https://www.sustainabilitynow.global/2024/03/16/urban-food-forests-seed-libraries-as-food-sovereignty-strategies/

#UrbanFoodForests #SeedLibraries #FoodSovereignty #SustainabilityNow #CommunityResilience #RegenerativeAgriculture #LocalFoodSystems #LandStewardship #Agroecology #CommunityBuilding #UrbanAgriculture #FoodJustice #EnvironmentalEducation #PublicPolicy #SeedSaving #UrbanFarming #CommunityEmpowerment #ResilientCommunities #ConnectionToLand #AutonomousFoodProduction

A Sustainability Now interview with Nina Simons, author, speaker, teacher and co-founder of Bioneers

Join us for a thoughtful and visionary conversation with Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and author of the top Nautilus award winning book, Nature, Culture, and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. Nina invites us into what she calls “full spectrum leadership;” leadership that reclaims our human wholeness, that values the wisdom of our hearts, our bodies, our intuition, dreamtime and our ancestors.

She calls for regenerating leadership in service to Mother Life in a way that values being as much as doing and is committed to learning how to live in right relationship with nature while reclaiming our fullest human capacities. Throughout her career, spanning the nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, corporate, and philanthropic sectors, Nina has worked with nearly a thousand women leaders across disciplines, race, class, age and orientation to create conditions for mutual learning, trust and leadership development.

Additionally, along with her husband and partner Kenny Ausubel, Nina is a recipient of the revered Goi Peace Award for “pioneering work to promote nature-inspired innovations for restoring the Earth and our human community.”

Nina's book: Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership
Preview on Bioneers | Buy on Bookshop.org
Bioneers website

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We currently stand at a pivotal juncture where the loss of numerous species from our local ecosystems poses a serious threat. This jeopardizes the ecosystem services that are essential for our well-being, including oxygen production, water purification, flood control, pollination, pest regulation, and carbon storage. However, this isn't a moment of condemning human actions, but an opportunity to embrace an enjoyable path to positive change through stewardship.

Doug Tallamy's message emphasizes a solution-focused approach: small individual efforts can collectively make a significant impact. By working together, we can create new ecological networks that support the growth and resilience of plant and animal populations, allowing them to thrive despite normal population fluctuations.

At the heart of this initiative is the concept of the Homegrown National Park®, a term coined by Doug. It serves as a rallying point, recognizing that even our grand national parks, remarkable as they are, are too isolated and limited in scale to preserve species effectively. The idea behind the Homegrown National Park is a grassroots call to action, encouraging us to restore habitats in our residential and working areas, and to a lesser extent in agricultural and grazing lands, effectively extending the concept of national parks to our own yards and communities.

To visually represent this collective effort, they have created "THE MAP," an interactive community-based tool that tracks each person's contribution to native plantings by State, County, and Zip Code. This map not only gauges progress toward the ambitious goal of planting 20 million acres of native species in the U.S. but also provides individuals with a tangible way to see their role in a larger ecological restoration effort, thereby creating new ecological networks and revitalizing biodiversity.

#HomegrownNationalPark #getonthemap #RewildYourYard #NativePlanting #BackyardHabitats #EcoStewardship #BiodiversityBoost #HabitatRestoration #CommunityConservation #EcoNetworks #DougTallamy #ConservationEfforts #BiodiversityMatters #StewardshipForChange #EcosystemResilience #HomegrownNationalPark #SustainableLiving #DougTallamysVision #CommunityConservation #TheMapForChange #RestoringBiodiversity #CollectiveAction #SpeciesPreservation #SmallStepsBigImpact