As one of the founding members of the Caux Dialogue on Land and Security, Dr Jennifer Helgeson remembers the excitement of its earliest stages. After moving from the UK to the USA, her direct involvement with running the CDLS has decreased, but she remains a huge advocate of the programme. She continues to act as IofC’s liaison to the United Nations Climate Change conference and to participate in the CDLS.

What makes the Dialogue special for Jenn is Caux’s unique model. She speaks proudly of the fact that the CDLS centres on the human connections that underlie the projects, science and mission shared by those involved. Throughout her career in disaster risk and natural hazard reduction, Jennifer has been continually touched by the extent to which human connections are the catalyst for real action.

As one of the Caux Dialogue on Land and Security’s initiators, Jennifer has experienced  the conference both as a member of the planning team and as a participant. She has been heartened to meet people from around the globe who share similar concerns. Their answers are unique to the location and needs of their communities, yet are transferable to the lived realities of others. Jenn says,‘The spirit of the CDLS is magical. It is elating to spend days with people striving to solve the issues I am also working to solve with innovative methods and genuinely good intentions!’

She has given informal advice on the behavioural economic elements of land restoration projects born out of the CDLS. Techniques and research approaches learned at the CDLS have affected her world view and how she conducts her professional work.

What’s more, Jennifer has co-edited a book on land degradation, Land Restoration: Reclaiming Landscapes for a Sustainable Future. She conceived and worked on the project with other members of the CDLS, including Martin Frick and Ilan Chabay.

Ben Callison is Managing Director of Borneo Orangutan Survival UK (BOS-UK), which works to protect the critically endangered orangutan and its habitat in Indonesia. Prior to this Ben served as President of the Humane Society Wildlife Land Trust in the US, permanently protecting wild lands. He has also been director of the Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch, a 1,500-acre animal sanctuary with close to 1,000 animals and over 40 species. Long active in the environmental community and in civic circles, he is driven to solving the root causes of ecological unsustainability, both in our natural and built environments. He practised architecture for 13 years, co-founding and serving as president of his own firm, which had an emphasis on sustainable design practices.

I was encouraged to attend the 2018 Caux Dialogue on Land and Security (CDLS), part of the Caux Forum, by a long-time friend and fellow conservationist. I was highly sceptical, having attended many conferences before. I found it hard to believe this won’t be a different version of the same thing.

The CDLS not only disproved my negative assumptions, but surpassed any experience I had ever had at a conference before. Everything about the Caux Dialogue sets it apart from the routine cycle of networking events. The setting alone is enough to differentiate it.

Once through the doors of the Caux Palace, I found that it serves as a community of thought – one that you feel connected to almost instantly. The next few days were filled with in-depth group and individual conversations that I could never have imagined having with people I had only just met. The speakers came from all areas and socio-economic backgrounds. The Caux Dialogue is one of the only places in the world where you can hear the head of a department at Oxford University speak right next to a Syrian woman, who is creating peace circles to help others cope with the tyranny of war. I found this equality of message humbling.

Greater knowledge was only a small part of what I gained. I feel far better for connecting to a network of people all around the world that I would never have expected to meet. It is easy to live and work in isolation, without even knowing it. The Caux Dialogue helped me identify and remedy that.

In the year since, I have found the personal connections to be most valuable. I expected to expand my network, but what I didn’t expect was that those same people would become such good friends. The Caux Forum creates a unique and collaborative environment that allows for connections to be made in ways that nowhere else can.

What I learned from the Caux Forum has helped to reshape my approach to problem solving. I have learned to start ‘loving the problems’ or at least looking at them in the round, rather than being exclusively in love with our solutions. In strategy sessions in the past we focused more on how to expand our current solutions, which I now see hindered innovation.

An example is our deforestation prevention work. Historically this excluded community development since it was these communities that were one of the main sources of illegal logging. We focused on preventing illegal activity, rather than including the community. After re-evaluating the problem we now work to develop and support surrounding communities towards sustainable industries. This approach provides the villages with a steady income that doesn’t destroy the forest.

Marc Ian Barasch describes himself as ‘a social entrepreneur, a communicator, a meditator, a networker’. A glance at Wikipedia shows he is also an international thought-leader and innovator. The titles of ‘founder’ and ‘co-founder’ recur regularly beside well-grounded green initiatives, and his books and films span topics from holistic healing through the science of empathy to the phenomenology of dreams.

Among his social enterprises are the Green World Campaign, and Green World Ventures, both inspired, he says, by writing The Compassionate Life (a bestseller that inspired the Compassionate Cities movement and the popular documentary, I Am). In 2018, he convened the ReGen18 conference in San Francisco, gathering together 500 leaders of the burgeoning regenerative movement.

In the late 1960s, Marc was an active participant in movements for cultural and social change. He dropped out of Yale University, hitchhiked to the Rocky Mountains to study Buddhism with a Tibetan lama, and went on to edit such magazines as New Age Journal, Natural Health and Psychology Today. He produced and wrote documentaries on the environment for Ted Turner (one of them, the 1992 Earth Summit special One Child, One Voice, was seen by 2 billion people in 160 countries) and wrote a culturally influential series of books.

Thirteen years ago, Marc gave up writing and set out ‘rather naively’ to maximize the tangible good he could do in the world. One day on this quest, Marc met a man who planted trees according to ancient methods of agroforestry.

When Marc learned there was a way to combine feeding people with afforestation, a light went on in his mind: ‘green compassion’. This insight led him to explore how to solve convergent ecological and human crises in ways that were not adversarial or ‘doom-and-gloom’, but holistic, optimistic, conciliatory and healing.

He was invited to visit Ethiopia, where forest cover has dwindled to little over one per cent. Local leaders told him that though the world’s magnanimity had poured into the country, it had little if any lasting impact on the lives of people subsisting at the bottom of the pyramid, trapped in a vicious cycle. Poor people cut down trees in fragile forests out of dire need. Treeless soils erode, become infertile, arable land diminishes, aquifers and rainfall dwindle. Conflicts over resources arise. Impoverished land swells the tide of human migration from rural villages to urban slums. He saw how poverty, hunger, ignorance, deforestation, conflict and climate change are all connected.

But he also learned that regeneration is possible. Local people desperately wanted to restore the lush landscapes that some elders could still remember. He recalls visiting a village where the well had broken and kids walked miles each day to fetch uncontaminated water. They always used some of what they lugged back in their heavy jerrycans to water trees planted on a hillside. He gave a grant to repair the well.

His next project was helping to start up the Bees and Trees regeneration project in Ethiopia. ‘We worked with the community to plant calliandra and gravillia trees to prevent erosion and enrich the degraded soil. Calliandra also have big, beautiful red blossoms favoured by honeybees, which increased yields at village hives. The bees pollinated the coffee crops, creating an economic incentive for villagers to plant even more.’ Marc realized that everything was connected to everything: you had to consider all the inputs and outputs, upstream and downstream, internal and external, and all the stakeholders from people to planet, from human biome to soil microbes.

So he started the Green World Campaign (GWC), which worked to restore forests in Ethiopia and Mexico, funded schoolchildren in Jordan to plant trees and supported agroforestry programmes in former conflict zones in the Philippines. Over the last nine years, GWC has planted 3.5 million trees in Kenya.

Hundreds of thousands of kids pass through Green World Schools programmes in Kenya and in turn influence hundreds of thousands of community members, many of whom have also benefitted from Green World Campaign’s programmes. Fast-growing, drought-resistant moringa trees have spread from schoolyards to farms across the Kenyan coastal region, providing nutrition, income, seed oil and climate change resilience. Their leaves contain 30 per cent protein with all essential amino acids. No village that plants this superfood tree will starve.

Marc took part in the 2018 Caux Dialogue on Land and Security, including the Policy Makers Round Table. He appreciated the new working relationships which blossomed there and the ‘well-curated, generatively designed context that fostered collaboration, compassion and awareness’.

He suggested that Caux could be the site of a high-level ‘Regenerative Davos’. The idea is under discussion. Other proposals include combining the forces of GWC with those of the Evergreening Global Alliance; a Green World Token to invite more public participation in regenerative projects; working with the drone tree-planting company BioCarbon Engineering on a test-bed project in coastal Kenya; a collaboration with DJ Spooky, merging environmental and social regeneration with urban arts , music, and culture; extending Kenya’s successful Green World Schools programmes to many more countries in partnership with collaborators he met at CDLS; and a joint venture to pioneer a moringa-based regenerative food industry, starting in Ghana and Nigeria.