Start Earth Week Right! - "Pleistocene Park" Discussion with Manager, Nikita Zimov

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Seth Itzkan

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Apr 17, 2021, 4:45:11 PM4/17/21

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Pleistocene Park Discussion with Manager, Nikita Zimov

Sunday, April 18, 9:00 - 10:30 AM ET (GMT-4)

Zoom

https://soil4climate-org.zoom.us/j/83756644945?pwd=elVTLytWbU5YVExIZ3k0MU9TWFRtQT09

Soil4Climate

https://www.facebook.com/groups/Soil4Climate/

Dear Friends,

Start Earth Week right! Join Soil4Climate in an interactive Zoom event with Pleistocene Park Manager, Nikita Zimov. Nikita is son of the legendary Sergey Zimov who conceived of and founded this precedent-setting ecological restoration effort.

If you don't yet know about this project, now's your time to learn.

The intent of Pleistocene Park is to bring back the "mammoth steppe" grassland that was present in Siberia before humans decimated the megafauna and turned it into a swampy forest. Although the swampy forest is, of course, a legitimate ecosystem in its own right, it is not, in fact, what should be there and it is exacerbating, not mitigating, the impacts of climate change and the warming of the permafrost. There is a literal "carbon bomb" frozen in the ancient soils up there, and the only way to keep it frozen, is to bring back the ancient grasslands which have an entirely different thermal profile than the swampy forests. Grasslands with grazers are net cooling, where the forests without grazers are net warming. Now, here's the fun part. The only way to bring back the grasslands is to bring back the megafauna grazers! This is precisely what they're doing - shipping large grazing animals to the steppe to try to bring back the grasslands with its natural climate cooling and carbon capturing impacts.

The implications of this project are profound and we invite you to take part in this perhaps once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to discuss it directly with the manager. There is lots of information about this project online and I encourage you to watch videos and read up on it prior to tomorrow's event.

Thank you!

- Seth

Resources

(Please educate yourself about this fascinating project prior to the interview with Nikita, so that you can be informed and ask thoughtful questions)

Website https://pleistocenepark.ru

wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park

Donation https://pleistocenepark.org/donate/

The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/pleistocene-park/517779/

On Vimeo https://vimeo.com/390284853 and https://vimeo.com/207624364

About Soil4Climate

Soil4Climate is a 501c3 nonprofit charitable organization that advocates for soil restoration to mitigate and to eventually help reverse global warming. We focus largely on ecological restoration of grasslands with Holistic Planned Grazing because of the enormous potential that holds for carbon capture and for restoring food, water, and cultural security for billions of people around the globe. Pleistocene Park is a perfect example of ecological restoration with animals and we applaud it. It compliments perfectly with our own efforts to bring regenerative practices to Maasai communities in East Africa. Soil4Climate encourages you to help support the Pleistocene Park project just as we ask you to help support us. We all need animals! If you aren't yet a member of the Soil4Climate Facebook community, we invite you to join. That has become our main center for activism and communications.

Thank you see you online!

Yours in soil restoration,

- Seth

Seth J. Itzkan