Einer der wichtigsten Dokumentarfilme der letzten Jahre, der Hoffnung macht, und abseits ausgetretener Meinungspfade einen ausgewogenen Blick auf die Probleme unserer Welt und deren Lösungen wirft.
7 Reviews
Unbedingt sehenswert.
sven-7052528 September 2020
Hope for humanity in agriculture
jeroenvdsmissen9 October 2020
In search of answers about the human future, Marijn shows a colourful variety of ways in how man is growing food in different parts of the world. Sounds boring? The more reason you should watch! Not one single moment in this film bored me. Marijn also shows the political agenda in food growing, but avoids to push a political opinion like most journalists nowadays do. That's his wonderful talent: giving people food for thought. People, think and search for yourselves. Food growing and distributing is a very important subject for human future. This film is made with live and it gives hope. That's rare.
Touching your heart by raising questions
joostvriens29 September 2020
If you want to grow plants in the desert, you have to give them water. If you want to cultivate the grass you have to give the underlaying ground what it needs. This can be successful if you look with an open heart: nature will tell you.
When I watched this documentary I really felt nourished. Because Marijn shows different perspectives, connected with people with a heart for nature, without judging, without choosing. Observe, this is what is happening too, besides the grimm cry from people who talk about the climate crisis.
I am very grateful for this warm contribution to my insight. So he opened my eyes. With a sharp, but compassionate question: what do you think? What can you do?
I like the metaphor of returning to Eden. I was very touched bu the image of the acupuncture point of nature in the Sinai.
Thanks to this beautiful film I have a different view on nature in my environment and my possibilities to contribute to a awareness-change. It feels like an important answer the climate-change raises. Thank you.
useful documentary
inekesnel15 October 2020
Absolutly important messages that people have to listen to
sej_gusse22 January 2021
Warning: Spoilers
This documentary has a great message and document some of what Allan Savory is about which his finding is the only option to save the planet, both with his findings of how to use the tool of livestock, his understand of ecosystem processes and his development of Holistic Management and the holistic management framework.
It's all so simple
robert-7446415 October 2020
I implore people to go see this film. Truly.
Jazzie12316 November 2020
Warning: Spoilers
The call of the wild
Every now and then you run into a solution to a problem that is so simple, and at the same time so powerful in its logic, it completely stuns you. The solution Allan Savory offers for the worldwide climate problem is one of those. Nobody in the climate world wants to hear it, but fortunately Marijn Poels gives it all the room it deserves in his latest film, Return To Eden.
The amount of climate preaching, doom scenarios, plans to turn the world upside down and resolutions that most people regard with great distrust is being fired at us in large volumes. We need to save the world! We're all going to die! CO2 and nitrogen! And the biggest evil of all, next to mankind, is livestock. The grass eater. The methane pooper. We need to get rid of all that livestock, let's all become vegetarians - we've even had suggestions that eating certain insects is very nutritious and delicious, and it could even become a profitable industry as a replacement of meat. But we have to get rid of our grazing poopers, no matter what.
And yet, as Poels shows us in his film, that's about the last thing we should do. He makes us listen to Savory, who's an ecologist, and his solution isn't just hilariously simple, we can actually see, in Zimbabwe, how well it works. And what does Savory tell us? We don't need less livestock, we need more. Everywhere. In the wild. It sounds insane, but it isn't. Far from it.
Poels' film clearly demonstrates why Savory may be right. The film starts in Germany, where we meet Vivianne Theby, a farmer's wife, who is applying the system of 'permaculture' in her kitchen gardens. Permaculture is an ecological system that looks for sustainable solutions for desertification. A method that asks for as little human intervention, such as human tillage, as possible, and sees nature as a whole, instead of parts that each need their own individual approach. Vivianne explains that, for example, in nature weeds grow everywhere, and prevent the soil from drying out. But we tend to remove weeds from our designed 'nature' - except it doesn't have a lot to do with 'nature' anymore. Because of man's constant intervening in nature, the ecology on and in the soil has been severely disrupted. And we're now faced with ever increasing drought problems.
Savory and his allies can see one thing very clearly: we think too much in terms of 'us' and 'the other'. We see ourselves as 'us', and nature, that's something outside of us: 'the other'. Unfortunately, therein lies the root of our problems. We're an inseparable part of nature, even if we've told ourselves we withdrew ourselves from that part of our world and learned to control it. It's proving to be a huge misconception to think that way. If we truly want to solve our problems with environment and climate, we'll need to start realizing we are part of an ecologic system we barely understand. A system we've never studied from the notion that we should 'fit in it', but always 'how do we use it'. We'll have to start answering the call of the wild and go back to Paradise.
And by now we've done so much damage, after thousands of years of mismanagement. Poels takes us to meet Addie Akkermans, one of the founders of The Weather Makers, a company dedicated to bringing the Sinai Desert back to life. An ambitious project based on the theory that the desert was a blooming jungle some 7000 years ago. They even have a dream of resprouting the entire Sahara. 'It's a heart that once had a beat,' Maddie says, 'and we want to turn it back on.' Can you imagine what that would mean for the world's climate, but also for African food production?
We have a tendency to think that it first takes rain in order to make plants grow, but Ties van der Hoeven, also with The Weather Makers, explains that this isn't necessarily the case. That you can kickstart rain with vegetation. And that's the very essence of Savory's theory, which deserves a heck of a lot more attention than it gets.
Savory takes Poels to Zimbabwe and shows him the ravages of years of environmental policies: a dried-out area, dead plants everywhere, here and there something green that's struggling to survive on the bone dry, rock hard soil. The zebra's and other grazers that live there, barely have anything to eat: not a sprig of grass will grow there. Savory knocks on the ground: it sounds like an empty box, hard and hollow. The soil, he explains, needs to be tilled and broken before there's any point in rain falling. All the water just runs off the dry ground or evaporates back into the air. There's nothing to start and perpetuate a circular rain system. And the policies of Western environmental organisations made things worse by keeping the big grazers, like elephants and buffaloes, out of the area with the help of huge fences.
Because it's the grazers, as Savory shows us in Zimbabwe, that break the soil they walk on. They till it and fertilise it at the same time. Grass returns in no time - and that's the kickstart The Weather Makers are aiming for. The process ensures that water and carbon will be absorbed by the soil, which stimulates the growth of plants, which in turn stimulates the rainfall.
But now you're thinking: hang on, what about all the methane? And the nitrogen? Well, says Savory, all those problems will be gone once we get the soil back in its natural state. Because healthy soil can deal with gasses like that. But since mankind has made sure a lot of grazing animals have gone extinct, the entire balance has been disrupted. And with it the balance of the soil we live on.
I recommend this film to everybody. This review is a very short one; so many other educational and interesting things are being said. But one thing is quite clear to me, having watched it: we've started at the wrong end in our approach of the climate problem. It's not the air we should be working at - it's the ground beneath our feet.
Every now and then you run into a solution to a problem that is so simple, and at the same time so powerful in its logic, it completely stuns you. The solution Allan Savory offers for the worldwide climate problem is one of those. Nobody in the climate world wants to hear it, but fortunately Marijn Poels gives it all the room it deserves in his latest film, Return To Eden.
The amount of climate preaching, doom scenarios, plans to turn the world upside down and resolutions that most people regard with great distrust is being fired at us in large volumes. We need to save the world! We're all going to die! CO2 and nitrogen! And the biggest evil of all, next to mankind, is livestock. The grass eater. The methane pooper. We need to get rid of all that livestock, let's all become vegetarians - we've even had suggestions that eating certain insects is very nutritious and delicious, and it could even become a profitable industry as a replacement of meat. But we have to get rid of our grazing poopers, no matter what.
And yet, as Poels shows us in his film, that's about the last thing we should do. He makes us listen to Savory, who's an ecologist, and his solution isn't just hilariously simple, we can actually see, in Zimbabwe, how well it works. And what does Savory tell us? We don't need less livestock, we need more. Everywhere. In the wild. It sounds insane, but it isn't. Far from it.
Poels' film clearly demonstrates why Savory may be right. The film starts in Germany, where we meet Vivianne Theby, a farmer's wife, who is applying the system of 'permaculture' in her kitchen gardens. Permaculture is an ecological system that looks for sustainable solutions for desertification. A method that asks for as little human intervention, such as human tillage, as possible, and sees nature as a whole, instead of parts that each need their own individual approach. Vivianne explains that, for example, in nature weeds grow everywhere, and prevent the soil from drying out. But we tend to remove weeds from our designed 'nature' - except it doesn't have a lot to do with 'nature' anymore. Because of man's constant intervening in nature, the ecology on and in the soil has been severely disrupted. And we're now faced with ever increasing drought problems.
Savory and his allies can see one thing very clearly: we think too much in terms of 'us' and 'the other'. We see ourselves as 'us', and nature, that's something outside of us: 'the other'. Unfortunately, therein lies the root of our problems. We're an inseparable part of nature, even if we've told ourselves we withdrew ourselves from that part of our world and learned to control it. It's proving to be a huge misconception to think that way. If we truly want to solve our problems with environment and climate, we'll need to start realizing we are part of an ecologic system we barely understand. A system we've never studied from the notion that we should 'fit in it', but always 'how do we use it'. We'll have to start answering the call of the wild and go back to Paradise.
And by now we've done so much damage, after thousands of years of mismanagement. Poels takes us to meet Addie Akkermans, one of the founders of The Weather Makers, a company dedicated to bringing the Sinai Desert back to life. An ambitious project based on the theory that the desert was a blooming jungle some 7000 years ago. They even have a dream of resprouting the entire Sahara. 'It's a heart that once had a beat,' Maddie says, 'and we want to turn it back on.' Can you imagine what that would mean for the world's climate, but also for African food production?
We have a tendency to think that it first takes rain in order to make plants grow, but Ties van der Hoeven, also with The Weather Makers, explains that this isn't necessarily the case. That you can kickstart rain with vegetation. And that's the very essence of Savory's theory, which deserves a heck of a lot more attention than it gets.
Savory takes Poels to Zimbabwe and shows him the ravages of years of environmental policies: a dried-out area, dead plants everywhere, here and there something green that's struggling to survive on the bone dry, rock hard soil. The zebra's and other grazers that live there, barely have anything to eat: not a sprig of grass will grow there. Savory knocks on the ground: it sounds like an empty box, hard and hollow. The soil, he explains, needs to be tilled and broken before there's any point in rain falling. All the water just runs off the dry ground or evaporates back into the air. There's nothing to start and perpetuate a circular rain system. And the policies of Western environmental organisations made things worse by keeping the big grazers, like elephants and buffaloes, out of the area with the help of huge fences.
Because it's the grazers, as Savory shows us in Zimbabwe, that break the soil they walk on. They till it and fertilise it at the same time. Grass returns in no time - and that's the kickstart The Weather Makers are aiming for. The process ensures that water and carbon will be absorbed by the soil, which stimulates the growth of plants, which in turn stimulates the rainfall.
But now you're thinking: hang on, what about all the methane? And the nitrogen? Well, says Savory, all those problems will be gone once we get the soil back in its natural state. Because healthy soil can deal with gasses like that. But since mankind has made sure a lot of grazing animals have gone extinct, the entire balance has been disrupted. And with it the balance of the soil we live on.
I recommend this film to everybody. This review is a very short one; so many other educational and interesting things are being said. But one thing is quite clear to me, having watched it: we've started at the wrong end in our approach of the climate problem. It's not the air we should be working at - it's the ground beneath our feet.
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