Meet John Dennis Liu, The Indiana Jones of Landscape Restoration

**John Dennis Liu** (born 1953 in Nashville, Tennessee) is a Chinese American film-maker and ecologist

John Dennis Liu is an ecosystem restoration researcher, educator, and filmmaker

John D. Liu is director of the Environmental Education Media Project (EEMP), ecosystem ambassador for the Commonland Foundation, and a visiting research fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Mr. Liu is an American who has lived in China for more than 30 years. He helped to open the CBS News bureau in Beijing at the time of normalization of relations between the US and China. He worked for CBS News for 10 years leaving in 1990. He also worked as a photo-journalist for Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI Italian Television) and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF German Television).

Mr. Liu has concentrated on ecological filmmaking since the mid-1990s and has written, produced, and directed films on Grasslands, Deserts, Wetlands, Oceans, Rivers, Urban Development, Atmosphere, Forests, Endangered Animals, and Poverty Reduction. His work has taken him to over 70 countries. Many of his films have appeared on BBC World and other networks. In 2003, Mr. Liu wrote, produced, and directed “Jane Goodall—China Diary” for National Geographic.

Interview with John D. Liu, February 4, 2016

It’s almost as if a global paradigm shift is needed to start accounting for nature in the economy. ‘Naturalizing’ the economy as you would say.

Liu: We have to be very careful not to commoditize nature. We need to naturalize the economy. What this means to me is that natural ecological functions are more valuable than ‘stuff.’ When we understand that, then the economy is based on ecological function. And that is exactly what we need in order to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to ensure food security, and to give every individual on the planet equal human rights. Suddenly we are in another paradigm. It’s similar to the shift from flat earth to round earth paradigm.

We need to realize that there is no ‘us and them.’ There is just us. There is one earth and one humanity. We have to act as a species on a planetary scale because we will all be affected by climate change. We have to come together to decide: What do we know? What do we understand? What do we believe as a species?

If there were one behavior or habit of humans that you could magically change, what would it be?

Liu: It is clear right now that economics is driving today’s problems. There are a lot of assumptions in economics that are simply false. Economics now says that extraction, manufacturing, buying, and selling can create wealth. This is bullshit. We are creating poverty by doing this. We are creating degradation of the landscapes. So few people in a tiny minority are accumulating vast material possessions in this system, while billions of people are living in abject poverty at the edges of large degraded ecosystems. Others can no longer even stay in their homes, and millions of people are migrating to escape from the horrible conditions. Well, this cannot work. This must change.

What I have noticed is that ecological function is vastly more valuable than extraction, production, consumption, and buying and selling things. What we really need to understand is: “What is money?” If I were going to leave one thing for the people to think about it is this: What is money? What is it? It is basically a storehouse of value, a means of exchange, and a trust mechanism. That means it is an abstract concept; it can be anything that we want it to be. If we say that money comes from the ecological function instead of extraction, manufacturing buying, and selling, then we have a system in which all human efforts go toward restoring, protecting, and preserving ecological function. That is what we need to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to ensure food security, to ensure that human civilizations survive. Our monetary system must reflect reality. We could have grown, not from stuff, but growth from more functionality. If we do that and we value that higher than things, we will survive.

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