Hot Poet and Co-Artistic Director: Chris Redmond
Matched with: The Weather Makers
Poem Focus: Re-greening the Desert

With an ever-increasing human population extracting value from Earth, the world faces severely degrading ecosystems. Over 1.3 billion people are affected by degrading agricultural land. It has never been so abundantly clear that we need functional ecosystems to support the complex life forms that live on Earth. A biosphere producing ecological value is the basis for all value creation. We need to regenerate ecosystems on a large scale to restore our biosphere. If we don’t, everything will be lost!
The Weather Makers have an ambition to support the local community and the population of Egypt in turning the Sinai into the lush Garden of Eden it used to be. Successful regreening of deserts demands a watershed-wide, holistic approach. The watershed scale allows us to properly address the complex interconnection between fauna, flora, soils, water, atmosphere… and to harvest the multitude of positive impacts that regreening at watershed scale can deliver.