September is a big month in New York City. The energy is both electric and pristine. The weather is usually beautiful with just the first touches of autumn beginning to show. The feeling is alive.

The General Assembly assembles at the United Nations, Presidents from all over the world, including the U.S. gather, security is on high alert, traffic is at a standstill except for we bike-riders, and simultaneously, scientists, ecologists, eco-entrepreneurs, indigenous leaders, environmentalists of all stripes, farmers and water-keepers come together for what has been come to be known as “Climate Week”.

It is a time when a good number of generally like-minded people who care about our species and planet’s future, get a chance to spend some time together and brainstorm the next both intelligent and practical steps toward fulfilling the goals of creating a healthier, soil-rich, carbon-sequestered, much less polluted planet that also puts regenerative, health-promoting practices into place.

The climate in NYC feels good during climate week

I don’t know if it is Nature knowing that we’re getting together to care about Her in a focused way but there is an air of compassion and caring, for people and planet, that uplifts the overall feeling in the city. Now there’s an extra buzz.

This will give you a taste, a little smattering of the full smorgasbord of activity across the island.

What’s happening?

All around town are meetings, panels, workshops, talks, exhibits, demonstrations, discussions about diverse subjects as renewable energy, the grid’s fragility and inability to handle the ever-increasing load plus alternatives, using different, natural materials instead of synthetics in fashion and even car seats, reforestation of large tracts of land from the U.S. to the Philippines, financing green projects, energy-efficiency, new technologies, and perhaps the simplest, least expensive and most natural of them all: regenerative practices for land and ocean.

Mildred McClain in Georgia raises hell!

My week started with a rabble-rouser from Heaven, Mildred McClain from the Harambee House in Savannah, Georgia, fighting for environmental justice for decades. As we all know, major corporations choose low-income, black neighborhoods to build their plants, be they chemical plants or oil refineries. The air, water and soil become polluted, contaminated and unusable after a while, can’t sustain life and people living there frequently get cancers, other diseases and die.

Mildred has been fighting on their behalf for decades. As a black woman, she is a fierce pioneer for justice, has helped to raise enough hell to turn around legislation and to protect these under-served communities over and over again. And as an added bonus during her talks, she sings beautifully too with soul.

The world needs more Mildreds. Cloning discussions are underway.

Self-sufficient housing systems being 3-D printed

There’s virtually no reason for houseless people anymore because of the advances being made in house-building using clean, green materials and 3-D printing. Houses that would take 6-12 months to build are now being fashioned in a day. The materials being used reduce the cost of heating and cooling, protect against wind, rain and fire.

With a dash more of political will and the cessation of war-funding, everyone in America and beyond can be housed, have their own vertical farming, water source and waste-management system. And fed with nourishing food, clean water, healthy soil and a useful education. Oh the money is there! It’s just being wasted, against the People’s wishes, on war. It may not appear that way, but this too will pass.

Indigenous people get a leg up

At the Doris Duke Foundation on Madison Avenue, I met a team of incredibly dedicated Native leaders who were being funded by this Foundation and others to the tune of some $45,000,000 per year, which was going directly to improve the infrastructure and lives of indigenous people on reservations in Alaska and across the nation. The consistent actions of the NDN Collective are very impressive.

A good part of the funds go toward restoring the variety of cultures, languages, education and ceremonial life, getting back land and advancing their lives in some hybrid of U.S. culture and their native one into a harmonious whole. The NDN Collective was at the heart of these actions.

Entrepreneurs back green technologies

At The Nest at the Jacob Javitz Center were panel after panel regarding renewable energy projects, all the way to General Motors removing of their leather upholstery, some 200 million pounds of it, and replacing it with mycelium-based fabric, yes, that’s fabric from the material of mushrooms. Can you imagine how much fun that dialogue was to listen in on?

While driving a distance, you can take a bite out of your seat if you get exceptionally hungry. Innovation abounds!

At Union Square Ventures on Broadway, was a panel on how the current national grid is actually crumbling from being overloaded. Even prior to the major advent of EVs, AI and crypto-mining, the grid could hardly manage the plethora of devices coming on-line.

Blue power systems

One of the answers to an overloaded grid is to get off-grid. The number of advantages to this is being seen by a growing number of people at this point, per week, as well as bigger players in the energy sector.

This dovetails with and supports the use of a variety of renewable energy sources, which can be as varied as solar, wind, geo-thermal, wave energy, waste-to-energy and other technologies that have come on-line.

An overloaded grid means more breakdowns, power outages, blackouts, brownouts and more grid vulnerability. PG&E frequently goes down in part and Ercot in Texas had a major crash a few years ago in February, 2021, that had over 4,500,000 people without energy for not a few hours but for several days in 25 counties and resulted in at least 57 deaths.

Electrical utility and grid vulnerability also shows up in respect to national security. Taking down a single utility by bad actors is vastly easier than 100,000,000 individual mini-power grids which is virtually impossible.

From just about every point of view, being energy-independent starts to look like a very attractive option. It happens that Blue Power Systems offers the ability to utilize renewable energy sources tied, not to the grid, but to this mobile, hybrid Power Plant itself. If it happens that the renewable source dwindles due to, say, a series of cloudy or windless days, the onboard genset which runs on all plant-based, recycled diesel, kicks on for just an hour or so to keep the battery reasonably charged until its telemetry reports that the sun will be bright in the sky the next day and photons will take over the job of charging the battery back up.

A brilliant piece of machinery, an example of the kind of innovation that is being conceived and produced for mass consumption.

Breezy point energy

Another breakthrough company in the renewable energy space is Breezy Point Energy. Its current focus is on building a green hydrogen hub on 6,000 acres in Montana to help power the upsurge in big tech’s data centers for AI and crypto-mining which seems clearly here to stay. BPE will utilize wind and solar as well as green hydrogen and is positioned to become one of the country’s leading renewable energy providers being led by its founder and CEO, Ari Goldstein.

This is the kind of “energy” being generated renewably, during Climate Week and overall, on the planet. Some say “nothing is happening” but that’s because they aren’t looking closely enough—so much is happening that it’s hard to keep pace with.

The transformative summit does it again!

Founded by Elliot Bayev, this excellent group of presenters brought forward innovations, thought-provoking ideas, artistic and cultural moments that stimulated everyone present. It’s very much a grass-roots, close-to-the-ground, innovative think tank of sorts and Elliot’s big heart and imagination see possibilities everywhere for creating a better world.

This Summit was held this year in a hidden building on the lower East Side inside an art space in which the likes of The Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin performed, making the time there just all the more fun and unique.

Hitting a home run: regenerate the soil, restore the ocean & the climate crisis is largely solved

Bold statement indeed. And yet, if certain, simple soil-and-water management and nutritional techniques were deployed en masse, i.e., everywhere starting now across the world, reasonable estimates suggest that within ten years, we will have not only sequestered the carbon continuing to be emitted but that a good amount of legacy carbon could be sequestered as well such that temperatures of air and ocean would be significantly reduced.

Hanging off a precipice requires bold actions.

Hence, the coup de grace of much of Climate Week, from my point of view, was to be found at the Nigeria House on 2nd Ave. near the U.N. at week’s end, hosted by the Eco-Restoration Alliance’s, co-founder, Jon Schull. My interview with Jon for A Better World Podcast & TV synthesizes several of the principal points of his talk on Friday evening in case you weren’t there.

Speakers such as Jon Schull, scientist Rob de Laet and Luri Herzfeld who is working on a project to restore water to the Panama Canal, and Michael Mayer, environmental project manager, each part of the ERA, spoke of their individual work in Africa and other parts of the world.

The most important principle is that to deal with the obvious issue of the heating of our planet due to man’s industrialization without accounting for the environment (or people) in which their businesses are domiciled, these now need to be cooled down from the excessive heat.

Curiously our land and oceans naturally cool when treated in particular ways. Getting rid of fossil fuel companies and the use of oil is not happening anytime soon, it should be quite obvious and even if oil’s use came to a dead stop today, it would take thousands of years to rid our atmosphere of excess carbon.

It’s clearly not a solution. Yet so much of the environmental movement focuses on this approach. It’s frustrating, it’s ineffective and it’s just not answering the deeper call of and solution to be found in Nature.

But going back to the intelligence of Nature, honed over a few billion years, does provide a solution and it is her already well-developed cooling system: plants, trees, clouds, rain, soil, droplets and water in every state.

The hydrological cycle-in-action, through the digging of trenches and creating conditions for water to be absorbed into hard dirt and become remineralized, everything changes. Life returns. Dirt becomes soil. Photosynthesis reasserts its natural magic. Carbon gets massively sequestered by Nature Herself.

When one remineralizes the oceans, per the work of ocean scientist Russ George, one vastly accelerate the growth of phytoplankton, the beginning of our food chain, coral reefs, sea grass and fish of all sorts, breathing life back into the oceans, cooling them and revitalizing the planet while massively sequestering carbon.

Bringing people together of like mind

There are vast numbers of people across the planet who recognize that they are the planet, and the planet is them. There is a deep recognition that there is no separation between Nature and Self but that there is but one continuum. It may appear that all things are separate, but indeed, quantum physics makes it abundantly clear, as did Einstein, that what we are is energy, one vast matrix of swirling energy taking different forms for different periods of time with different appearances. Sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle. So we call it a wavicle! That’s us.

This deeper understanding of the nature of life is found in virtually all indigenous wisdom, in quantum physics, in wisdom traditions east and west and among individuals and groups to be found everywhere.

When one feels this connectedness, this unified field, it comes with a feeling to protect all life, and to respect all sentient beings.

Climate Week is a big home for many people who think along these lines, and others who might not grok “the whole” on this larger, systemic level but are still doing much needed, brilliant work to contribute to the benefit of the whole.

While very diverse, Climate Week in NYC in 2024 provided a forum for a great amount of learning, connecting and bringing together people who needed to meet and learn of each other’s good work toward ever more collaboration at a faster pace.