6 October, 2023
ReWild Mpumalanga
GeaSphere
Dear All
It is my privilege and pleasure to write you all this letter, in an effort to inform you regarding the progress of our GeaSphere ‘ReWild Mpumalanga’ project.
First, let me thank all of you for your support, without which this effort would be impossible.Your time, energy and financial contributions provides a glimmer of hope - making a daunting task of holistic habitat restoration a reality.
Warm gratitude to the ‘GeaSphere Tribe’ on Clubhouse, Bev, Zampe, XYZ, Lisa, Sandra, Nate and Niklas, for attending our regular committee meetings and helping to give life and direction to our project.
I am happy to report that we have now access to a team of 10 trainee ‘Field Rangers’, who will start actively working on the project in October. Though this team is on a part time basis (16 hours per week), it provides an opportunity to meaningfully engage with the growing problem of alien invasive plants, whilst providing ongoing training and skills development wrt restoration, plant identification, compost, biochars etc.
The project is in collaboration with the Mpumalanga Water Caucus (MPWC) and will be responsible for the employment of 50 people in land restoration, 40 will be active in the BushBuck Ridge area (approximately 70 km North north east of Sudwala). Ten rangers will be employed and active locally, in the Sudwala Rainforest Valley area.
The opportunity is being facilitated by ‘Project Biome’ - which is an American organization founded by Zach Bush (zachbushmd.com/about). Project Biome managed to obtain this funding opportunity via aAvoVision - with the funding being from the IDC Social Employment Fund.
This project is part of a much larger job creation initiative, and it is with gratitude to the MPWC (specially my friend and colleague December Ndhlovu), Project Biome and Avovision that we embark on this venture.
Though funding has been obtained for part time employment, we as yet don’t have any funds for operational support. We lack basic equipment, PPE, Uniforms, and basic tools. Significantly, we are in dire need of adequate transport to move our teams around. However, we are optimistic that we will manage to obtain additional support, and have reached out to several local corporations. These include timber giants Sappi and YORK Timbers, Toll Road operators TRAC-N4 and equipment and PPE suppliers TWK and Jonssons.
During the second week of October I will have the opportunity to meet with an organisation ‘Hummingbirds’ (hummingbirds.eu) who reached out to us with potential interest in supporting our land restoration efforts. They are specially interested in the carbon sequestration potential of the project, through reducing and reversing ‘forest landscape degradation’ and potentially the production of biochars.
Our website is up, with links to all our social media channels, which include Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Restore, iNaturalist and YouTube. We would appreciate it if you could take a look at the site and provide any feedback.
We are just about to reach our $3000 ‘Mini Pilot Project’ target, which would allow us to put a team of two people in the field - 5 days a week for 3 months. The aim is to identify and restore a particular area, carefully monitoring the efficacy of the intervention. The ‘Mini Pilot Project’ was conceived before we knew that we would have access to a team of 10 people two days a week, where we would also be carefully monitoring project progress. Thus we expect some ‘overlap’ in execution.
Though Clubhouse is struggling to recover its functionality after the recent major update, it remains a valuable tool to share and learn. Our regular Monday 7pm ‘Event’ has seen a reduced audience, but not as severe as has been observed in some other ‘Houses’. To me there is a clear link between the size of House membership and attendees, thus it remains important to build the house membership. At the moment, the GeaSphere House on Clubhouse has approximately 3350 members, and it is still growing daily.
We have also activated a PayPal account, and we thank those of you who tested and used it to make a gift. Some supporters prefer this method of donating, and it must be said that the platform makes international payment processing seemingly easy. There is an easy link which can be used to donate - even if you have no PayPal account.
Our Patrons on Patreon has also doubled in the last two months, thanks to those of you for your continued faith in GeaSphere, and great to see things starting to come together!
We retain faith in the utility NFT project, but recognise that we need to appeal to people in the crypto currency space, and that we would need to sharpen our ‘marketing’ of this innovative funding strategy. It is not easy to ‘onboard’ supporters who are new to NFT’s, but we are confident that the potential of this medium will grow and more people will adopt crypto currency for financial transactions.
The team from ‘Project Biome’ visited our area on Tuesday, 3 October. This was also the day that our team of ‘Field Rangers’ started with the Ecosystem Restoration work. Lacking adequate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for venturing into the wilderness, the team spent this day picking up litter from the side of the main road leading through the valley. This clean up action resulted in a full pick-up truck load of (mostly plastic) rubbish removed to the municipal landfill site.
The team from Project Biome is a wonderful group of people, warm hearts and positive attitudes. We look forward to a long lasting relationship with benefits to people and planet.
With Gratitude
Philip Owen
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