Webinar REPLAY 🌄 Guardians, Not Owners — How We Free Land for Generations to Come
Our second Freeing Land webinar went deeper and wider than any of us expected — thanks in part to those who joined and actively participated.
Whether you were there, couldn’t make it, or want to know how we can liberate land so that it can work for all of life, we’re happy to now offer:
↡ Why we organised this webinar
↡ Watch the full replay
↡ Summary & transcript
↡ The three initiatives
🌄 Why This Webinar
If we want to be part of a thriving planet, we need to recognise that the Earth belongs to no one AND to us all. But how do we make that work — not just legally, but also in how we live, organise, and relate to land day to day?
Three initiatives are each finding practical answers: the Terra Agora Foundation through law, Eternal Forest through art, ritual, and community, and Miracle Project through ecosystem revival and reinventing how we live and work together.
This webinar was for land guardians who want to protect their land for generations to come, regenerative investors, artists and ritual-makers, and anyone interested in freeing parts of the Earth from market dynamics so that this planet can work for good.
↡ Watch the full replay
↡ Summary & transcript
↡ The three initiatives
💫 Watch the Full Replay
» Inspired? Free Miracle Mountain here
Video Chapters
- 0:00 Six moments ahead
- 0:43 Why we're here
- 3:37 A promise never to sell
- 4:45 Who will tend the land?
- 8:25 Close your eyes
- 11:12 Fires that aren't wild
- 12:37 A thousand sanctuaries for a thousand years
- 15:38 From seed to sanctuary
- 20:51 Hopeless alone
- 23:23 Brace for impact? No.
- 28:10 Green firefighters
- 30:51 We're going to free a mountain
- 35:29 Animals on two feet
- 40:41 Can this travel?
- 45:10 What if the foundation disappears?
- 46:21 Lessons from France and Chile
- 51:19 Any land, any size
- 54:13 An unexpected ally in Brussels
- 56:48 How to get involved
- 1:02:57 In praise of slow
- 1:05:58 If we don't dream, who will?
↡ Summary & transcript
↡ The three initiatives
📜 Summary and Transcript
1. 🌍 Terra Agora — land that can never be sold again
Ivan Sellers
- Portugal has no trust law, so a group of people spent six years building a foundation whose only objective is never to sell the land entrusted to it: no mortgages, and four boards keeping each other in check. It now holds 1,600 hectares.
- The Terra Agora Foundation grants guardians a perpetual right of use (direito de superfície), registered on the land itself — so it holds even if the foundation were ever to disappear.
- The real key isn’t the land, but its guardians: in Portugal, 52% of farmers are over 65, and only 4% are under 40. Who will take care of the land ten years from now?
2. 🌳 Eternal Forest — a thousand sanctuaries for a thousand years
Evgenia Emets
- Eternal Forest was born after the devastating fires of 2017: “These are not wildfires. These are fires caused by our negligence, but also our disconnect from the land.”
- Its theory of change: forests can only thrive for a thousand years when they become culturally meaningful to us. That’s why Eternal Forest works on art, culture, and community even before the first tree goes into the ground.
- Every sanctuary starts with a ‘seed’ forest (as small as 50 by 50 metres), grows a circle of guardians around it, and joins a global network. Miracle Mountain will become one of them.
3. 🌄 Miracle Project — guardians, not owners
Raymundo Resink
- “Things are not just the way they are.” After 70,000 hectares burned in seven days in 2025, a community started coming together every weekend to clean up, learn, and turn landscapes into green firefighters.
- Miracle Project uses steward ownership, which separates decision-making power from economic ownership, and its statutes require land it acquires to be transferred so it can never be sold again.
- The 11 hectares of Miracle Mountain are to become a demonstration site, learning centre, and source of inspiration — with an invitation to everyone present to help free it.
4. 💬 Highlights from the Q&A
- Animals? They’re already there — two-legged ones with tools, mimicking grazers by turning dead trees into food for the soil. Sheep, chickens, and small cattle will follow once the ecosystem has recovered enough.
- Can this model travel? Similar instruments exist in Catalonia, France, and Chile, and Terra Agora has started connecting with them. In England, Julia shared, the legal landscape makes it much harder.
- What if the foundation disappears? The right of use is tied to the land itself. And, as Raymundo put it: more than legally proofing what we do, we’re creating a movement — and movements are hard to overthrow.
- A political angle: Humberto pointed to the new EU Nature Restoration Regulation: framing projects as wildfire prevention through nature restoration can help protect them.
- Room for slowness: José made a case for ‘yin regeneration’ — letting land be slow, dry, or burned for a while, learning from degraded places, and making space for the people doing the work, too.
Evgenia closed with lines from the Eternal Forest manifesto: “If we don’t dream a thousand years, who will?”
🌏 The Three Initiatives
🌳 Eternal Forest is a long-term art and ecology project creating an interconnected network of forest sanctuaries, protected for 1,000 years by the communities who steward them. Want to create a sanctuary where you live, or help with outreach and communication? Get in touch via the website.
🌍 The Terra Agora Foundation enables land stewards in Portugal to protect their landscapes from market speculation and safeguard them for long-term regeneration — whether you have 11 hectares or 2,000 square metres. For more info, check the website.
🌄 Miracle Project works to break the fire-flood-drought spiral, revive ecosystems and natural water cycles, reinvent how we live and work together, and build small-scale, living models for what the whole planet can be.
Inspired by what you see?
Help other people find this work — and help us build community:
» Repost on LinkedIn
» ♡ on Instagram
Thank you, Evgenia and Ivan — and thank you to everyone who joined, asked, and shared.
Member discussion