Climate Water Project

Restoring the world’s water cycles is a craft, one that takes time to learn, and a community to grow within. That community is being built.Water Stories is an education platform, community network, and hands-on career pathway dedicated to restoring the world’s water. It has been quietly growing, building a network of extraordinary people, advocating for landscape-scale change, and educating a new generation of practitioners in the art of working with water.Water Stories is following a similar path. It is a learning, training, and action platform focused entirely on water cycle restoration, offering a community-centered approach to some of the most pressing environmental crises we face: drought, flood, fire, and polluted water. Its award-winning films tell the stories of people who have raised their communities out of extreme environmental crises, and are available free to its online community. That community now numbers over 3,000 people from around the world, concerned about the future of fresh water, learning from one another across different landscapes and contexts, and supporting each other toward a better common future. Founded by Zach Weiss, Water Stories was created with a bold vision: to train a global force of water cycle restoration practitioners, equipped to heal landscapes wherever they are needed.Zach Weiss spent years learning to restore the water cycle from the ground up, studying under mentors including the legendary Austrian farmer Sepp Holzer, who urged him to take what he had learned and teach it to as many people as possible. That call to multiply the work is what drives Water Stories today.The methods Zach developed are focused on helping the land receive rainfall more effectively, slowing water down, guiding it into the ground, and recharging aquifers so they can feed springs and streams throughout the dry season. They are rooted in reading the landscape, observing where water flows, how slopes behave, where it pools or rushes away, and then working with those patterns rather than against them. In practice this means building terraces, planting strategically, putting in check dams, and creating water retention features that follow the land’s natural contours (in title picture above, are terraces leading into a water retention pond, that helps recharge groundwater, that Zach helped create in Montana USA). It is about restoring soil, restoring vegetation, and restoring the slow, generous movement of water through living landscapes.Farmers using these methods have withstood wildfires while neighboring properties burned, because their land was deeply hydrated going into summer. Others have seen vegetation flourish as rising groundwater reaches plant roots. The core idea is simple but profound: get the earth to receive water better, and life follows.Now, rather than doing that work alone, Zach is focused on training others to do it too, spreading these skills as widely and as fast as possible across the world.A groundswell takes hold when networks begin to form, when decentralized centers of activity emerge around the world, when people step into leadership, and when knowledge spreads person to person. Permaculture did exactly this through its Permacultue Design Courses, which perhaps half a million people have now completed, with many millions more practicing its principles worldwide. It spread like an octopus reaching into every nook and cranny of the globe, quietly shifting paradigms and transforming both landscapes and lives.The groundswell that Water Stories is one of the forces helping to build is beginning to feel like that.Yoga offers another useful parallel. It took off in the 1980s when enough teachers had been trained to make a living from their practice, creating a self-sustaining wave of growth. That is exactly what the Water Stories platform makes possible, a genuine career path in watershed restoration. Practitioners already report having more projects than they can handle, more land asking for attention than there are trained hands to tend it.Across the world, a broader awakening around water is underway. Scientists, farmers, indigenous communities, and restoration practitioners are all converging on the same understanding: that healing the water cycle is one of the most powerful things we can do for the planet. Water Stories sits right at the heart of that, with the tools, the community, and the vision to become one of its many central forces carrying that groundswell forward.Here is a lightly edited, abridged version of of our interview:Alpha: Cool, I’m excited to have on here again. You came on two years ago….. Maybe you could just start out by saying a little bit about the larger global water problem, and then how you came upon this path of actually trying to help the whole water situation in the world.Zach: When we look globally, I think the easiest, most succinct way to look at the challenges we’re facing is that right now, we’ve built landscapes that reject the rain, and what we’re seeking to do is help those landscapes receive the rain. The greater picture is of water cycle restoration, of rebalancing the full cycling of water through living ecosystems, of water retaining on the lands, of being circulated in the small water cycle, of being circulated slowly through the larger water cycle. But in daily practice, it really is just helping landscapes receive the rain instead of reject them.There’s just so much need for this around the world, there’s so much interest and demand for this work, way more than I could ever service on my own, and so we really started looking at — and Sepp Holzer pushed me towards doing this — how do we give capacity to people to do this work all around the world? I took my 5-year journey to getting where I am, and tried to condense it into 6 months, and we basically give people all of the essentials with none of the unnecessary stuff, so that by the end of that, they’re further along in activating these changes in their community. And it’s different for different types of people, you know, it’s really not a course where it’s like, come in and you’re gonna leave being an earth mover. That might be one route that you take, and that’s a route that we need lots of, but we need advocates, we need stewards, we need all these different people helping out in all of these different roles to make the changes that we’re really trying to make globally, around the world. And so we really try and just help people in that journey.The way I look at it is it’s one thing to get a map and say, okay, I can kind of figure out where I’m going here. It’s another to get a map and then have someone grab your hand and drag you along the trail, and teach you how to orient, and teach you how to read the map. And then you’ve already started that journey by the time something like the course is finished. And it’s just amazing — we just had a webinar earlier today, and within one year, people are making real changes in their communities. They’re becoming an expert in the field in their communities, because they’re actually practicing and engaging with it every day, and have this really great community of support to lean on and learn from one another as well.Alpha: One of your central teachings is this idea of the Watershed Death Spiral, and then also how we can restore it via the Revived Water Cycle. For instance, all the wildfires around the world are, in part, tied to this problem with hydration. Could you say a little bit about the wildfires, and also this idea of Revived Water Cycles and the Watershed Death Spiral?Zach: Yeah, definitely. I oftentimes joke that Australia and California are in this race to the bottom of the Watershed Death Spiral. Those two places are getting so severe, the fires are getting so crazy, and it frustrates me to no end that people aren’t even addressing the root problem of the issue. When everything’s drying out, all of the organic matter is oxidizing and turning into fuel for fire, rather than being broken down by life and becoming food for fungi. And so you very quickly get to this pattern of drought, fire, flood, drought, fire, flood — and they each beget each other. This is where we see just a huge potential to change things. The number of projects I’ve seen where drought’s no longer an issue, and flood’s no longer an issue, and they’re fire resilient — within a couple of years to a decade at most — it really just shows how clearly we have the solutions; we’re just not implementing them.You see places that have really revived the water cycle over huge areas. We were recently in India where rivers are flowing now, it’s cooler in the summer, the rains are coming, and the communities are back on the landscape. It’s just like, wow, why aren’t we doing this? This is so simple, the benefits are so extreme. And so this is really where we’re trying to lead people: how do we restore some kind of balance to our water household, so that water is slowly moving through the ecosystem again and again? And people are able to do it all over the world. This is one of the great things — it’s not something we need to wait for governments to act logically on, or for big businesses to develop some conscience. People on the ground, living on those landscapes, can do it today and see the results after the next rains.Alpha: Could say a little bit more about the drought-fire-flood cycle. Why exactly does fire lead to more floods, and why do floods lead to more droughts?Zach: So after a fire — and the temperature of the fire becomes really important too — the type of char that’s created actually changes. When it gets really hot, that char can become hydrophobic, actually repelling water. So in the extreme case, when a landscape burns very hot and the rains come, it’s rejecting the water both because it lost all its organic matter and because that organic matter has been turned into something that repels water. And even if you’re not getting that effect, all of the channels that water used to move through and be absorbed by are now broken. So you get all that water moving downstream more quickly than before, creating floods downstream, but because the water didn’t infiltrate, you’re also creating drought on that landscape.And the long-term drought leads back to fire. We’ve generally destroyed all the water-holding capacity of the landscape, then hardened it, plowed it, created hard surfaces that send water downstream, cut roads across it, dredged the waterways. We’ve done all these things to speed up water moving downhill, which creates floods downstream. But because that water is moving fast through the system instead of slowly, it creates persistent drought, which leads to fire. For example, woody matter that doesn’t have basic hydration to break down into the soil just petrifies and forms a nice fuel bundle. So you get all these effects acting collectively in the same direction.Alpha: You’re saying there’s this Revived Water Cycle, where certain intervention points help build the land’s capacity to hold water, rebuild the soil, and rebuild vegetation. And I think to some people it might not be obvious that making certain indentations in the earth. these earthworks, can actually do a big part in restoring this important cycle that could affect the whole global water cycle and climate.Zach: Yeah, it’s so simple. When you intervene in the right places and do the right things, you start this never-ending cycle, this perpetual motion machine that is nature. If you help slow down water, it creates more life, and that life creates more water, and it feeds into this smooth, steady cycling. There’s a really nice saying we picked up in India: where water runs, help it to walk. Where it walks, help it to crawl. And where it crawls, give it rest and allow it to enter into the womb of the earth.This is actually the recharge of the groundwater that then supplies so much of the downstream landscape. This is another neglected mega-crisis of our times — the overextraction of groundwater, mostly without monitoring. We all know what happens to a bank account if we just take out and never put anything back in: we go broke, and it gets ugly very quickly. That’s currently happening with groundwater in a lot of our planet. So by helping water slow down and go into the landscape where it’s concentrating and moving quickly, we’re also helping reverse groundwater depletion — actually charging up those groundwater sources. The big thing is just reading the landscape and making the right interventions at the right points, because the earth has a tremendous capacity to hold water. We want to hold water not in our built infrastructure, but in the earth’s womb, where it has an incredible ability to do so.Alpha: Do you want to say a little bit about some specifics of how you intervene? I know you did some work in Spain with the dehesas — to get agriculture going again in those degraded landscapes, your first step was restoring the water, right?Zach: Yeah, for me it always starts with water, though it’s water as part of a whole. Water, soil, vegetation — they’re all part of the same system. But looking at how a landscape is managing water is really the first step. What we were just talking about made me think of some students of ours in Chile. They had a really tough landscape almost all silt with almost no clay — and we were thinking, you’ve got a really tough go of it down there, but apply these same principles. They built crater gardens and retention ponds and retention features on their landscape, and they already have a spring that’s formed from the work they’ve done.By digging these little holes that collect water from the road and send it into the ground instead of downstream, they’re charging up the ground, making greenery, and even creating new water downstream as a result of that process. And the great part is you dig the water body once, and if you do it right, every time it rains after that it’s doing work. And even between the rains, it’s doing work — that’s why it’s so effective. It’s like a one-time investment for an era of nature doing its own work from that point forward. Th retention ponds are maybe a couple hundred square feet, with the biggest one around a thousand square feet or so. They really don’t need to be large; they need to be at the right points within the land, where they interact with the natural skin of the earth.Alpha: And just a couple of these help recharge the groundwater, which then affects the hydrological cycle?Zach: Yep, exactly. And the wonderful part is that water is also grabbing clay higher on the landscape and depositing it into their system, so they’re actually harvesting that process to improve their system over time with the clay the water is delivering.Alpha: Can you give some examples of what happens when the water table does rise? What are some examples you’ve seen in different places?Zach: Yeah, I think the most striking example I’ve seen was in India, where we recently visited. Rivers are flowing now because the groundwater has risen. In this area, 9 rivers are now flowing throughout the year as a result of groundwater recharge. 250,000 wells that were dry now have water again. But perhaps the most striking thing: in one of these areas, 6,000 violent bandits handed over their weapons and became peaceful farmers, because they have water again. When you talk about the impacts of recharging groundwater, it touches the waterways, the agriculture, the ecology, and even the way of life for people on that landscape. This was in Shambhal, in Rajasthan, in northwestern India — a very dry region. That’s where a lot of their projects are concentrated, though they’ve also done work in other parts of India.Alpha: I know that Sepp told you that you were doing great work on your own with all this water retention, but what you really needed was thousands of people doing it. And so that caused you to think about starting a school to train more people. Since I last talked to you, that school has probably grown quite a bit. Zach: Good mentors always push you to the next step. Sepp said probably the nicest thing he’s ever said to me, calling me his best student — but immediately followed it with, “but one of you is nothing! We need hundreds or thousands!” Really good mentors will just keep pushing you forward, and that led us to create Water Stories. We’ve now had around 400 students go through our training over the last couple of years, and it’s just incredible to see all of the changes they’re making around the world. It’s already dwarfed what I could ever hope to do within my lifetime, and we’re just at the beginning.Because for each one of these people, what they’re accomplishing within one year is just the start of a career path that’s going to span the next decade or two for many of them. Imagine the change they’re going to create over such a long period of time. It really gives you a lot of hope — wow, we really can do this. People really are good; they do want to do good things when they’re given the opportunity. That’s what they execute upon, and that’s why we built the course in a very strategic manner.We designed a course that is online, but it’s really at home in the sense that you need to go out onto the landscape and actually do all of these things. And if you do them, it will lead you to the next step. For example, we ask people to give a presentation in their community about water cycle restoration. That’s not primarily for the sake of spreading water cycle restoration — though that’s a nice byproduct — it’s because if they do that, that’s where their first client is going to come from: someone in the audience of that presentation. And then it leads to the network and the growth that people actually need to build a career around this. I think that’s why our program has been so successful: we give students a roadmap, all the steps needed to become a practitioner, and a community of hundreds of other people willing and able to support them on that journey. It makes it a lot easier. It’s one thing for visionary mavericks like Sepp Holzer or Rajendra Singh to accomplish all this, but for an average person like me or you, it’s a lot easier with some support, some people to help along the way, and some experienced mentors to draw upon — and that’s what we’ve set up our program to provide.Alpha: Cool. I was wondering if we could talk a little bit and tell the stories of a couple of your students. Maybe we could start with Nick Steiner, who I also know and who’s also come on this podcast. He was one of your earliest students.Zach: Yep, so Nick was in our first class, which I think was back in 2022 — the first time we ever ran the program — and a lot of incredible students came out of that, Nick being one of them. He went from being interested in these things and having quite a good skill set, but not having it be a full-time job, or a way of life, or a vocation, or a real cohesive business that earns his livelihood, to having a full-time water job.And for me, this was a very important part of the course. A lot of trainings teach you one little skill set and then ignore everything around that skill set that’s important to actually delivering it. So, for example, how do you manage clients? How do you set up your contracts? Do you hire people or not? How do you do estimates? We give the framework in the course for how I do all of those things, so that people can really easily move on to doing that themselves.And now Nick’s doing it full-time. He’s passing projects off to our other students because he has so many. It’s just really incredible to see that switch happen within a year, where it goes from something I’m interested in to something I’m working in full-time. And he’s doing really great projects for all sorts of farmers throughout Europe. He’s currently on an earth-moving project somewhere in Spain [Nick Steiner building a water body].Alpha: I know he does it with so much joy, too. What does he do on these farms? Zach: Yeah, the approach that we teach first looks at how do you understand the landscape — what’s on it, what features it has, what capacity it has. Then how do you understand the goals of the people there: what they’re trying to create, both their long-term goals and their immediate pressing challenges. And then how do you harmonize those two elements? In Spain and Portugal, water scarcity is a real limiting factor for most agriculture in the region. And yet, when the rains do come, all of that water just flows downstream away, where it can’t benefit that farmer or that landscape. So a lot of it is: where do we find the intervention points where we can do a relatively small amount of earthmoving? Now, sometimes it might be a big earthmoving project, but we want the maximum hydration outcome per amount of earth moved. For example, today he’s building a water body in an area where they found clay and some underground seams of water. He’s on the excavator, opening up the key, compacting it very diligently, creating a vessel within the earth that will receive the waters when they come and allow them to enter the ground, recharge, and rehydrate that space. Basically, they have this dying landscape that they’re trying to put back on life support and get going in the right direction.Alpha: So the idea is that when you build these retention ponds, or features that capture rainwater, they recharge the groundwater, and then vegetation can reach that groundwater, and that’s why the land becomes more alive. Is that the basic principle?Zach: Yeah, and it varies depending on the geology. In some areas, you might make a water body that specifically rehydrates a deeper aquifer, or a spring, or a waterway downstream. In some areas, you might make a water body that holds water all the way through the year, creating surface tension that wicks moisture out all around it and produces this beautiful green, hydrated zone. You might also use that water for irrigation on certain crops. So there’s a kind of spectrum between a very ephemeral water body that recharges the ground and a perennial water body that supplies surface water — from the water itself to the habitat — with a lot of things in between. The specifics of the landscape tell you what’s possible, and the goals of the people tell you whether it makes financial sense and is viable. Together, those things make it pretty clear what kind of project to move forward with.Alpha: Other students you want to mention? Zach: Yeah, one of my favorite students is from Japan. He’s been doing amazing work. They’re actually just starting a course tomorrow for Japanese speakers on food forestry and water cycle restoration. And they have a whole project now designed around the question: how do we lower the temperature of our city by a degree and a half through water cycle restoration? He’s also using it as a way to connect with the indigenous cultural heritage around water in Japan, which is very strong and very vibrant. Basically every culture in the world, if you go back far enough, has a deep reverence for water.They’ve been doing all sorts of really cool projects. One of my favorites: he started a food forest for a man who had been diagnosed with cancer and wasn’t expected to live very long. This man wanted to leave something for his children and grandchildren, so he started the project with Jun Omura, the student. And then he started enjoying it so much — it was going really well — and he just kept getting more and more full of life. He’s now far outlived his expected life expectancy. He created this garden to die in, but it’s actually become a garden to live in, giving him so much energy, and it will provide for his kids and grandkids. That was just a really special story — knowing that people are making such a big impact on people’s day-to-day lives. And then it begets itself, because that client tells his friends, and before you know it, Jun has this roadmap of projects and needs help because there are too many for just him. That’s the really powerful thing about this kind of work. Alpha: Cool. And what are some of the strategies he had to lower the city temperature? What are some of the projects?Zach: Yeah, basically making green spaces again, getting water staying in a living earth and circulating through vegetation. In their context, that means making green pockets to break up the heat island. They’re in a very industrial city, so the strategy is: how do we start to break up the concrete mass and add a bunch of cooling pockets? You know, a liter of water moving through a tree absorbs about as much energy in the form of latent heat as a regular car battery holds — about two-thirds of a kilowatt hour. So the more water you have moving through vegetation, the more localized and regionalized cooling you’re providing, breaking up those heat islands. They’ll actually be presenting on this next week on the 24th in a webinar we’re hosting — their whole strategy for how to lower the temperature a degree and a half in their city.Alpha: It is quite amazing, because every student you have creates all these ripple effects — just like when Sepp had you. So 400 people doing projects all around the world is remarkable. You have some students in Africa too?Zach: Yeah, we have a handful of students in Africa. One that comes to mind is Gonzalo, who’s been doing projects there. He was an architect who didn’t like being in such a corporate, sterile setting, wanted to find his way back to nature, came and volunteered on a project, and has since been working in South Africa on his own project and on projects for clients, building water bodies. And another student of ours, Stenbergen, in Kenya, is actually starting a project with a university — still in planning phases, but on university grounds as an education resource for people at Nairobi University. Natalie Topa is doing all sorts of amazing work throughout Africa. In many ways, I think Africa and South America are the best places to potentially lead the way here, in that they have a more direct relationship with the land and a real desire to do a little bit of work to improve their own quality of life.To give you a sense of this: we did one training in a very remote village in Mozambique. We trained 15 people — we called them water MVPs — and built one water body together. The next day, people in the community were already using that water to water their gardens, do their laundry, and meet their daily needs. But then we left, and with the help of 50 villagers, they built 26 water bodies in the two weeks that followed. So from a 5-day training with the local people, they went on to create all these little water bodies all around their village — a place where they have huge water scarcity issues in the summer and real challenges growing enough food, especially with animals coming through from the nature reserve. To have that kind of impact on people’s way of life in just a few days — there aren’t too many things where you can really do that.Alpha: Other students you want to mention?Zach: In Australia, Claire Vanderplank comes to mind. She had a big event there, and she started the Western Australia Water Alliance. She’s been doing water projects for clients and friends, but is also very focused on advocacy, because the reality is that so many people who need to know what’s possible have no idea, and so many policymakers who need to make different decisions have no idea either. This goes back to the point that we need storytellers, authors, artists, musicians — it’s not just about getting in the machines and digging the holes. That’s a critically important piece; without it, there’s nothing. But we need all these other layers around it to create real change. Claire is doing a really good job activating local communities and building community support that will make it easier and easier for her and others in the area to do projects year after year — more interest from clients, more support from regulatory bodies..Alpha: And Claire was the person who felt the river was asking her — “how come you don’t drink me?”Zach: Yeah, exactly. That’s a big part of developing a relationship with place: spending the time to let your monkey mind go quiet and receive information. She mentioned sitting next to a water body and it asking her, why don’t you drink me? And that’s a great question, because water used to be drinkable everywhere. There are entire watersheds now where it’s not even swimmable or fishable anymore, and that is shocking. That is a bad state of affairs.So this idea of being a voice for the voiceless is really important. You know, imagine the earthworm in the soil — it has no voice to say, hey, stop spraying chemicals on me, but it still suffers from them, and it has no doctor to go to for relief. So how do we each, as humans, start to be that voice? Whether it’s for the river, the forest, the earthworm, or the fish.Alpha: You provide support for your students to actually host workshops, right? Zach: Exactly, and I can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard from students: they say, well, I put together the presentation, and only 3 people showed up. But I figured I’d just give them my full attention, and they really loved it. And then they put on the next event, and it’s 12 people. And then the next one, it’s 20 people! Because this is something that just has so much potential, it’s so exciting, that it just grows and grows. There’s so much opportunity. And so, yeah, that’s exactly it — how do we make this groundswell of community activation happen?We’re trying to build community, foster networks. In a very practical sense, we’ve had a lot of situations where students from the course end up starting businesses or efforts together with other students, because they can each contribute where they have skills and capacity, and lean on others where they’re more deficient. And it’s just a lot more fun and enjoyable for everyone to push that boulder uphill together, rather than each person trying to push their own boulder alone.Alpha: And in your education platform, you have some different tracks, too, right? One for people who really want to work the land and help clients, one for people who want to work their own land, and one for advocates working on policy. And I know you have someone in Oregon who’s pushing some policy around water?Zach: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, a group of several students banded together and formed PLUG Oregon — Permaculture Land Users Group Oregon. Last I talked to them, they were getting very close to pushing through some exemptions that would allow farmers to create water retention features and hold rainwater. Because the reality is water law in the western US is so broken — it’s just a total mess — and it actually makes it very difficult for people to do meaningful projects. And so this group of students said, let’s fix this in our state.And the reality is, when you speak with confidence, clarity, and a pure heart, people listen. So, yeah, we have these three different archetypes. The person who wants to do it professionally and earn their livelihood doing this. The steward who wants to do it on their own place. And the advocate who’s going to share this with the world. They all have a really important role. We have a lot of retirement-age people do our course through the advocate track, and they’re the ones who, in many ways, create the opportunities for young professionals. Alpha: And over the last two and a half years since I last talked to you, how would you say this whole water movement has been evolving?Zach: You know, it’s been really interesting to see it start to get a lot more mainstream traction than I ever would have imagined. Since we last spoke, I’ve worked on a job for the Department of Defense. The Water Conference had a whole segment on the power of green water for climate stability. The Global Commission for the Economics of Water has released a series of reports. A European Union Commission released reports saying, basically, we need to do decentralized water retention all throughout Europe to solve these challenges. So it’s definitely starting to get a lot more mainstream attention.But the big thing I keep coming back to is: give all of my time and energy to the people who are the future practitioners. They do so much in one year’s time, and they give so much inspiration to each other and help support each other. When we have events, it’s like this little village forms of the best people in the world — these amazing little experiences. So I’ve really come to see: these are the people who are going to do it, and I should do everything in my power to support them, get them off and running, and be there for them over the years as they need it. The webinar we just did today — I left so inspired. It’s crazy, because I started all of this about 4 years ago, and now I look at it and think, wow, these people are so inspiring. How are they doing so much so quickly?It’s like we’re all part of this superorganism, each getting to push in a little bit and contribute what we have. And it honestly restores a lot of my faith in humanity. I often tell people, I live in this tiny little bubble, and in my bubble, everyone wants to help, everyone is an altruistic person — and I love my tiny little bubble. I want to stay in it. And this bubble is just slowly growing. When people enter it, they’re like, oh, it’s really nice in here, this is really fun, everyone’s really supportive — and that just helps it grow a little bit at a time.Alpha: Cool. Yeah, it sounds like getting in on the ground floor of a whole movement. Do you want to say a bit about your upcoming course — when it is, how long it runs, and how people can sign up?Zach: Yeah, so we have a live and a self-paced version. It’s the same basic content, but the live version is a cohort of students from around the world, with live sessions with me and a whole bunch of extras if you’re able to participate in real time. People like both versions, but they say it’s well worth it to do the live — the live sessions alone are worth it. Registration is open now through March 27th, and then the program starts and runs for 6 months as we go through all the content together. But it really is also a long-term thing. After the 6 months, it moves into an alumni membership, which people are welcome to join. We have people still meeting each month who started with us at the very beginning, years ago, and you can come and go as you like.And that’s the other big thing I’ve found: for some people, 6 months and they’re off and running — great. For others, that journey might take a year or two, or even five years. So how do we build a community of support so that all these different journeys can reach their destination? So it’s a 6-month program, then open-ended. There are sessions and new videos every week, and it’s all set up so everything is asynchronous except for the live sessions. It’s not a case of joining a call and sitting through a lecture you could have watched as a recording. It’s all built around watching the produced content beforehand, and then getting together to discuss it — so we can really dive deep into each topic and each module together. It opens once a year in the spring, runs through the end of September or October, and then the self-paced option is available anytime.Alpha: Cool. And this is the Water Stories course. How people can find it?Zach: WaterStories.com. The Water Stories Core Course is what we call the program. And for people who aren’t sure yet, we have a lot of free content — films, animations. If you’re not ready to jump in, we say spend a year just digesting all of it so you can really get the maximum out of the program when you do. A lot of people spend years learning from the free content, and then when they’re really ready to make that big leap, they enter the program. We just released a new film last week and will be releasing another one next week, because we really just want to get this information out there. So check out the stories section of WaterStories.com. We also have a Mighty Network community, a great place to meet other people and learn from one another. There are a lot of next steps you can take even if you’re not ready to jump into the course.Alpha: And what’s the time commitment for the course?Zach: It depends how much you want out of it, but I tell people to expect 5 to 10 hours per week if you want to become a professional by the end of 6 months. Some people may even want more. It’s basically 2 hours of content, 2 hours of live sessions, and then 2 to 6 hours of outdoor activities, because the course really is what you make of it. We lead you toward all the actions, but if you don’t do them, you’re going to learn half as much. So it’s definitely worth making sure you have enough time when you sign on.Alpha: Okay, cool. Thanks, that sounds great. Well, it’s been great having you on, and I’m excited to be part of this water movement with you. Any concluding words?Zach: I’m just excited for your forthcoming book — I can’t wait to read it. I think the biggest thing I’d say is: just get out there and do it. Sepp Holzer always told me, do something and something happens. Go outside in the rain. The water will teach you everything you need to know — where to intervene, where not to intervene, all of it. Just get out there and start reading from the Book of Nature, and you’ll be really surprised what it tells you.………………………………………………….The Water Stories course begins this Friday Mar 27th, 2026 if you are interested in signing up. https://www.waterstories.com/core-course. If you enter the code ‘CLIMATEWATERPROJECT’ you can get $100 off the course.Course Intro video ………………………………………………………………….. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

The idea of bringing back the beaver to the UK was an idea that was scoffed as too eccentric, even by environmentalists. But Derek Gow, against a lot of opposition, has pioneered bringing the beaver back, so that they are now once again part of the UK landscape, restoring the wetlands and rivers.Born in Dundee in 1965, Gow left school at seventeen and spent his early years in agriculture. He was inspired by the writing of Gerald Durrell, and jumped at the chance to manage a European wildlife park in central Scotland before moving on to develop two nature centres in England. That early immersion in wildlife conservation set him on a path that would eventually make him, in the words of George Monbiot the person who has done more to restore Britain's missing fauna than anyone else in the country (words written in the blurb for Gow’s memoir).Gow was the first to import and quarantine beavers for projects in the UK, sourcing animals from Poland, Bavaria, and Norway. It was the opening salvo in what would become a long and often maddening battle against institutional resistance. Since the early 1990s, in the face of outright opposition from government, landowning elites, and even some conservation professionals, Gow imported, quarantined, and assisted the reestablishment of beavers in waterways across England and Scotland, while responding to the opposition with characteristic bluntness, charm, and what his supporters describe as an almost reckless willingness to keep pushing when anyone else would have given up.Beavers were once common throughout England, Wales, and Scotland but became extinct in the sixteenth century, hunted for their fur, meat, and castoreum - a secretion used in perfumes, food, and medicine. Their disappearance was the removal of a keystone engineer from the landscape. Beaver dams create wetlands, slow water flows, filter pollutants, and provide habitat for an extraordinary range of species. Through gnawing on stems and coppicing trees, beavers stimulate regrowth that provides homes for more insects and birds, while also enabling more constant water flows and better water retention during droughts. In 2015, several families of beavers were reintroduced in Devon, in the UK, as part of the River Otter Beaver Trial - the first legally sanctioned reintroduction of an extinct native mammal in the country. Over the following five years, the two original breeding pairs expanded to at least eight, and researchers found 28 dams built across the catchment, impounding water across nearly two kilometres of watercourse. Findings from the trial showed that beavers reduced flood flows by up to 60%, even during very wet weather, by holding back water in newly created wetlands and allowing it to trickle out slowly rather than surge downstream. In the flood-prone village of East Budleigh, a family of beavers constructed six dams upstream, with the measurable result that peak flood flows through the village were significantly reduced. The animals were also found to clean water supplies, removing large quantities of soil, manure, slurry, and fertilisers from rivers and streams. Beavers have been steadily increasing their numbers over the years. There are now over 2000 in Scotland, and around 500 in England. Wildlife trusts are looking to release more this year.Today, Gow farms a 300-acre property on the Devon-Cornwall border that he is transforming into a rewilding haven, while continuing to be influential in the reintroduction of the Eurasian beaver, the water vole, and the white stork in England. He has written about the whole extraordinary saga in his book Bringing Back the Beaver.Here is an edited, abridged section of our interviewAlpha: This whole field of water restoration and rewilding - how did you get into it? Derek: I started working with water voles which are a very small animal in Britain. Water voles are one of the characters in Kenneth Graham’s book The Wind in the Willows. The character of Ratty, sculling up and down the idyllic English River with his friends, used to represent a very common animal. They were incredibly common in British waterways from the beginning of the twentieth century, and writers at the time referred to their overwhelming presence.Around 100 years ago water voles prospered. But by the 1960s and 70s, canalization of rivers, concrete banks, pollution, and the introduction of North American mink from fur farms caused massive declines. The animals once lived in chains of colonies along waterways. When those chains break and populations fragment, they can’t find unrelated mates and they disappear.Today the species has lost around 97% of its British range. The remarkable thing is that they are extremely robust. If you reintroduce them correctly with the right gene base and numbers, they recover easily. Their decline shows how harshly we’ve treated the Earth.I began working on water vole reintroductions about thirty years ago. We’ve learned a lot, though we haven’t saved them entirely. Early in that work, digging ponds and cutting trees to create wetlands, we began to realize something else must once have been doing this before us. And somebody eventually asked: do you understand what beavers do? At the time, I really didn’t.So in the early 1990s I went to Poland and spent a month visiting wetlands where beavers had been reintroduced in the 1960s. Wading through these incredible ponds with floating islands of vegetation, orchids flowering, frogs jumping away, dragonflies landing on your head—you reach the great beaver lodges in the middle of this living world.You quickly realize the animal that created habitat for water voles and many other species is the beaver. People call them a keystone species, but beavers are bigger than that. They are a function of nature itself. Apart from humans and elephants, they may be the third most impactful species on the planet in terms of habitat creation. That was my first journey into understanding beavers.Alpha: So you were a farmer when you started introducing the voles?Derek: Yes, on and off. I was also working on conservation projects. And water voles and beavers became central to those.When I started talking about bringing beavers back to Britain in the mid-1990s, people laughed. Most conservationists thought it was ridiculous.Yet when I traveled to Poland, Germany, Russia, and the United States where beavers had been reintroduced, I realized it was perfectly feasible. Much of Britain still has the trees beavers need. The problem wasn’t ecology—it was misunderstanding and inertia. Historically beavers were heavily hunted for fur and for a substance called castoreum in their scent glands, which contains salicylic acid, related to pain relief compounds. Because of hunting, their populations collapsed. By the early twentieth century only about two thousand remained in Eurasia. Governments eventually protected them, and slowly populations began recovering.Alpha: And there are two species of beavers, right? The North American and the European?Derek: Yes. When Europeans arrived in North America there may have been about 100 million beavers. The fur trade reduced them to around 2.5 million. In Eurasia the collapse happened over a longer period but was just as catastrophic.Ecologists studying North America have been able to track the environmental impact of removing beavers. Rivers eroded, floods increased, soils washed away, chemicals flowed into waterways, and ecosystems collapsed. Our pursuit of beavers was ruthless.Yet ancient cultures understood their importance. Leaders of the Zoroastrian religion in Iran over two thousand years ago forbade killing the “water dogs,” warning that deserts would advance if they were destroyed.Alpha: Wow. They figured that out that long ago?Derek: Yes. But modern societies largely forgot.Alpha: So when beavers build dams, how does that affect rivers and floodplains?Derek: Beavers are lazy animals. When they first arrive in a landscape with wetlands, they live easily—floating around eating reeds and plants. But they are territorial. As populations grow, younger animals move upstream into smaller creeks where they build dams.These dams create wetlands that act like giant sponges. During heavy rainfall the wetlands absorb water and slow its movement. Water can take ten times longer to pass through the system than it otherwise would. That breaks flood peaks for communities downstream.A great example is the Bridge Creek project on the John Day River in Oregon. Conservationists built structures to help beavers rebuild dams. The beavers reinforced them, slowing water flow and reducing flood damage dramatically. Beavers can have enormous effects, but only if we allow them enough space.Alpha: So many rivers today are straightened and engineered, but naturally they would be braided and slow-moving?Derek: Exactly. Nature never produced anything that flows in a straight line. Humans did that. For centuries we drained wetlands, built pumps, and tried to enslave water. Now climate change brings heavier rainfall and the water pushes back into places where we built our towns. We call that a disaster. But really it’s nature reclaiming what was always hers. The sooner we reshape landscapes to work with water again, the sooner we’ll realize the beaver may be one of our best allies.Alpha: So how is the rewilding effort going in the UK and Europe?Derek: So the rewilding movement in the UK… There’s a huge amount of talk about rewilding. The most famous rewilding project in the UK is a place called Knepp Castle in Sussex, and that is the home of a couple called Charlie Burrell and Izzy Tree. They have effectively rewilded their estate over the last quarter century for nature, and the results of what they’ve done, the cessation of farming, the use of big old breeds of domestic animals as proxies for extinct animals, has just been remarkable.The response of all the other wild species that live there is incredible. Bird numbers have risen with much greater diversity and abundance, and it really shows that if you approach even meat production in a different way — lower densities of animals, feeding them no extra supplements — you can create a landscape that is very rich in other life while still keeping some cattle.Elsewhere in Britain you’ve got other people talking about rewilding. There are all sorts of shapes and forms that it takes, from managed landscapes with very low densities of domestic animals to places where perhaps some wild ungulates are present — though there are very few of those left in Britain. Maybe a few wild boar and a few red deer.Different organizations and individuals are doing this for different reasons, so it is slowly growing in Britain as a way of approaching land use. But our government is incredibly hesitant about it, and our nature conservation authorities can be very difficult when it comes to moving this process forward quickly.To be brutally frank, things like the beavers, the reintroduction of the beaver , has been a thirty-year battle with all sorts of obstacles. The nature conservation organizations really did not help much at all until about the last five years. Even now, when it comes to government organizations, the bureaucracy involved with removing a few beavers into a new river system — it would be easier to move nuclear missiles and point them at the Irish than it would be to move the beavers.Europe is much more advanced. There’s been a huge degree of liberal thinking and action there, again for possibly about thirty years. One of the best parts of Europe to visit if you want to look at initial rewilding is the Netherlands. There have been large projects like the Oostvaardersplassen above Amsterdam where they’ve taken six thousand hectares of what was going to be industrial land reclaimed from the bed of the North Sea and allowed wild herds of large herbivores to live there and regulate themselves. This allowed the plant landscapes to develop and drew much other wildlife to it.Now all the way through Europe you see different projects of different sorts, with different species and habitats forming, and it is incredibly encouraging.When you look at responses to wolf reintroduction — for example in places like Yellowstone and Colorado in the United States — and then compare it with the Netherlands, which people imagine as windmills and tulips, the wolves are right the way through that landscape now. They are in people’s back gardens eating pygmy goats. People encounter them on walks while Nordic walking or walking their dogs.In the main everybody regards their presence quite rationally. A few weeks ago a wolf attacked and bit a child and it was shot, but nobody is jumping up and down about it or making a huge fuss that the wolf is back.If you look at that over time, we do evolve as a species in our relationship with nature. If wolves had returned to the Netherlands fifty years ago the main response would have been to kill them all. Now the vast majority of people are prepared to tolerate them.Alpha: Do you want to say a bit about your efforts to reintroduce the beaver — where you introduce them and what you had to fight through?Derek: My efforts to reintroduce the beaver… well, now we’re reintroducing them into habitats that are suitable. In the last few weeks the first licenses have come through to put more beavers out in England, and to reach the point where we had that official permission has taken nearly a quarter of a century.When the beavers first came, I imported them for areas where landowners were putting up large fences and keeping them in enclosed areas. But sooner or later beavers — which are basically made by God with bolt cutters on their faces — got through the fences and out into the surrounding wetlands and simply started living there.So there have been illegal colonies of beavers living free in England without licenses for maybe twenty years or more.My role was importing these animals and giving them to people. Nobody broke the law initially; some of the beavers simply escaped.Now we hold beavers for projects that are going to release them into wetlands. We have big buildings on the farm designed for this. Beaver families come here and stay for a couple of weeks where we feed and look after them before they move on to their final destination. It’s like a beaver hotel.Initially there was a lot of advocacy — film work, media, talking to organizations about beavers. I don’t do much of that anymore. I think no human being can do that for their entire life and remain balanced. You have to move on to other interests.My interests now are restoring other species that depend on beavers, such as water voles, or species that benefit from beaver wetlands like white storks. Because not many people are working on those creatures, that’s where I focus now.The whole thing has changed greatly from being a lonely guerrilla war to something where many organizations and individuals are involved with restoring beavers.I have beavers living free on my farm, and in the summer evenings my greatest pleasure is to get a bottle of cider, sit outside with binoculars, and watch them doing whatever they’re doing and watch all the other life that revolves around them.I don’t want to fill in any more forms on their behalf or fight any more political battles. Those days are done.Alpha: Thank you so much for getting the whole movement going. Do you want to say a bit about the white storks and what you’re doing with them?Derek: When the beaver disappeared and we destroyed the wetlands, we also destroyed everything that lived in them — fish, waterfowl, cranes, white storks, black storks, bitterns, everything.White storks were once recorded nesting in Britain in the 1400s and again after the Second World War. From the time of the ancient Greeks and Aesop they were seen as symbols of joy, recovery, hope, and rebirth.But in Britain when they sat on the roofs of people’s houses we simply thought: there’s lunch. So we killed them.As the species recovered in Europe they sometimes passed over Britain, but they would not breed here because birds have to be born somewhere to think of it as home. If no young storks are born in Britain, none will return here to nest.So our project began with a feasibility study in 2017. With funding from Knepp Estate we imported orphaned storks from a wildlife hospital in Warsaw Zoo.Some could fly and some could not. The ones that could fly eventually left, but over time birds in the enclosures and the free-flying birds started breeding.They built nests high in oak trees around Knepp. Last year there were around forty-seven nests and the numbers grow every year. The aim is to restore the stork as a breeding bird in Britain.Britain is a very conservative country, and some conservationists argue there are not enough historical records to prove they belong here. You can spend years arguing with people about that.But when ordinary people see these great birds spiraling into the sky or landing on their chimneys, they realize how spectacular nature can be. In a time when Britain is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, we need symbols of hope.The white stork has become one of those symbols.Alpha: So nature itself can regenerate quite fast if we get it started again?Derek: Nature can regenerate if we help it. We’re very good at cultivating animals we want to eat — billions of chickens, millions of cattle.But if we decide to help other creatures as well, there can be a different future for us as a species. We don’t have to be the plague we’ve become; we can be something benevolent.Around the world there are remarkable people who devote their lives to the creatures they love.Governments rarely save species. Often governments initially support industries destroying them. But small groups of committed people can change everything.When North American bison were reduced to fewer than a thousand animals, a handful of people protected small herds. Those herds became the foundation for the hundreds of thousands of bison that exist today.Alpha: On your farm you’ve turned it into a sanctuary for wildlife. Can you say a bit about that?Derek: I originally accumulated about four hundred acres of land near Dartmoor. I used to farm here.Now there are a few cows, but they are here as lawnmowers and to provide dung and hair for insects and birds. They are not here for meat or milk.The grasses and herbs grow tall like hayfields. Voles live beneath them, insects burrow into the roots, dung beetles roll the manure into balls and take it underground.We have opened perhaps a hundred ponds. The beavers create more wetlands every year. Birds like skylarks that once were absent are now breeding here.Soon white storks will fly here and build nests on the farm buildings. We’ve reintroduced wild geese, water voles, water frogs, and many other species. Tomorrow we’re even moving ants to restore anthills that were plowed away decades ago.We’re not saving the planet, but we are creating a place where people can see what is possible and be inspired.Alpha: Do you have any advice for people who want to get into rewilding?Derek: My advice is simple — bloody do it. This is not a rehearsal.It’s easy to sit in an armchair and assume someone else will take responsibility. If something truly matters to you, look at what you can do and do it.If you wait too long, age will catch up and the opportunity will pass.Do it quickly and enjoy the rewards and the fun and satisfaction that come from helping life prosper. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

I met Stephanie Betts a couple of months ago and was struck by her dynamic and enthusiastic energy. She had launched a pioneering, ambitious, and viable project to restoring the water cycle in a large scale systems way. Last week we sat down and talked about her project and her life.Stephanie Betts had worked in law and investment banking and was leading meetings between M&G (global investment manager) , the Bank of England and NGOs like Client Earth, looking at best practice governance for climate. Then came her first aha moment: the CEO of AXA, a major French multinational insurance company, declared to her that a world at plus four degrees would no longer be insurable. Insurance, she realized, wasn’t just a financial instrument. It was the key to dealing with climate change.She pivoted into insurance, becoming Head of Climate Alliances, Coalitions & Reporting for Aon - an insurance broker, that matches risk with capital, clients with underwriters, and counts major corporations and governments as clients.Insurance, at its core, is about understanding and pricing risk. The industry runs on calculating probabilities and turning them into prices. Stephanie started looking at something more fundamental than individual premiums. She was seeing entire sectors, entire geographic regions, becoming uninsurable. When water systems fail, it’s not just one farm or one business that becomes too risky to cover. It’s everyone who depends on that watershed. The insurance industry had been tracking this for years through their payouts: floods and droughts accounted for a large proportion of their disaster claims. But what Stephanie realized was that this wasn’t just about paying out more claims. It was about approaching a threshold where the risk becomes so high, so unpredictable, that insurance itself breaks down. Whole classes of people, whole industries, would simply have no coverage available at any price. The system only works if risks are manageable and calculable.Even before joining Aon, she had realized that water was important. But now it was getting clearer it was the fundamental risk underlying everything. Water runs through so many industries, from agriculture and technology to manufacturing and energy. It is the foundation of our society and the basis of our food security. As she puts it: “The risk isn’t just to the individual crop; it’s the dependency of our entire society on water. If the watershed fails, the entire economic system becomes uninsurable. We have to treat the water cycle as the ultimate infrastructure.” From within Aon, who initially just saw Stephanie’s interest in water as a hobby, she started to educate and convince the network around her of the importance of water.Then came her next aha moment: she realized farming was key to the whole water issue. Agriculture uses a large percentage of our total water supply, and the water footprint of regenerative agriculture was much smaller than industrial farming. Regenerative agriculture was the way to deal with water. She began to focus intensely on this connection. She saw that insurance could be a way to unlock investments, to get money flowing toward solutions. For the food industry, a switch to regenerative agriculture would make them less risky to insure. As she explains: “Insurance is the seed of resilience. By leveraging risk analytics, we can move from simply paying for a disaster to incentivizing the prevention of one. We are matching risk capital to the transition.”In other words: instead of just writing checks after disasters happen, insurance companies could lower premiums for farmers who prevent disasters from happening in the first place. But more importantly, by fixing the underlying water risk, they could keep entire sectors and regions insurable.The claims data said that regenerative farmers filed far fewer insurance claims than industrial farmers. They were more resilient. Through decades of heavy machinery and chemicals, industrial soil had become compacted and lifeless. When heavy rain hit, the ground acted like concrete. The water ran off, taking the topsoil and crops with it, leading to massive flood claims.Regenerative farmers, using cover crops and avoiding tilling, had rebuilt the organic matter in their soil, creating a sponge effect. High-carbon, aerated soil can hold up to ten times its volume in water. In a flood, the soil sponge absorbs the excess. In a drought, that same sponge slowly releases stored moisture back to the plants. Regenerative crops often stay green for weeks longer than neighboring industrial crops during heatwaves.For an insurer, it was key that a single farming practice lowered the probability of having to pay out claims on both ends of the extreme weather spectrum. Both floods and droughts. As Stephanie explains: “When we restore the soil sponge, we aren’t just fixing a farm; we are protecting the collateral. Healthy soil is an appreciating asset because it builds its own resilience against both flood and drought.”In financial terms, collateral is what backs up a loan. If a farmer borrows money to operate, the land is the collateral. If that land becomes degraded and can’t produce crops reliably, it becomes worthless as collateral. But healthy soil that can weather both floods and droughts? That becomes more valuable over time, not less.Industrial plants had “tiny little roots” because they were “spoon-fed” fertilizers at the surface. They didn’t need to work for their food. During extreme weather events, these shallow-rooted plants were easily uprooted. In healthy soil, plants had to reach deep into the earth to find nutrients and interact with fungi. Some of these roots could be a meter long, creating a massive underground anchor system. When storms hit, these plants stayed put.Industrial farming also created economic volatility. Wild swings in costs and income. It depends heavily on expensive, energy-intensive inputs like fertilizers and pesticides. If gas prices spiked or supply chains broke, the industrial farmer’s costs skyrocketed. If they couldn’t afford the inputs, the crop failed. Regenerative farmers used the soil’s natural biochemistry to provide nutrients, creating more stable, predictable business models. For an insurer, a farmer with lower, more stable costs is less likely to go bankrupt during a bad year.Stephanie applied this to what she calls the earth’s “first mile.” The beginning of the supply chain, where raw materials are actually grown in the soil. Industrial farming had turned fields into a toxic cocktail of compacted dirt. “Industrial farming has created a toxic cocktail of soil degradation,” she says. “From a financial perspective, this turns the land into a depreciating asset. It’s essentially mining the future to pay for the present.”A depreciating asset is something that loses value over time, like a car. Industrial farmland, stripped of its nutrients and ability to hold water, becomes less and less productive. It’s like slowly destroying the machine that makes your money.When rain hit these degraded fields, it ran off like it would from a parking lot, causing the downstream floods that insurance programs struggled to cover. The realization was that they needed to pay farmers to deal with flood and food security. To fix the problem at its source.Then came the next step: to shift this system, we needed to focus on supply chains.To understand why this matters, you have to step back and look at the fundamental question: what are the levers for large-scale change to restore water on this planet? Economics is one of the fundamental driving forces of societal behavior. And supply chains (the networks that move commodities from soil to shelf) are the basis of how the economic system actually works. They’re not just logistics; they’re the invisible architecture that determines what gets grown, how it gets grown, and who profits from it. If you’re looking for an innovative leverage point to shift the whole system, supply chains provide exactly that. Change the rules at the chokepoints (the handful of massive companies that sit between millions of farmers and billions of consumers) and the entire system has to adapt.A few key companies control the flow of massive amounts of commodities. Change the rules at those chokepoints, and the entire system shifts. A powerful real-world example of this is the Flood Re model in the UK. Historically, insurance companies viewed floodplains simply as high risk. But as one-in-a-hundred-year floods began happening every decade, the industry reached a breaking point. They realized they couldn’t just keep raising premiums or building higher concrete walls. They had to manage the risk at its source. This led to a key moment for the industry, where they became advocates for nature-based solutions, recognizing that floodplains act as natural relief valves. They impacted where development occurred by refusing to give insurance to people who built on floodplains. For the food industry operating on just-in-time logistics (where ingredients arrive exactly when needed with no excess inventory), any break in the supply chain is a massive financial hit. A drought in Brazil means no cocoa. A flood in Vietnam means no rice. Studies show that during drought years, regenerative fields can maintain yields up to 90% better than conventional neighbors. For corporations, that would mean consistent raw materials and protection against the price spikes that happen when harvests fail.As Stephanie points out: “Investors and banks are looking for stability. In a world of volatile climate ‘fat-tails,’ nature-based solutions aren’t just ‘nice to have.’ They are a strategic hedge against systemic collapse.” (Fat-tails refers to extreme events that are supposed to be rare but are becoming more common.) She used this argument, showing insurance companies and investment banks how to lower their risk and depreciation, and enlightening food corporations how valuable regenerative agriculture could be for protecting their businesses, to begin building a global partnership. After leaving Aon, she’s launched a project which has been assembling major food corporations, investment banks, and insurance agencies to incentivize and help finance the shift from industrial agriculture to regenerative agriculture. Their goal is to redirect several billion a year to create this shift.“De-risking the first mile of the supply chain will help scale food production sustainably to feed a growing global population, while limiting supply chains’ impact on nature,” she explains. “Producers will benefit from lower raw material volatility. They will also have access to crop data on a real-time basis, allowing for transparency, risk management, and reporting.” They are initially focusing on cocoa, coffee, cotton, soy, and palm oil, water-intensive crops, for which a switch to regenerative agriculture will have a huge impact on the global water and soil footprint. By making regenerative agriculture the new standardized requirement for these commodities, she’s working to use the leverage of global supply chains. The transformation is similar to what happened with the palm oil industry. For decades, activists and governments struggled to stop deforestation through treaties and local laws, with little success. The real tipping point will occur will when a handful of global traders (the chokepoint companies sitting between millions of farmers and billions of consumers) realize deforestation had become a massive financial and reputational liability. A regional example of this shift began in 2013 when Wilmar International, the world’s largest palm oil trader, adopted a “No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation” policy. Within just one year, nearly all major global traders followed suit, bringing over 90 percent of the world’s palm oil trade under similar sustainability commitments. By setting these requirements at the refinery and trading level, the industry created a powerful market signal: if a producer’s methods didn’t meet the new standard, they risked losing access to the global market entirely. Once satellite monitoring caught up to these corporate pledges, palm oil-linked deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia plummeted, eventually dropping by over 90 percent from its peak.By proving to insurers, investment banks and corporations that regenerative agriculture protects their concerns of food stability and supply chain reliability, Stephanie's working to turn the insurance industry and global supply chains into engines for water and soil restoration. Below is edited version of segments our interview. In the full audio version, you might find the final third particularly intriguing if you are interested in finding out more about how supply chains can be such a leverage for restoring water and soil. …...Alpha: Hi, it’s great to be here. I have with me today Stephanie Betts. Welcome.Stephanie: Thanks, Alpha, it is really nice to meet you again. I’m really excited to be on the podcast. A lot of people used to say water was my hobby. I’m glad to see that it’s not just mine. It’s a real topic that many people are spending a lot of time thinking about now, which is great. Alpha: Yeah, great to have you. You’re going to bring a different dimension to this whole water topic that we don’t talk about as much, which is the insurance and some of the finance side.Stephanie: Yes. My background is a bit different from a lot of people you’ve interviewed because I spent a bit of time looking at the archive to make sure we brought something that was a bit different. It’s not so much about the science of water and what happens—really gaining a deep understanding of the water cycle, which is fascinating and something we learn about all the time—but it’s really about how we move forward. It’s about solutions, action, and how we handle the risk that we’re facing now. We have increasing dependencies that we’re more aware of in terms of business and the global economies and the way they work.In a way, that’s not linear. We’re facing risks that are starting to be multi-layered and nonlinear, and how do you deal with that? I think the goal is to think in systems because if you look at water, it’s a very layered system. You have transportation, rain, cloud seeding, plants, and roots—all sorts of ways in which water connects to other parts of the system. I think that if we want to address the large-scale problems we’re facing on the planetary level, we need to start thinking in layered systems as well.On planet Earth we have enough water so far for most people to live comfortably (if we set aside the 2 billion plus people who actually do not have access to safe water already) means we’ve been lucky to have these “pale blue dots.” What do we do next to make sure we can stay, and that the next 50 years do not see us disappearing? Because if you run out of water, you run out of life. It’s a pretty urgent situation.Alpha: I’m excited to dive into these solutions with you, but how about we first get into how you got into water and your background?Stephanie: My background is actually law. I started as a disclosure lawyer working for a law firm called Sullivan & Cromwell, which is a well-known Wall Street law firm. That had a profound influence on me because I’ve always had this idea that you need transparent information; investors need to make the right decision. If you do not have the right level of information, you cannot make the right decision and you end up with financial markets that are not working optimally. From there, I went to investment banking and brokering for nearly 20 years where I worked for Lehman Brothers first, then JP Morgan and Citigroup. I’ve done my “tour of duty” in the big funds in the financial system.From there, I set up a sustainable business which brought me a bit more forward as to what is happening outside of finance. I realized people didn’t know very much. I realized that finance knew enough to take action, but they were not yet taking the right action. So I decided after 10 years of setting up this business—which involved cotton, hence why the water footprint became important for me—to go back to the City like an activist hiding in plain sight, trying to find the levers for change.I decided not to go back to my old world because I knew that investment banking world. I decided to go into asset management because they were my former clients and I wanted to see how people who manage huge amounts of money embed climate risk. I joined M&G for about four years, ended up working with the Bank of England and engaging with their climate unit to see how we could improve our practices as a firm to disclose more on climate. How are we going to hook financial systems to the right level of disclosure so we can get to the right outcomes? After that, I realized that finance is good, but it’s not really where the big lever is. I know it sounds odd, but actually what I found out is that it was insurance. I decided to join insurance just to get under the skin of it all, so I joined AON, the global insurance broker. That was phenomenal because there I had a first-hand view of what clients are thinking about when looking at risk, what kind of risk they are looking at, and what insurers are able or not able to do.That was the beginning of my thinking around water, which led me to set up my own business about two years ago to tackle that problem. I’m happy to delve more into the issues we’ve seen and how we’ve designed a platform and a solution to hopefully start. It’s a complicated thing, but I’m thinking again in terms of engineering: how we kickstart change and make sure we can hook the best solutions that already exist to better outcomes. We do not have the time to reinvent the wheel. We do not have the time to totally change capitalism, but we can rewire certain areas of it and that alone will give us the levers to get better outcomes.Alpha: Well, you have a fascinating background coming in from this with investment banking and the sustainable business side. A lot of people do think finance is the leverage and are worried about how economics and money fit together. It’s interesting that your insight was that it was insurance that was the lever. Do you want to explain a little bit more?Stephanie: Yes, there were two levers. It was really interesting. I remember the precise moment. I was always concerned about climate. When I left the City 20 years ago and I told my clients, “Guys, I’m going to be away. I’m having children. I don’t know when I’m back, but watch out for clean air and clean water. We’re going to be running out of all of that, and keep an eye on commodities.” That was my farewell to them. I could see that India and China were expanding and industrializing at a fast rate. In Europe—I’m speaking from England, but I’m French (and half Haitian, which is interesting for topics like water problems, erosion, and deforestation)—you could see it took the developed world 200 years to get there while China and India were doing this over 50 years. You can see the strain it brings on the systems and the entire population, which is exploding worldwide. We’ve gone from 5 or 7 billion to looking at 10 billion very shortly. Suddenly we’ve doubled the population, but the resources have shrunk. We need to manage that, and water is at the absolute nexus of all of that.One day, I was sitting next to an elevator doing some research for a presentation, and I came across a quote from the then CEO of AXA who said that a world at +4 degrees would no longer be insurable. That was that. There was a before and after. As a lawyer, you think an uninsurable world is a very scary world. As a young adult, I did an internship in Haiti where the rule of law was non-existent. I could really see what an uninsurable world looks like. You buy a house and someone says it’s not your house. You try to sell it and they say no. People come and seize your property. You’re not insured for anything. If you cannot insure your car, you’re not going to get in your car. If you cannot insure a project, that project is not going ahead. Interestingly, you can have the money from finance, but if insurance doesn’t want to insure a program or an asset, your asset is now valueless. You’re starting to see that in pockets of California where people are struggling to get insurance for their homes. Insurance has a huge role to play as a lever.Then a very good friend of mine, who was a very senior underwriter at Munich Re, and I used to chat about work. The more I talked about it, the more I thought what they were doing was interesting. They were insuring everything. I thought, “Is there anything you do not insure?” and he said, “No, because if the world has to go around, you need insurance.” When I put the two together, I knew I had to go into insurance. That’s when I went to AON. It was clear that for many clients, especially in the food and beverage area, climate change was the biggest issue. They didn’t necessarily know how to handle it and the long-term structural problems like yield attrition and lack of water.Alpha: Say more on AON.Stephanie: AON is one of the largest brokers worldwide for insurance. They match risk and capital. They find companies that need insurance and find the right underwriters to insure that particular risk.Alpha: Can you explain more about your perspective? You said as a lawyer you looked at this situation being uninsurable. What are the legal ramifications for that? My friends were trying to buy houses in California and had problems with insurance due to wildfires.Stephanie: The problem is that a bank will only lend you money for a mortgage if they know they have an asset they can eventually repossess. That’s the guarantee. But if that asset is not insured—especially in a high-risk region like California—the banks can’t give you a mortgage. It’s that little grain of sand that can stop everything from moving.Imagine you have a huge project and need to invest hundreds of millions in building infrastructure. Banks are not going to lend hundreds of millions for a big project unless it’s insured. And insurance is not going to play ball if they don’t have data that proves they’re not going to lose their shirt on that investment. Interestingly, large parts of the world like Africa are almost entirely uninsured. There is almost no insurance in Africa. Why? Because insurance doesn’t have enough data to be able to run the right calculations. Insurance is a numbers game.But what’s been fascinating recently is even the numbers game is changing. Right now, the problem is—and you’ll need a climatologist to tell you more about this—you have these fat-tailed risks that are coming more often than they used to. The calculation you had based on previous cycles is not necessarily applicable to the world going forward. That’s a big break for insurance. How do you handle that when the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is accelerating?If we don’t deal right now with the underlying cause of those extreme climate events, insurance is going to become irrelevant because premiums will become so expensive people can’t afford them, or there will be events that you can no longer insure for. We still have a window, but we need to move.In Phoenix, Arizona, you can no longer build a development unless you can confirm you will have water supply for the next 100 years. It’s getting harder to prove. Local governments can’t issue permits if they think people will be stranded with no water. They’ve been relying on groundwater, but they have drought, hotter temperatures, and pressure on the Colorado River.I see a conflict coming between finance and population. You have hedge funds saying water is “the next oil” or “the next gold” and buying water rights, and then you have farmers and populations. Finance, business, and industry all need access to water—from energy to data centers. Then you still have to feed the population. How do local governments allocate water to these different constituents? Phoenix is a huge hub for data centers, which use millions of gallons of water, creating competition with agriculture.Alpha: You have a timeline of how you came to the realization of it. You were a lawyer, then in investment banking, then you had a realization about insurance. At what point did you have a realization about water and the soil?Stephanie: Good question. I always have a visual moment of when the penny dropped. I was at Aon and I thought, “If insurers are grappling with these big problems, what do we do to calm things down and rewind a little bit? What is the lever of change?”I realized the biggest issue was that in a warming world, we’re going to have less water available. Then I looked up the biggest influence on water. It was so simple: 70% of the world’s fresh water goes straight to agriculture. When you think about the water in your shower, that isn’t it. It’s what you eat and what you wear.I knew that regenerative agriculture was able to reduce your needs in fresh water by about 50%. If on a global basis you could move from 70% to 35%, that gives you a huge margin. We can’t move the whole planet to regenerative systems right now, but we can try because that’s when we’re going to reduce the pressure on water.Alpha: I don’t think a lot of people connect that. They realize agriculture uses a lot of water, but they don’t say the solution is “regen,” at least in the insurance business.Stephanie: It’s coming. People are getting serious about this because it’s happening. We’ve seen the ground collapse in places like Turkey because people have taken too much water out of the ground. When yields are down by 50% because of drought and the soil is unable to cope, or when floods take away the topsoil, you realize you’re trapped in a negative loop.For me, it was straightforward: we need to look at soil. A healthy soil is very open and aerated. You have the worms and the fungi interacting. When the rain comes, it acts like a sponge and can hold up to 10 times its volume in water. When you look at the roots of plants in healthy soil, they can be a meter long. But in poor soil, you have tiny little roots.When an extreme weather event like a storm or flood arrives, the crops with short roots get pulled away because the topsoil gets washed away. The plants with deep roots don’t get pulled away because the soil is elastic. When the event is over, they recover and they have plenty of water because they are saving it. When the next event arrives, like a drought, they can access water deep under which the others can’t. What’s happened is over 50 years of intense agriculture with tractors compacting the soil, but also with a lot of fertilizers that have killed the unique biochemistry of the soil. All that good soil infrastructure has been lost. That is what regenerative farmers are trying to rebuild. People like Gabe Brown, for instance, are at the forefront of this. There is a massive movement in America and a “Groundswell”—which is also the name of an amazing conference here in the UK—of regenerative farming.What gives me hope is that insurers are smart; they follow the money. In all these conversations, we need to follow the money, because that is the only way you get solutions that people will adopt and keep. Insurers are starting to notice they have two types of farmers. Traditional farmers who use heavy pesticides, chemicals, and heavy machinery are hit very hard by extreme weather events. They are always putting their hands up for a payout. The other pool—the regenerative farmers—actually don’t need payouts because their crops survive the events.Suddenly, insurers are looking at these two pools much like they did with smokers and non-smokers in the 1980s. They are starting to give them very different insurance costs. It is becoming more financially beneficial to move to regenerative agriculture than to stay with existing protocols.Then there is the nutrient element. I tell my children, “I’m trying to save your bacon here.” Most food in shops is made using products that weren’t “good enough to get in my car,” because fertilizers are often toxic byproducts of the chemical industry. People naively think pesticides just mean bigger fruit; they don’t realize that what goes into the soil goes into the plant, then the animal, and eventually into us. That is why we have escalating issues with chronic illnesses. We need to make good food accessible to all, but that requires a major system change.People often ask, “How can we be running out of water when it rains so much and there are floods?” I tell them, “Do you want to drink the water on the road?” That water damages aging infrastructure and carries topsoil runoff. A friend of mine farming in Devon recently had a “one-in-a-hundred-year” flood. Farms all around them were wiped away, but because they have practiced regenerative farming on their estate for years, their water was running clear. The water sank into the ground, and they didn’t lose any crops. It’s very concrete.If we can harness governments and insurance to move to regenerative practices at scale, it will make a massive difference. Our supply chains were set up 200 years ago for a very different world. We are operating under different constraints now. A big part of preserving water is looking at your diet—the water footprint of your food. I looked up the footprint of a simple lunch sandwich: it’s about 200 gallons. If you add a bag of chips, it gets “spicy.” The water used to irrigate the potato is one thing, but then it goes to a factory to be washed, processed, and packaged. Each step adds to the water and carbon footprint.In my perfect world, you eat flavorful, seasonal food from a regenerative supply chain. We need to make people dream about this possibility, not just scare them. A brilliant example is Louise Mabulo and The Cacao Project in the Philippines. She created the “Napa Valley of Cacao” by helping farmers move to regenerative practices. These farmers are now making money, buying cars, and improving their lives.We have a planetary problem, so we need a planetary solution. I decided to focus on five “worst” supply chains: cacao, coffee, palm, rice, and cotton. Cacao, coffee, and palm are linked to deforestation that disrupts the water cycle, while rice and cotton use extreme amounts of water. Our project creates a “plug-and-play” program for corporates to transform their supply chains from depleted to regenerative.Supply chains are engines that go all around the world. Instead of making them engines of destruction, we make them engines of regeneration. We’ve brought insurance and finance into the mix, creating a big insurance pool for each commodity. We’re working with partners like Aon, ERM, and Fauna & Flora.Alpha: Are your working with all insurance companies?Stephanie: It’s a mix of insurance, finance, and organizations that work on the ground with farmers. If you are a company like Nestlé or Mars and you want to ensure your beans are free from deforestation, how do you know? There is a massive gap between the head office in Switzerland or the US and the “first mile” of the supply chain.We are bridging that gap with technology. Five years ago, it didn’t exist, but now with AI and satellite data, we have transparency. You can see a chicken run from space! But data isn’t enough; you need infrastructure on the ground. You need agronomy, village champions, and investment in tools. We are giving corporates a “sweetener” with insurance to work across the entire arc of the supply chain. This creates better livelihoods for farmers, lower volatility for corporates, and higher GDP for governments.Alpha: You saw that agriculture is the key thing, and that regenerative agriculture is more resilient to “fat-tail” risks. You’re leveraging the companies downstream that have the money to help the farmers upstream switch. It’s a key to the whole system.Stephanie: Exactly. We are losing between 25 and 75 billion tons of fertile topsoil every year. It takes 100 to 1,000 years to rebuild just one centimeter of that soil. At this rate, 90% of the world’s soil will be degraded by 2050. It’s like an office where nine out of ten employees don’t show up for work; nature is hanging on by a thread.Indigenous populations have this right; 80% of remaining biodiversity is under their control. We need to go back to that old wisdom. It’s not a corporation’s job to worry about planetary boundaries—their job is to make chocolate or coffee. That’s why we stepped in. We are running pilots in Africa and Latin America to “test the plumbing” of this architecture. Once we are up and running, we are talking about a billion dollars at work in each supply chain.It isn’t even that expensive because, once engineered properly, the program pays for itself. If you take a tiny sliver of the $500 billion coffee trade and invest it in a concerted way, the impact is enormous. AI enables us to exchange information and monitor protocols across different landscapes. There is a small window of time, but a massive opportunity.Alpha: This is mind-blowing. In finance and insurance, everything is about incentives. You started with insurance because they have a direct incentive to address water risk.Stephanie: The main game for me is water. Nobody wants to pay for water because it’s a common good—the “tragedy of the commons.” But if you hook it to a value people do care about, like a smooth supply chain or protecting their assets and bonuses, you hook it to capitalism. Depleted supply chains work for no one. Once farmers make money through these practices, they become a brand new market for insurance. Remember, the protection gap is 70% worldwide. Insurance has 70% to gain by helping the world become more resilient.Stephanie: There is plenty of room to grow, but we need to do a few steps first. You have to make sure people have better livelihoods so they do the right thing to support those livelihoods. It’s all about how you hook it and how you organize it. Depleted supply chains serve no one, but regenerative supply chains serve everybody. They serve the head office, the customers, the farmers, the government, and the insurers.The challenge was moving from depleted to regenerative. That transformation is difficult because no company can do it on its own. But if you do it at the supply chain and country level, with the support of government and policy, it suddenly becomes a new norm. Think about seatbelts. Nobody cared about seatbelts in the 70s; kids were just driving around. Then, suddenly, you had to have them, and now everybody wears one. You needed policy for that.Things like that can happen overnight, but we don’t have policy at the planetary level yet. So, we had to go via the market. Once it happens in the market and people see the benefits, we’re hoping other supply chains will have “FOMO”—they’ll want to do the same.Alpha: This is a really interesting point. Last year, we were looking for the trigger points to tip the water cycle into better systems. We talked about different places to push, but none of us were thinking about supply chains. It’s a foundational economic idea. Since supply chains are the engine of the whole system, revamping them shifts the incentives to align with the water cycle.Stephanie: To get there, we just need a shift in those supply chains because they are the only things big enough and efficient enough to give us the fast transformation we need. Policy is one thing, but if policy isn’t moving, we go to the market. When I was a kid, I remember Superman going around the globe so many times you could see the lines of his travel. That’s how I see supply chains in my mind. They are “Supermanning” the globe in cars and trucks; they are everywhere and impacting everything. If we can make them supportive of a better life and water, we win.Water is my real mission—my not-so-secret mission. But we needed to embed it into something financially relevant for companies. That’s how you hook it to insurance and the financial system to create a chain reaction.Alpha: How much is the idea of water discussed in the insurance and finance sectors right now?Stephanie: I’ll be honest with you: water and insurance is a complicated one. The Green Climate Fund has a smart water expert who is looking at infrastructure projects worth $12 billion a year. But water is challenging because it’s a common good. That’s why you see people buying land for water rights and digging deeper to grab more water. You see it in California with thirsty crops like almonds; a farm turns on the tap and nothing comes out because a hedge fund next door had the money to dig deeper.Alpha: You’re pushing the economic side, which influences policy. If a corporation is whispering to the government that they need to restore the water cycle, policy becomes easier.Stephanie: And they’ll want a reward for it! When they show investors they are looking after nature, it’s a benefit. We also have sovereign wealth funds like Norges Bank and the Japanese pension funds making big moves. Norges Bank issued a report stating that 96% of their assets were exposed to “nature risk.” They told companies: “If you do not report on your impact on nature and show us a direction of travel, we will dump the stock.” These are funds worth two trillion dollars.I think the next step is the stock exchange requiring disclosure on nature. Nature underpins our financial system; everything we trade, eat, or fly comes from the ground. If the ground is depleted, we cannot continue to create economic growth.There was an enormous report by the CFTC (Commodities Futures Trading Commission) called How to Manage Climate Risk in the U.S. Financial System. They said the prices in the options market are no longer real because nobody knows how climate will affect the “underlying asset.” We have no idea what orange prices will be in five years. We are working on very thin ice, and that is a “zone of danger” for the global financial system.Once you ask people to disclose a risk, they naturally start to manage it. Managing it means reducing our footprint on natural capital and water. It’s about resilience—not just because I love beavers and keystone species, but because the resilience of our financial system is intricately linked to nature.Alpha: This has been amazing—seeing how to use supply chains for a massive shift in regen ag to help the water cycle. Any closing words?Stephanie: Just thank you for listening and for your interest in water. People often forget they have agency. As citizens and communities, we have the power to buy the right products and support the right supply chains. Never forget you’ve got agency—whether you work in policy, investment, or just as a consumer. We have the power. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

In Bolivia, farmers wait anxiously for rains. Meanwhile, Bolivian consumers buy beef and soy from Brazilian suppliers whose operations are clearing the very Amazonian forests that generate Bolivia's rainfall. The atmospheric connection is real but the economic feedback loop is invisible. If Bolivian businesses and policymakers could see this connection as clearly as they see a map of trade routes, would they make different choices about whom to buy from? Would Brazil negotiate differently if it understood that the forests it's clearing don't just affect its own climate, but control a neighboring country's water supply, a country that happens to supply a significant percentage of Brazil's natural gas?These are the questions that the work of Patrick Keys, a professor at Boston University, raises. He is taking the work of moisture recycling (aka the small water cycle, aka precipitation recycling) in exciting and pioneering directions. He is making the geographical sinks and sources of rain clearer, and then transforming moisture recycling from atmospheric physics into something socio-politico-economic: maps that show which upwind regions supply a location's rainfall, and frameworks for understanding how economic decisions in those distant regions create invisible dependencies. He's building the conceptual infrastructure for embedding atmospheric connections into the social and economic systems that actually shape land use.Working with Ruud van der Ent (interviewed here previously), he developed the precipitationshed framework, which maps how much rain falling in a particular location comes from which upwind regions. A city might receive portions of its rainfall from countries A, B, and C, or provinces D, E, and F. By making these connections spatially explicit, the framework transforms vague atmospheric dependencies into actionable geographic information. This required inventing new vocabulary - terms like precipitationshed and evaporationshed had to be coined to discuss atmospheric source regions, linguistic innovations necessary for thinking clearly about phenomena that previous frameworks couldn’t adequately describe. From their paper, precipitationshed is ‘defined as the upwind atmosphere and surface that contributes evaporation to a specific location’s precipitation (e.g. rainfall). We apply the precipitationshed as a tool for better understanding the vulnerability of rainfall dependent regions (e.g. dryland rainfed agriculture).” [Keys 2012]. The precipitationshed gave moisture recycling the same kind of geographical grounding that watersheds gave to rivers.Keys then applied this framework to map mega-cities worldwide, identifying which might be most vulnerable to land-use change in their precipitationsheds. His 2018 paper combined precipitationshed boundaries, rates of land-use change in source regions, reliance on terrestrial versus oceanic moisture, and robustness of municipal water infrastructure to create a vulnerability index. It was the beginnings of a translation exercise of sorts: how to convert land and atmospheric physics into the kind of comparative risk analysis that could sit alongside assessments of aging pipes or aquifer depletion in a city planning document.The mapping of atmospheric vulnerabilities built the platform for his next stage of work. Together with Lan Wang-Erlandsson (also interviewed here previously), Keys pushed the framework into new territory: moisture recycling as an ecosystem service embedded in social and economic systems. Places downwind buy from businesses upwind that affect the land. Economic behavior affects how businesses treat the land, which then affects the rain downwind. It’s a feedback loop where economic behavior is integrated into the hydrometeorological flow. In their 2017 paper “On the social dynamics of moisture recycling,” they propose a new field: socio-meteorology. And they write: “this paper provides insights for resource managers, particularly land and water managers, who are searching for new leverage points within their dynamic social–ecological systems. Understanding where key feedbacks, bottlenecks, and potential cascades are located within a system can provide managers with better information about the consequences of direct or indirect intervention within their systems.”Keys and Wang-Erlandsson analyzed three countries with different social-ecological configurations. Mongolia recycles 13% of its own moisture and receives 29% from Russia. Its precipitationshed is geographically vast but socially isolated - the moisture comes from remote Siberian forests and Kazakh steppes with little economic or political connection to Mongolia. Niger generates only 9% of its own rain, depending on moisture from Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, and across the Sahel. Here, multiple neighboring countries with active trade relationships, migration flows, and shared resources all influence each other’s rainfall through land-use change, creating a regionally interconnected system.Bolivia recycles 18% of its own moisture and receives 28% from Brazil. Brazil’s soy and beef production drives Amazonian deforestation, reducing moisture available to Bolivia. Yet Bolivia supplies a signficant percentage of Brazil’s natural gas imports, creating economic interdependence. Global commodity markets, international conservation programs and distant financial actors all influence land-use decisions in Bolivia’s precipitationshed - what Keys calls a tele-coupled system, where spatially disconnected actors drive local change while experiencing no feedback from the atmospheric consequences.Through these case studies, Keys and Wang-Erlandsson mapped the complex networks of interactions, categorizing different network topologies as isolated, regional, or tele-coupled, and showing how each creates distinct governance challenges. Their work sits at the intersection of economic geography, which examines how location shapes economics; spatial economics, which studies the role of distance and place in economic systems; and ecological economics, which constrains economic analysis by biophysical realities. The rain falling on your city isn’t just a weather event. It’s the downstream consequence of land-use decisions made by people you’ve never met, influenced by market forces you don’t control, mediated by institutions that don’t know you exist. And your economic choices -where you buy your food, what you consume - are propagating back through that same system, affecting rainfall patterns elsewhere in ways you can’t see.Economic activity in one location, such as deforestation for cattle ranching, reduces moisture available to another location through reduced rainfall for agriculture, creating invisible water transfers mediated by the atmosphere rather than by shipping containers. Every economic transaction that changes land use is simultaneously shifting hydrometeorological patterns - a causal chain that conventional economics typically ignores.Keys describes his vision for a coupled model that could simulate these systems dynamically - tracking not just moisture flows but also economic networks, political institutions, social dynamics, and climate change, all interacting in real time. “If you think it’s actually a social ecological system, some sort of complex adaptive system with feedbacks, then you have to be able to do that,” he explains. “You have to be able to kind of have the other part of that connection. Otherwise, it’s like only it’s like half of a simulator, right?” Building such a model would require bringing together network scientists, economists, political scientists, and climate modelers together to connect the dots.Here is an abridged, edited version of our interview into the exciting fields of precipitationsheds and the socio-economic-political dimensions of rainPat: I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University and I have been doing moisture recycling research since 2010. My background is kind of a real mixed bag. I have an undergraduate degree in biology from Willamette University. I have a master’s of science and civil engineering from the University of Washington with a focus on kind of water resources and climate change. Then I started an environmental consulting company called Keys Consulting Incorporated, super creative name, and we focused on climate change, impacts, adaptation, resilience with clients all over the place, with projects all over the world. Then I realized I was still really curious about the world and I had a chance to go back to get my PhD and so I took it and I got my PhD in sustainability science at Stockholm University. I was a research scientist at Colorado State and then I moved into an assistant professor role. Then I recently moved to Boston University. That’s like a real quick snap.Alpha: Cool. Moisture recycling also goes by other names, precipitation recycling and small water cycle. You want to just say briefly what it is?Pat: My research is quite a bit broader than moisture recycling but I spend a lot of time in that world. For me, the idea of moisture recycling is just a atmospheric water cycle. It’s thinking about the sources of water on the surface of the earth. That’s evaporation, transpiration. It can be either from an ocean or a land surface. The moisture recycling part is understanding where it arises, where it travels through the atmosphere and then where it falls out later as precipitation of some sort. I know some people define moisture recycling on a much more local scale or a regional scale or only on land or all sorts of things. For me though, I take a pretty broad view and it’s just this idea if you’re tracking and understanding the sources and sinks of atmospheric moisture, you are probably thinking about moisture recycling in my mind.Alpha: Okay, cool. Did you get first get interested in this when you were doing your PhD at Stockholm?Pat: I went out to the Stockholm Resilience Center and worked with a whole bunch of different people thinking about surface water. I upgraded a surface watershed model for that fellowship. Right at the very end, Line Gordon and I started talking about this other project idea, which was instigated by a conversation Line had had with a colleague of hers, Huberts Savenije in the Netherlands. Line said, hey, I know this guy and he has a master’s student that had just come out with this really cool paper on moisture recycling. And so we had this big plan to try and build a research team with me and the Stockholm group and with Hubert Savnije and Ruud van der Ent in the Netherlands. So I’ve known Ruud since 2010. I know you had him on your show.The first paper we sort of cooked up was this idea of precipitationsheds, essentian analogy to surface watersheds - how can we think about sort of airborne sources of moisture, sources and sinks. I actually still have a notebook somewhere where at the time Ruud and I were trying to talk about what would be the best name for this sort of unit, names like skyshed and rainshed. The other day I found this notebook and I saw all these names crossed out.Alpha: That’s cool. I like hearing stories about how words came into being because basically you’re defining a lexicon for a new kind of field. I have heard people talking about the precipitation shed. Pat: Well honestly its I think the most important thing in looking back at that body of work the idea of this unit. Let’s work with this unit in a spatial sense, because it permits talking more specifically about an area on the surface of the earth that might be connected to some other place downwind. The purpose was to try and see whether or not that was a reasonable thing to do. Like, and that’s actually what my PhD was really all about was like, how reasonable is this approach? How useful is this idea? That’s what my PhD ended up being on.Alpha: And the ‘shed’ part is to make you think about the watershed to kind of analogize that idea.Pat: Sort of that. And also that it’s shedding, it’s shedding moisture.And so we want to understand what was the kind of upwind area, the upwind catchment, so to speak, that supported precipitation in a particular location. I am interested in are people using the source and sink idea more now? And I think they are. Alpha: So the precipitationshed tells you the source of where you’re waiting for comes from. There’s also one a word for where it goesPat: That is something that Ruud coined in a paper that he wrote, I think in 2013 which was the evaporationshed. So that’s where does a region’s evaporation go?Let’s take Colorado, for example. So you can think of all the places that contribute moisture to Colorado. So that sort of set if you drew a circle around it, that would be its precipitationshed, the place that supplies Colorado precipitation. The tricky question is how do you draw a line? Or how do you weigh the importance of regions that are contributing moisture? Because ultimately, a lot of regions could be contributing tiny, small fractions of moisture. So at some point, you want to say, Well, we’re not really talking about those places.So which places are we talking about? That gets to be pretty tricky. And I think that’s also where this very hydrology oriented subject sort of butts right into sustainability science, which is a very problem oriented thing. We’re talking about land use change, we want to understand the consequences of land use change in this particular place. Well, then maybe whatever lines that you draw in terms of upwind and downwind source and sink regions might have to correspond in some way to that would that would matter to this problem that you’re focusing on. Alpha: So for Colorado, what would you say the precipitationshed for Colorado and what is the evaporationshed for Colorado?Pat: My master’s student that just graduated just did that. So, so what her work shows, her name is Katherine Humphries. She just finished her master’s degree at Colorado State. And what she found is that the sources of moisture for Colorado, for Eastern Colorado, and especially the northeastern part of Colorado - lot of it actually comes from kind of regional sources. When I say regional, I mean, within Colorado, and adjacent states, there’s a pretty substantial contribution from the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Ocean, also from the Gulf of Baja California, so that body of water. There’s also substantial continental sources as well. And how much? I would actually like cite the paper, but she’s submitting the paper sort of like this week, so I can’t cite it yet.Alpha: How much does California contribute to Colorado’s rain?Pat: A little bit, some. And I should say again, this is, I’m really speaking primarily about northeastern Colorado right now. But California would some, if only by virtue of the fact that it’s evaporating and it’s sort of, if the Pacific Ocean is making its way to Colorado, California is sort of in the way. And there was a cool study that was done years ago - they looked at the Colorado River and how the moisture that arises from much of the irrigation and the lower watershed of the Colorado River, which is sort of this mass of canals and irrigation. A lot of that moisture then transports, or some of it, transports back up to the headwaters of the Colorado River. So there’s this circularity in the water cycle for the Colorado River to a certain degree, not completely by any means, but to a certain degree.Alpha: And what about Utah? Is there a lot of evaporation from Utah that ends up in ColoradoPat: But Utah is a pretty dry place, as you know. So there’s some evaporation from some of the bodies of water and also from some of the higher altitude mountainous areas with forests and so forth. And that’s true of the entire sort of quote unquote, desert southwest. Is there are still lots of mountains, lots of forests at higher altitudes, and those end up kind of showing up pretty clearly as sources of moisture. They’re not dominant by any means, but they do represent sources of moisture. When tracing moisture cycling remember that for a given location, in Northeastern Colorado, Boston, wherever, Oregon, you could draw a line of where this is the moisture coming from, but all those places are also contributing elsewhere.So it’s not a one to one relationship. You have some moisture is arising in Boston, and it’s going to travel elsewhere. Some fraction will go to a particular place, and maybe you care about that place, but we can’t forget that it’s also contributing to lots of places. So the diffuse character of this quantity makes it a little bit trickier in some ways than say a watershed where there is a more of a one to one relationship. There was some fantastic work that really dug into the archetypes of landscapes and how they partition evaporation precipitation and runoff as a way to sort of way to understand that water challenges are going to manifest in wildly different ways depending on the kind of which archetype you’re in. If you are in a system where actually you’re dominated by runoff versus evaporation, you’re going to have a different set of challenges for the most part than a place that’s dominated by evaporation with very little runoff. There was a really cool paper that was based on CESM isotope-based water tracking, a series of papers, Harrington et al. I want to say, that used the isotope-enabled version of the Community Earth System Model that’s developed primarily out of NCAR and Boulder, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And this isotope-enabled version allows essentially online water tracking while the model is running. They can sort of track the moisture in different ways. And so there was some cool work that looked at North America and parceled it off into these different segments and looked at sort of the exchange of moisture among those segments, as well as disaggregating it from evaporation, interception, and transpiration to really tease out, well, what flux part of the evaporative flux is actually connected, connecting these two places that are transpiration dominated, which tells you something about the importance of land use.Alpha: There’s seven states in the US that depend on the Colorado river water for their water.It’s a huge problem because it looks like we’re draining the Colorado River, and there won’t be enough water in two decades or three decades. And it’s, officials are at a loss of what to do. So, my question is like, can we restore some more of the rain in the precipitation shed to kind of increase the Colorado River?Pat: This is such a tricky question. I would say that that level of intervention would presume a way better understanding of the system than we actually have. And by that, I mean, you know, we’re just starting to, I feel like we’re just starting to get a handle on a sense of the variability, etc., associated with some of these kind of the flows of moisture. Atmospheric rivers as a research topic is not that old. Now, I mean, to some people, you’d be like, oh, it’s been around for decades.And it’s like, that’s still not that old. And that’s a critical component for understanding the major sort of sources, the major events that inject moisture into parts of the Colorado River basin, if not, you know, parts of basins around the world. And so that’s one part. Another part is the fact that a major part is that we now have a moving target with climate change. So almost all of the phenomena that we’re talking about from an atmospheric science perspective that are going to matter for moisture cycling, changes in humidity, changes in prevailing wind pattern, storm tracks, etc., changes in temperature gradients, the fact that the land is drying out more quickly in the ocean, all this stuff is happening and matters for understanding moisture cycling. And depending on the decisions that society makes around its carbon, we could either be a lot warmer or a little warmer. And I would say we’re just now starting to get good comprehensive studies on climate change, the way that different climate change scenarios will have different types of moisture recycling. Alpha: You have looked at mega cities and how much they can restore their water systems and rain.Pat: That was something I did during my PhD. In a paper we tried to figure out, is there a way to talk about, in a way like the way we talk about the vulnerability of municipal water supplies, for these mega cities that could arise from the rate of land use change, the amount of land use change in their sort of upwind source areas and their precipitation sheds. Some cities are pretty resistant to upwind effects in part because they’re coming from the ocean for the most part. Their sources are coming from the ocean. So like humans can only really affect that through global climate change for the most part. But some places are intensely reliant on terrestrial sources of moisture wehre those terrestrial sources are experiencing pretty dramatic types of land use change. So there are places on the world that could be ppretty vulnerable. There are mega cities whose domestic water, municipal water supply are pretty exposed to upwind change. If I was in one of those highly vulnerable cities, and I was in charge of water, I would probably say, oh gosh, I should make sure I’m aware of this and thinking about this and maybe do our own studies, right?Alpha: So this is where the land use in the surrounding area upwind, like if you cut down the trees, will affect the rain in that city downwind.Pat: The amount of how much it affects, how it affects is all, it’s so variable in the sense that it depends on where you are on the planet. It depends on when you get your precipitation. It depends on what is your municipal water storage system.So that’s something we actually considered in that mega city paper was on a city by city basis, we sort of looked into, well, how robust is their kind of municipal infrastructure for storing, transporting the water for their city? Is it a run of pipe that they’re just sticking a pipe in the river? And it’s like, if the river’s low, they’re low? Or do they have the good work of reservoirs?Alpha: So which were the major cities you found that the rain did depend on the surrounding area the most?Pat: The four cities were Karachi, Shanghai, Wuhan, and ChongQing. And so those four cities stood out as being particularly vulnerable across all of the different metrics. It’s not a surprise to me in part because there is a lot of land use change across Asia. And part that’s part of the analysis is what’s the rate of land use change in some of these places. On that side of the Eurasian continent, the terrestrial sources are very high. On governanceThe FAO, the UN Food Agricultural Orginizaton has a strong interest in this, they’re producing a report as we speak about the benefits of forests to agriculture, and a chapter on that in that report is looking at the kind of say the climate side and a big part of that is thinking about moisture cycling. That’s a really good example of a pretty high level governance institution that is interested in this topic. I should mention that the one of the funders for Kat’s (Katherine Humphries) work I mentioned earlier. She had done this moisture cycling analysis for northeastern Colorado, for a very extreme year in 2023 where we had the record breaking precipitation events. And so the Colorado Water Conservation Board, a state level agency wanted to understand more about that that extreme year and partially funded Kat’s thesis. And so one of the deliverables for that thesis was essentially, you know, where did that extreme rain come from. How can we understand that extreme rain in the context of, and it was all rain I should say or it was, you know, rain and hail.So that’s another example of an institution that I think became aware of the possibility to ask this kind of question, in part because one of the faculty in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State. His name is Russ Schumacher. He’s also the state climatologist. So he is having very much on the ground discussions with producers or like agricultural producers in Colorado about Colorado’s climate. And he’s engaged with policymakers at the state level, talking about Colorado’s climate, not just climate change but you know climate, you know variability, etc.Agriculture is a huge part of Colorado’s economy, especially some local economies. And so putting that so this is something that he I think he shared this with that agency and they said, oh wow, should be interesting to understand. So I think you’re right that there’s a certain amount of if you can share this, the fact that there is this kind of scientific possibility to understand this phenomena a little bit more broadly.Ecosystem serviceAlpha: You’ve been doing work to frame vegetation generating rain as an ecosystem service.Pat: One of the papers in my PhD was asking this question, sort of can we frame moisture cycling as an ecosystem service and if so what does that look like what would that mean how would we do that. And it’s good you mentioned Lan Wang-Erlandsson because as part of her PhD she had developed this evaporation model that simulated evaporation partitioning at the land surface. So evaporation is moisture turning from liquid phase to gas phase, but there’s lots of different ways that can happen. If it water can fall on say a leaf that’s called interception and if it re evaporates from the surface of that leaf that’s been intercepted and then re evaporated. If water falls to the soil and gets taken up by the tissues of the plant and then evaporated up a still motto that’s called transpiration. It functions differently you can sort of so you can simulate that so you can if you have land use data soil data precipitation climate data, etc. I think it was really useful providing kind of a first order estimate, a conservative estimate for the effect of vegetation on moisture recycling. If you wanted to get more detailed you’d use a dynamic model like an earth system model with different land surfaces. Then you could get at a lot more of the dynamic processes, you know, changes in that diurnal cycle changes in seasonality.And so another scientist, Becky Chaplin Kramer, who has led a ton of ecosystem service work, she invited me to contribute sort of this data and a little bit more analysis to some work where she was trying to combine multiple index of critical natural assets around the planet with moisture cycling being one of those sort of critical natural assets ecosystem services. And so that idea has gotten a little bit more traction and is still sort of ricocheting around. It’s probably what has motivated the FAO to be more interested.Social-economics of rainAlpha: Cool. Yeah, I think ecosystem services framework helps certain organizations, and governmental groups too… And then you and Lan also did some work on social ecological modeling?Pat: We wanted to try and do this idea of how land use can affect precipitation in a different place, and Lan and I wanted to see if there’s a back loop. Is there anything that connects the place that’s receiving precipitation back to that upwind source region? To really investigate that we wanted to think about sort of social dynamics, economic dynamics, political dynamics. And when you start using that language in the context of an ecosystem service, you bump right into this concept of social ecological systems, SES, which are a way to study coupled human and natural environments. It draws a lot from the complexity science community, thinking about how there are feedbacks that exist within these systems that lead to emergent phenomena, all sorts of stuff. If we think about moisture cycling in the context of a social ecological system, then the moisture cycling side is sort of part of the kind of ecological connection, a main feedback in some ways that ecosystems upwind are connected to the ecosystems downwind via the atmospheric water cycle.We did a deep dive into a couple of case studies like in Bolivia, Niger and Mongolia.What we tried to do is we said let’s map the precipitationsheds for these locations. And that gives us the boundary in which to sort of consider the spatial scope of these social connections, economic connections, policy connections. And this was really an exploratory paper in some ways that was an attempt to sort of open up this conversation that was already, there were already other kind of spokes into the conversation, but from different communities. So there’s a couple other communities, one’s called sociohydrology and one’s called hydrosociology (they sound the same, but they’re different). I’d say there’s still a ton to do there. Lan has a PhD student who’s working on this still that’s really starting to dig into some of these social dynamics. I’ve got a couple of grant proposals that have been submitted to try and dig into this phenomenon more in part because if there are, if some places do have much stronger social kind of back loops to their upwind areas. Those are levers of change, right. So those that those are ways that those places are potentially tied into affecting their own precipitation, albeit through totally different mechanisms, policy mechanisms, economic mechanisms, trade mechanisms. I’m really excited about that work. I think there’s a ton left to do so many questions and almost all of them rely on, aside from funding, but rely on really deep interdisciplinary work to understand those systems, which me sort of waiting into initially is good for generating an initial question or set of questions, but beyond that, you really have to start working with experts in their respective disciplines.Alpha: Could you give an example what you mean by the social back loop?Pat: Let’s say there is a patch of land upwind that is a mosaic of forest and range lands and croplands. It evaporates water, which falls down, downwind to a city, let’s say Montevideo, in Uruguay. Well does Uruguay buy product from that area upwind? Is its economy locally dependent in any way on the products generated upwind? Is its economic activity would be promoting or discouraging certain land use decisions which are then affecting it.Alpha: Oh, wow.Pat: Trying to disentangle that question is complex. A lot of different ways of thinking about the connectivity. There’s network science from there. There’s economics in there. There’s policy sciences in there. Institutional science is even like history involves. And so that’s why it’s a really it’s not an easy question to ask in some ways.The biological side is simple by comparison, right? We take this grid-ed climate data. We ask this question. We answer it. We write a paper. But then we want to talk about what are the connections that are poorly documented, which do not fit any sort of grid structure. They don’t follow physical laws. How do we study that question to then connect it back? A dream scenario would be to build a cool simulator to say this is how we could simulate change in an upwind area and its effects downwind. But if you think it’s actually a social ecological system, some sort of complex adaptive system with feedbacks, then you have to be able to do that. You have to be able to have the other part of that connection. Otherwise, it’s like only it’s like half of a simulator, right? Like you’re only simulating half of the system, not simulating all of the other stuff. And if there are some really important slow or fast feedbacks, reinforcing feedbacks, especially you could get some really surprising outcomes. Alpha: Yeah, that’s good. So yeah, so it’s kind of cool how you’re bridging the people part with the ecological part. Usually people decide to study one or the other, right? Economists, they treat nature almost as a separate physical process, but economics really is a subset of nature because people are subset of nature.Pat: You’re going to need a whole other podcast series for that one.Alpha: It’s interesting that you’re using a complexity theory lens to write so a system and right and you actually have a fondness for looking at things from a systems perspective, right? Pat: I don’t do a ton of work through that lens but I think actually most of my work is implicitly through a systems lens. I got my PhD at the Stockholm Resilience Center resilience. And that institute has a deep connection to something called systems ecology, which really came out of systems thinking complexity, complexity science. And so a lot of my academic training, especially my formative PhD training was infused with that sort of lens that systems thinking lens. I actually taught a class on systems thinking, sort of a one shot systems thinking course at CSU, which was a ton of fun to teach. It was such a cool class to teach really asking questions, asking these undergrads to think deeply about sort of the systems that were embedded in what kinds of leverage points exist, etc. We use a book called thinking and systems that was written by Donella Meadows. Alpha: In economics you have emergence like the invisible hand. So it’s interesting when you’re trying to tie ecosystems with the sociology and then seeing what emergent things arise, and seeing what complexity arises. You change the rules a little bit and you get really different emergences. Maybe you just change a little bit how the ecosystem connects to the sociology. You get very different behavior, maybe more favorable behavior.Pat: I think almost all the ingredients are out there scattered or different disciplines. I think a really strong big opportunity is some of the advances in, I would say, like complex network science is probably a really good entry point for starting to wrap our heads around some of the social processes. So you could think about networks, social networks, political networks, economic networks, and from those networks, you can actually distill almost rules or kind of governing principles that make that network work, mathematical rules, I should say. And that’s what would permit you to start to develop something like a simulator is if you had, you could translate what you observe in the data in the networks that you find into something that can be represented in numbers. And that’s how then you can really connect that into some sort of simulation. And so there’s a ton of work on complex networks. I mean, that’s a whole massive field with sub fields. And there’s even been some work on complex networks related to moisture cycling to distill the moisture tracking findings into a complex network and then use that network to then ask and answer questions. And then the people have done similar things for people and it’s really just a matter of like, which networks do we need to develop and understand and sort of glue together to make the sort of representation of something that we can simulate and explore change and. So I mean, it’s not for I don’t think it’s for a lack of data per se. It’s a lack of essentially finding the right people to work together to connect the dots that are already there.Alpha: Yeah, that’s really interesting. The social system is a network and the moisture recycling is a network. You can think about each tree as a node in the water network where the tree decides whether to transpire water up or not, whether to bring water from the groundwater. Basically you’re moving water between these nodes.Pat: The other thing that I’m really interested in is exploring how ecosystem stress, say from drought can propagate through moisture recycling to affect other places. So if you’re in Gabon in in Africa, it gets a lot of moisture from the ocean, but also from East and Central Africa, from Kenya and from the Congo Basin. If you’re in Gabon, your precipitation sensitive to the evaporative stress in East Africa. Are you seeing a signal in your variability or seasonality, the actual magnitude of the amount of water that you’re getting? Are you seeing any sort of signature signal of evaporative stress or changes in evaporative stress as a result of that being transmitted through moisture cycling? And the reason I’m interested in that is in part it’s getting at a different aspect of sort of the kind of the complex and the kind of network connectivity of these ecosystems to one another.I want to understand the teleconnected aspect over land mediated by the ecosystems in multiple ways. This is motivated in part because then it permits talking about the dependence of one place on the governance of another, where you can say this place is actually dependent in some ways on the way this place over here chooses to govern its land. I’ve done a little bit of work on governance of moisture cycling, and this is another way to sort of continue deepening that work through a slightly different lens, not just saying hey these places exchange moisture with one another which is interesting in itself, but saying this place is actually somewhat dependent or sensitive to exposed to the policy decisions in this place in this specific measurable way.Alpha: Right, yeah. So the ecological stress in one location affects another location, then you would be interested in perhaps helping that other place have less ecological stress.Pat: In my opinion it’s honestly a route to cooperation right. It’s also something that would lend itself more to sort of trans boundary connections trans boundary cooperation. It’s rare that you would just have two countries next to each other. Canada and the United States are an exception of two giant countries that are next to each other with few other countries sort of involved in their moisture cycling. Most countries at the total mess. And so as a result you have to think about these sort of like consortiums of countries with transboundary relationships. Alpha: And this opens the door to bring in negotiation and game theory.Pat: All sorts of other dimensions for sure. Tipping points and planetary boundariesPat: Tipping points is an idea that’s been around for ages. And that idea has been incorporated into the planetary boundaries framing. The planetary boundaries framing is this suggestion that there are specific thresholds within the Earth system that to cross those thresholds would begin the transition to a new Earth system system.Alpha: Moisture recycling could play into the planetary boundary.Pat: In the initial framing of the planetary boundaries it was based on surface water and thresholds in surface water related to environmental flows - the flows that are necessary for the ecosystems in a particular river to be sustained and to last and be resistant to change. That was adjusted in the last decade to include quote unquote green water, to look at the evaporative side, the atmospheric side of water, thinking about all the landscapes that are not really where runoff is pretty marginal and where it’s much more about precipitation and the evaporation and really that exchange. So there is now a green water planetary boundary, essentially that other half of the water cycle dominated by precipitation evaporation versus precipitation runoff. And that green water boundary has attempted to fold moisture recycling. I’m a co-author on a green water planetary boundary paper. I will say that the planetary boundaries are still a really evolving concept and I think even the people that are in on the inside would acknowledge that that, you know, every year, there’s new insight about what the details of this or that planetary boundary are. Alpha: Did you have any final thing you might want to say?Pat: I think one thing that has guided my research, for moisture cycling especially but I would say it’s true across the board, and is to find the questions that are really interesting to me personally. And then in some ways chasing them even if some of the people that are around me are less excited. I think if I can leave you with one thing something that would be valuable in my view is if you’re excited about chasing something keep chasing it you know because I think that there’s so many more questions out there than we realize to even that we haven’t even realized we should be asking them. I think we have the sense that we’ve discovered everything right that every rock has been turned over scraped clean that there’s nothing left to do and that’s like hilariously not true. Especially in this thorny challenging area of thinking about the intersection of anything physical natural earth system ecosystem hydrologically related and people we still think that we’ve scraped the rock clean we haven’t.If you’re interested and curious and excited about something keep chasing it even if you have to put it on like not even the back burner like the warming section of your of your stove top that’s like barely keeping it warm. Don’t lose it, right. I’ve had to do that multiple times in my career where I have to set something aside to work on something else for whatever reason but don’t forget that that’s there because that could be the biggest thing that you contribute to like our understanding of the world.ReferencesKeys, Patrick W., R. J. Van der Ent, Line J. Gordon, Holger Hoff, R. Nikoli, and H. H. G. Savenije. "Analyzing precipitationsheds to understand the vulnerability of rainfall dependent regions." Biogeosciences 9, no. 2 (2012): 733-746.Keys, Patrick W., and Lan Wang-Erlandsson. "On the social dynamics of moisture recycling." Earth System Dynamics 9, no. 2 (2018): 829-847.Keys, Patrick W., E. A. Barnes, R. J. Van Der Ent, and Line J. Gordon. "Variability of moisture recycling using a precipitationshed framework." Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 18, no. 10 (2014): 3937-3950.Wang-Erlandsson, Lan, Ruud van der Ent, Arie Staal, Miina Porkka, Arne Tobian, Sofie te Wierik, Ingo Fetzer et al. Towards a green water planetary boundary. No. EGU21-13583. Copernicus Meetings, 2021. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

I was mesmerized listening to John Cherry talk about groundwater, so absorbed that I didn’t notice that two hours had gone by. With lucid clarity, he laid bare the massive groundwater crisis engulfing us.Cherry speaks from a place of gravitas. He’s won the Stockholm Water Prize, known as the ‘Nobel’ of water, which is awarded in conjunction with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the same institution behind the Nobel Prize itself. He wrote the seminal Groundwater textbook that shaped our modern understanding of groundwater hydrology. He essentially pioneered the entire field of groundwater contamination.In our conversation, he poignantly pointed out that the water crisis is really a crisis of groundwater. 99% of liquid freshwater is groundwater, and groundwater supplies 40% of our food, and 70% of irrigation, but many major aquifers are already overdrawn. The Ogallala, which grows a sixth of the world’s grain, could be largely unusable within decades. Once natural buffers against drought, aquifers are now drained, leaving regions like California, Spain, São Paulo, and Cape Town vulnerable to even short dry spells.He noted that the Agricultural ‘Green’ Revolution of the mid 20th century wasn’t just about using synthetic chemicals and high-yield seeds to produce more food, it was also withdrawing more groundwater. Cheap pumps fueled massive irrigation, temporarily boosting yields but eroding soils and depleting aquifers. Today, exhausted soils and collapsing aquifers are twin legacies of that mid-century surge.Global “virtual water” trade has been hiding the growing groundwater crisis. Wealthy nations import crops grown with disappearing groundwater, from Peruvian blueberries to Arizona alfalfa for Saudi Arabia. Far from increasing food security, globalization has made local water crises a global problem.There was so much rich material in our interview that I couldn’t squeeze it all into one written article (Substack has length limits), so I’ve split this into two parts. Part II will go further into the crisis, and also explore solutions - regenerative agriculture, rainfall harvesting and managed aquifer recharge. The audio podcast remains one complete episode.Here is a lightly edited, abridged version of the interview : Part IAlpha: Lets give you a little bit of an intro. You’ve written a very widely regarded textbook on groundwater, and you were a pioneer of contaminant groundwater.John: Yeah, I wrote that book Groundwater with a colleague, published in 1979. There weren’t any other modern books on the market, so it became a widely used book for many decades. It’s on the Groundwater Project website and it’s one of our most highly downloaded books, even though it’s very old.Alpha: Yeah, it’s very readable. At some point you began exploring the bigger picture idea of why groundwater is so important to the world.John: Yeah, I started the Groundwater Project as a follow-up to the textbook by Al Freeze and myself. The idea was to just publish a few books on the web and then it grew and grew, and that got me into looking at the bigger picture. Bigger picture lectures are what I’ve been giving for the last four or five years. First I was talking about the bigger picture of the state of groundwater science, and now it’s really about the bigger picture of groundwater in the world and how it’s kind of ignored and unappreciated and mostly pictured incorrectly.Alpha: You’ve won some of water’s biggest prizes. The Lee Kuan Yew Prize and then the Stockholm Water Prize.John: I won the Lee Kuan Yew Prize of Singapore in 2016, and then the Stockholm Water Prize in 2020, rather late in my career. But it kind of caused me then to want to develop responses to broader questions. Really, it was the Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize when the interviewers would ask me, “Why is groundwater important?” The technical things for which I won the prize were entirely irrelevant in terms of the big picture. So I realized I had to develop responses to the question of why groundwater is important.Alpha: I think for a lot of people, when they first hear about groundwater, they don’t really realize they should have any significant thoughts about. It’s just this water deep underground which we don’t see. And yet, I think you’re saying there’s actually this whole groundwater crisis that’s looming that has repercussions for many things—from our food to our water systems. Really key to human society.John: Yeah, and it’s now recognized that there’s a global water crisis. The World Bank and UNESCO and all the global organizations pay lip service to that, that there’s a global water crisis. But they never get to the point of what’s the nature of the crisis. It’s primarily a groundwater crisis because groundwater makes up 99% of all liquid fresh water. The number you see in the textbooks is always less than that because they include ice. But when you take ice out of it, it not being a liquid, groundwater is 99% of all liquid water. And most of the time, all of the water that flows in streams and rivers is groundwater. It’s called base flow. All wetlands are fed by groundwater, and most ecology that’s water-related has a groundwater feed. People just don’t recognize that because you don’t see it.About half the people in the world drink groundwater to some degree or another. And 40% of the food these days is produced by irrigation, but 70% of the irrigation water is groundwater. The standard number you see everywhere is 40%. But if you include the groundwater that’s flowing in the rivers nearly all the time, if you include that in the irrigation number, then it’s 70%. So groundwater, the 99% number, you almost never see that mentioned. The number for food is always underestimated. There’s just misunderstanding of the importance of groundwater.There’s the concept of peak water, which isn’t given much attention, but then there’s the concept of peak groundwater and the depletion of aquifers around the world. So it’s the heart of the global water crisis and it’s becoming the heart of the food crisis from the water point of view.Alpha: Can you give us some of the basics of groundwater? Like how much groundwater there is relative to freshwater? I don’t think people realize exactly how groundwater comes up and that streams are fed by groundwater. Can you give us some overview?John: So when it rains in most areas, rainwater infiltrates through the soil and gets to the water table. The water table is the first free water. If you were to go out in your backyard and dig a hole, eventually you’d find free water in the hole—where the water level would come. If you take a post hole auger and make a hole, and if you’re in a part of the world where there’s enough rainfall, then not far down—five, ten feet or whatever—you’ll have free standing water. That free standing water level is the water table.In the upland areas of the landscape, the water table has high energy water and that water flows toward the low-lying land in a flow system. Just like streams have a flowing regime, groundwater has a flowing regime. The water flows from higher elevation to lower elevation areas that are called discharge areas. Streams and rivers are almost all discharge areas. Wetlands are almost all discharge areas. By that term, we mean that there’s water seeping up and discharging into the surface water body.What people don’t realize and what schools don’t teach is that groundwater is beneath us everywhere. It’s very unfortunate in the schools—there’s not a well outside the door. Students could have been measuring the water level at least at about any school in the world, seeing what’s happening to it over a long time. Sometimes when it rains, the rainfall gets down to the water table and recharges groundwater, but in many cases when it rains, water doesn’t get all the way to the water table and that water goes back into the atmosphere.The most important—one of the most important concepts in the so-called water cycle—is the water table. If you look in the scientific literature, even generally in the literature, people in the news media and in the literature not written by groundwater experts refer to water levels. A water level is a meaningless term. It’s just the water level in a well someplace. That’s not usually the water table, and the water level in a well can reflect how water is being drawn out of the aquifer—it reflects many things. But it’s the water table that’s really the critical entity that relates to plants and forests and streamflow and all of that.Alpha: So when rainfall infiltrates into the soil, some of that soil water is brought back up by the trees or used by the different plants, right? But then some of it, if it’s lower down, keeps seeping down into the aquifers.John: Yeah, if it rains enough in many areas, then part of that rainfall makes it all the way through the soil. It makes it past the roots and gets to the water table. Generally, once it gets to the water table, it starts its subsurface journey. Now there are roots that go down to the water table, but most of the water that actually gets to the water table continues on, traveling in its flow system.That travel—groundwater flows at rates of a few inches a day. A lot of groundwater is old. A lot of groundwater is decades or hundreds or thousands of years old. Unlike surface water, when you drill a well someplace, the water might be 10,000 years old or it might be a few months old. Much of the water used in the world is water that’s geologically old. That water is being mined. In the Middle East—Saudi Arabia and many countries in the Middle East and in Brazil—they’re pumping out water that’s tens of thousands of years old, water that went into the ground in the geological past.But water that’s coming out of wells in North America and Europe is generally relatively young. It’s generally younger than 70 years. That’s in a way almost unfortunate, because almost all the water that’s younger than 70 years in the industrialized world has anthropogenic chemicals in it. It’s contaminated. I use the word contaminated not to mean that it’s going to kill you, but to mean that it contains chemicals of human origin.Alpha: What is the extent of aquifers? Can you discuss a little bit about the world’s aquifers? What are some of the major aquifers? John: There’s a map I show in my lectures of the world’s largest 68 aquifers, major aquifers. In the United States, there might be a dozen of them. There’s a major aquifer in Northern Africa. These 68 aquifers apparently supply 40% of the world’s drinking water, and at least a third of them are going dry. A third of them are apparently dewatered to the point where they can’t recover. Even if we stopped over-pumping them, they wouldn’t recover. They would take centuries to recover.One of the big aquifers is the High Plains aquifer, also called the Ogallala aquifer in the United States. It runs from South Dakota to Texas. It’s so big and so highly used that its irrigation accounts for one-sixth of the world’s grain supplies. It’s being drained and in some places, it will be drained beyond use in another 20 or 30 years. That’s irreversible. In other words, the economics of agriculture in places like Nebraska is such that the farmers will drain it and then they’ll move on to something else.That aquifer wasn’t really used before the 1950s. It began to get used in the 1950s because drilling machines developed after the Second World War and modern pumps allowed that aquifer to be used. Many parts of those states were almost semi-deserts before irrigation started. That story is worldwide. Pumps arrived, drill rigs arrived, and the dewatering of aquifers started in the ‘50s. In many cases, the pumps have to go deeper and the rate of pumping exceeds the rate of recharge. In other words, the amount of rainfall that makes its way to the water table is relatively small compared to the rate of pumping. We call that depletion. Many—a third of these 68 largest aquifers—are being depleted, which means the water is being mined.People talk about climate change, but there’s two parts of climate change. There’s the natural climate change and then there’s the anthropogenic part of climate change. But in the past, there have been very long droughts. When long droughts come, the only water you have available is groundwater. If you’ve already pumped a lot of the water out of your aquifer, then you don’t have resilience.A lot of these aquifers that needed to not be over-pumped are now lacking in resilience because when the long droughts come, they’ll be pumped because there’s no alternative. Now, how that’s going to play out in terms of world agriculture, I have no idea. But the Ogallala apparently supplies one-sixth of the world’s grain, and the Japanese and a variety of other countries are dependent on grain coming from that aquifer—grain from irrigation.Alpha: Can you give us a sense of a little bit how the Ogallala aquifer works? John: Well, when you’re pumping it heavily, most of the water that falls in that area that you’re pumping ends up in the wells. Before we started pumping, aquifers like that, the water might be decades or hundreds of years old. You have the natural flow system for groundwater where the groundwater is flowing along slowly. Then when you tap into it, you basically draw everything towards your wells. Of course, everything then changes.In many areas, groundwater is increasingly contaminated because the water we’re pumping out is younger than 70 years. About 70 years ago was when all the use of industrial chemicals began. Now there’s the Green Revolution in agriculture, which is a total misnomer. In the late 1940s, the United Nations realized that famines could come back with a vengeance, and it was recognized that there needed to be preparations to prevent that.The first part of the preparations to prevent famines was to develop better grains—better plants, better wheat, better rice and so forth. That was the first part of the Green Revolution. Then with that came fertilizers and pesticides. There was great fanfare to the Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s because the amount of food on the world market was almost an oversupply at times. The fear of famine basically disappeared and the credit was given to, shall we say, modern agriculture—given to fertilizers and pesticides.Whereas in fact, a major part of the increased food supply that went along with the Green Revolution was pumping groundwater. It was basically the invention of good drill rigs and modern pumps. You almost never read that. Now the Green Revolution, the increase in agriculture production per acre, leveled off in 1980. The world has been able to produce more and more food apparently not by increased productivity on the soil, but by basically cutting down forests and developing more land.But the Green Revolution, that type of chemical agriculture, depletes the carbon in the soil. One of the results of the Green Revolution has been to have less productive soil. Now that’s separate from the irrigation issues. You’ve got soil becoming less productive and you’ve got many aquifers becoming less productive. But many aquifers are going to become very much less productive apparently in another decade or two, contributing to what people are saying is going to be a globalized food crisis.Now in Canada, it used to be that we were relatively self-sufficient in food. Then the Green Revolution came along, and now we get much of our food from California and Mexico. When we go into a grocery store here and we look at where our fruit comes from, where our raspberries come from and all of that stuff, much of it’s coming from California and from Mexico, and much of that food is unsustainable food. That’s got to do with the global food supply chain and basically the idea of virtual water.Whenever we look at what we’re eating, we should realize that it’s got water in it and the water is referred to as virtual water. The British professor who developed that term got the Stockholm Water Prize about 20 years ago. Water is being shipped around the world in food, and much of this water in food is unsustainable water. It’s unsustainable because it’s from aquifers that are being depleted.Now Saudi Arabia began to pump water at a crazy rate a few decades ago as their population increased. They’re beyond peak groundwater, far beyond their peak groundwater. Now they basically sustain themselves with oil money that allows them to buy food, which has all this water.Alpha: So the whole Green Revolution—we give credit to all the synthetic fertilizers, but the credit isn’t really warranted because it actually messed up the soil. But actually, you’re saying that groundwater was also a big part of that, because we figured out how to irrigate a lot more. Now we’re realizing we shouldn’t be slowly destroying the soil with these chemicals because then you can’t produce food in the long run. But also, the other thing is that we’ve depleted the groundwater to make that revolution. We’re facing this double whammy kind of crisis.John: We’re facing a double whammy—depleted soil and depleted aquifers. As I mentioned, many of the aquifers are so depleted that even if we stop pumping now, it would be decades or centuries before the water level gets back up. When we deplete an aquifer, the pressure in the aquifer goes down. That means your pumps have to go deeper, but also the water table goes down. You’re basically drying out the land.In many parts of the world, early on there were flowing wells—flowing wells all over the place in Europe and North America. You hardly see a flowing well now. And there were springs. What we’ve done over the last 70 years is we’re drying out the continents. We don’t see springs and we don’t see flowing wells.Henry Darcy, who developed Darcy’s equation, which is the basis for groundwater science, did that because there were so many flowing wells in France and so many flowing fountains in Paris that he was curious about it. Now you don’t see any of that.Alpha: You also brought up the whole idea of virtual water, right? I was wondering if you could explain a little, because that whole idea of virtual water is important. Now that we’ve depleted the groundwater in certain places, we’re depleting virtual water. John: The term virtual water was developed by Tony Allen, a geography professor in London. He realized that when we look at food, all food has water to produce it. Then he looked at the world—he traveled a lot—and he realized that water was being shipped around the world in food.He recognized that places like Saudi Arabia could continue to exist with a large population if they could import food, and that food comes with water. There’s a research group in the Netherlands that took over that idea and quantified it. They did a lot of quantifying and they’re still at it. They draw maps and diagrams with arrows indicating how much virtual water goes from the US to Japan, how much virtual water goes from Peru up to Canada, et cetera.When I buy my blueberries, which I like very much, I always look to see where they come from. Many of the blueberries we buy in Canada come from Peru. When I started looking into that a few years ago, there’s actually a peer-reviewed paper published on that pointing out that much of the agriculture product from Peru that’s entered the global food marketplace is produced by dewatering their aquifers.The countries where you have money can buy their food and can have blueberries at any time of the year because they’re shipped in. Much of that is virtual water that’s unsustainable. The key is unsustainable virtual water.Alpha: The virtual water depends partly on the groundwater; it’s now networking the world’s access to groundwater in a way that when you collapse, usually it’s just a local effect, but now it’s actually going to have repercussions, right? If Saudi Arabia is using Arizona water and buying all the land, and that collapses, that affects Saudi Arabia and multiple other places.John: Economists of course really like the idea of globalization. Decades ago, it was thought that the globalized movement of food around the world—provides more security, food security, because then you’re getting your food from a variety of places. But the end result is in fact increasing food insecurity because of the virtual water part of it.Alpha: Can you say a little bit more—we talked about Ogallala in the US—can you talk about some of the other continents and the state of the aquifers there?John: Yeah, the other place in the US where there’s a lot of over-pumping is California. As you well know, when a drought comes to California, there’s a huge crisis and drill rigs come from all over and they pump more and more and there’s more land subsidence, et cetera. The Central Valley of California and other parts of California are thriving in many cases on unsustainable water.In other parts of the world—in North Africa, in Morocco, in Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt—in general, where people are pumping groundwater, it’s unsustainable groundwater. But I might mention the whole issue of drought. California thinks they’re having a drought when they don’t have lots of rain for two or three years. By the third or fourth year in California, it’s a crisis and it’s referred to as a drought. Well, that’s barely a drought. In paleohydrology, a real drought is ten or fifteen years.We humans have gotten so off track in not realizing the dependency we have on water that we’re not realizing that with or without any carbon dioxide-induced climate change, big droughts should be expected to come. Spain has had a long drought—I guess it just broke recently. Spain had a four-year drought that was really affecting their agriculture and their exports.South Africa—when the media wants to talk about drought, they talk about South Africa. In 2016 to 2017, they had a two-year drought. I actually happened to be there at a conference in 2017 and they were right in the midst of the drought. They were talking about turning the taps off and all of that stuff. But that wasn’t a drought at all. It was two years without rain and their reservoir went dry. They hadn’t backed it up with wells or anything. There was a big crisis to bring in drill rigs, but that was all too late.São Paulo in Brazil had a four-year drought and that was a total calamity down there. That’s only four years. In general, when it comes to drought, our security is gone in many cases because we’ve drained our aquifers. The purpose of not draining an aquifer is to save that water so that when you have a drought, it’s there as a reservoir. Pretty well all the major aquifers in a dry climate area are drained to the point where resilience is lost.You never hear mentioned in these cases that these are short periods without rainfall. And you never hear mentioned in general how the aquifers that are supposed to provide the resilience are providing it. In some cases, they’re not providing it because the wells aren’t located in the right places at the right depth.Now, India—India is a total crisis in the making. India pumps like 90% of the world’s groundwater. They’ve got 1.4 billion people. India’s going to add 300 million people before they peak. They have 600 million people dependent on agriculture. When drilling wells became common in India, which was in the ‘70s and ‘80s, all the farmers switched to what they call tube wells.Before that, they had dug wells. We switched from dug wells to tube wells and that changes everything. Then the government subsidizes electricity. India has a groundwater crisis in many areas because with subsidized electricity, the farmers have pumped too much water and in some cases the water is arsenic, et cetera.Iran is now into five or six years of drought and has the most severe water crisis in the world. People who look at Iran say there’s going to have to be major human migrations. They mismanaged their water. Apparently they built dams and done all a bunch of things. But one of the things that we’ve done in human societies is engineers like to build dams. The world has tens of thousands of dams. Huge numbers of dams have been built. When drought comes, the dams go dry. That’s what’s happened in Iran and other places.If the only water that humans have, other than melting glaciers, that is there when you have a drought is groundwater, and it needs to be viewed as being a very precious resource because it’s the water of last resort. Part II of the interview….John Cherry’s The Groundwater Project John Cherry and R. Allen Freeze Groundwater bookStockholm Water Prize : John Cherry Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Lan Wang-Erlandsson is a researcher studying moisture recycling. She focuses on the large-scale interactions between land, water, and climate, and their implications for social-ecological and Earth system resilience. She has conducted work on the planetary boundaries of green water, where green water is defined as water that vegetation uses, or more formally as ‘freshwater from precipitation that is stored in the soil and used by plants through transpiration’. She helped society understand moisture recycling as an ecosystem service, and collaborated with the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) on reports examining how moisture recycling intersects with the future of agriculture.Her work has emerged from two scientific lineages. Science often evolves through such lineages. Hubert Savenije was working in the Sahel region of Africa when he wondered why rainfall did not keep decreasing further inland, as it should if the air rained out water closer to the coast. He concluded that there had to be moisture recycling, where moisture evaporated back into the air and then fell again as rain. (Other lineages have called this moisture recycling phenomenon by the names precipitation recycling, or the small water cycle.)Two decades later, Ruud van der Ent (who appeared here on the Climate Water Project podcast), a graduate student of Savenije’s, built on his work to create a map of global moisture recycling. Lan Wang-Erlandsson would eventually collaborate with van der Ent, as would Patrick Keys, who would work on hydrosocial aspects of moisture recycling (he will appear in a future podcast).Lan Wang-Erlandsson completed her graduate work at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, which brought its own scientific lineage. The Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) was founded in 2007 by Johan Rockström and Carl Folke as part of Stockholm University. Its intellectual roots reach back over half a century, drawing on ecological economics, systems thinking, resilience science, Earth system science, and work on sustainability, tipping points, and the interplay between society, economy, and the biosphere.From this foundation, the planetary boundaries framework emerged. In 2009, Johan Rockström, then director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, led a group of 28 scientists to formulate the concept of planetary boundaries in the paper “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity.” The idea was to identify critical Earth-system processes (such as climate change, biodiversity loss, nutrient cycles, land-use change, and freshwater use) that regulate the stability and resilience of the planet, and to estimate thresholds or “boundaries” for those systems that should not be crossed if humanity is to avoid large-scale, abrupt, or irreversible environmental changes.Here’s an abridged, lightly edited version of our interview:Lan: I’m a researcher and team leader of the Anthropocene Dynamics theme at the Stockholm Resilience Center. Alpha: And when you say Anthropocene, that is the era where people are affecting the Earth. You’re studying how people are affecting the water, and how that then affects the whole Earth. Lan: Yes, exactly. You know, the human impact on the water cycle is really very severe and widespread now. You could say that in the past 12,000 years during the Holocene, it’s the only time in history that we know for sure that has supported modern civilization and agriculture the way as we know it, right? The Earth system has several tipping points. So the transition could be non-linear. And so whether we exit this, what we call the safe operating space, of the Holocene-like conditions, if we depart from these conditions, it could be in an abrupt way, or it could be in a more gradual way. The boundaries are a set of guardrails. So you could imagine that you’re standing at the cliff, you don’t want to stand precisely at the cliff, but a few meters away, right? So the boundaries are the guardrails. So now we are somewhere between the guardrails and the cliff, and it’s an uncomfortable zone we want to get out of. Alpha: And then one of the nine planetary boundaries is the water, right? And so that’s what your working on. Lan: Yes, so the planetary boundaries identify nine Earth system processes or components that are vital for the system resilience to function, for the Holocene-like conditions to continue, to support humanity. Freshwater is one of them. And of course, you could say that some other boundaries also relate very much to water, such as biogeochemical flow that deals with phosphorus and nitrogen pollution, for example. And eutrophication is a big problem. You have the novel entities about chemical pollution, and you know, microplastics in river systems is a big issue. And then the same goes with land system change, biosphere integrity, that also includes life in aquatic systems. We know are much threatened. And then climate change, obviously, that is the main culprit behind the water extremes that we see. So they’re very much interconnected, I would say. But yes, my work so far focused on the freshwater change boundary that was previously called freshwater use. Alpha: How did you get into the whole water field? Lan: I’ve always been interested in environmental issues. I remember when I came to Sweden, it’s like 1990. It was a huge transition. So at the time in China, the water, the environment was very polluted. And the only place that was green, I grew up in the city of Guiyang, the only place that was green was the park. So when I came to Sweden, I realized everything is so green, like the whole country is a park. So I think that’s sort of where it started. Oh, you can have it this clean. Is that possible? So I think that ignited my interest for environmental issues. So it wasn’t necessarily water, but I was very interested in sustainability, sort of how we can make the environment more livable. And also just seeing that it is possible. But then the more I thought about it, I find myself kind of obsessed with the thought somehow that we live on this unique planet Earth in this universe. And we are kind of the only conscious ensemble of molecules and atoms. And that somehow it comes somehow with a responsibility or like just so precious that we live, right? And water somehow is tied to everything that is alive. It was the basic element that made life possible. If you go on Mars looking for life, you would look for water. And water is connected to climate, it’s connected to pollution. It’s very much connected to everything on Earth. So it suited me well to work with water as a person who is very interested in our living conditions as a whole. My master’s was in civil engineering. Then I did my PhD with water in Delft University with Hubert Savenije and Ruud van der Ent. Alpha: So you and Ruud were together in graduate school? Lan: Yes, and Patrick Keys. So we were kind of a trio working very closely together on moisture recycling-related issues. Alpha: What was the issue that you worked on? Lan: The aim of my PhD was to figure out sort of how land is quantified, how land-use change affects rainfall. So Ruud has a really cool model that could track moisture, but it didn’t necessarily tell us a story of how land-use change affected rainfall. So my PhD started a couple of years after his. And so the question then was what does this mean in the time when humans, if we look at historically, humans have affected, well, affected basically all land systems on Earth, but transformed around half of the land surfaces, turned it into pasture or agricultural land and with massive irrigation. So how does that change this water cycle? This was my thing I was dealing with. Alpha: And were you looking at for that social-ecological as opposed to the purely ecological aspects, or you were looking at both? Lan: Yes, I guess when I started, it was very biophysical in the sense of just looking at the quantitative water flows. And of course, conceptually, Pat and I, we worked a little bit more into sort of conceptual thinking, how can we conceptualize this as a social-ecological system because you can imagine that you might have some sociological feedback that we ever say we haven’t really tested out quantitatively, but you can imagine that, you know, if you deforest Amazon, you reduce evapotranspiration, the moisture input to the atmosphere, decreases the moisture transport in the atmosphere and decreases rainfall. That part we know from the modeling. And so that decreases again, the rainfall not only over the forest itself, but also over the cropland that in the first place caused the deforestation. And the question is how do the people then on the ground want to manage land given the feedback loop or and/or given the knowledge that this is happening? Right. So will they try to reduce deforestation and restore the moisture flow? Or will they sort of have less water and the crop yields are negatively impacted. We should deforest more to have more land, right? So there are sociological interactions and feedback that, that should come out of this, but it’s more like a question mark, I think, than precise answers to that. I have a PhD student now looking into that, but she’s focusing more in the African continent.The Congo rainforest is actually a very important moisture recycling region. So if you look at the Amazon internally, the moisture recycling ratio annually is around 25, 30, that’s on different estimates. And for Congo, it’s almost a double. But the Congo region is also more interesting because it’s also precisely where the Intertropical Convergence Zone moves around. So you would say that from different seasons, the moisture contribution either goes from the Congo towards the north or to the south. So there are different countries benefitting in different times over the year, very different, yeah, seasonality. Alpha: Which are the main countries that benefit from the Congo rainforest rain, or getting rain from the Congo rainforest? Lan: That’s a good question. The three recipient countries that receive most precipitation from the Congo forest are Congo, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea on a mean annual basis. They receive around 30% of the precipitation from Congo, and during the dry season, so June, July, August, Congo and Gabon receive 50% of the precipitation from the Congo forest. So it’s really substantial. Alpha: So you’re framing this as an ecosystem service, right? So land use is providing rain? Lan: Yes. So that was together with Patrick Keys. And so as I mentioned before, even if you just look at the moisture, like the moisture flows themselves, it doesn’t mean that the entire flow is there because of the vegetation. Even if you remove the vegetation, some evaporation will happen. And the other thing is that it depends on which type of vegetation you have. So if you have a forest with a very deep root, they will be able to provide moisture also during the dry season and dry spells. So there’s a seasonality to it as well. But you would see that like the short vegetation like grassland, they wouldn’t transpire as much or at all in the dry seasons. So in that way, you can regard it as an ecosystem service that certain types of especially wooded vegetation are providing to support rainfall. And of course, in the ecosystem service framework, you’ve been talking about regulating services and support. So conceptually, it’s kind of there. But I think what we did together with the co-author leading that work, what we did there was to quantify it. It’s a first attempt to quantify how much of the, if you would have two scenarios, one with vegetation as we have today and one without like barren land, what would the difference be? And that difference we termed ecosystem service. It’s a simplification, of course, because we know that when you remove vegetation, more things will happen than just that the evaporation will not be there. You will change the wind, you will change the temperature. So a lot more things are going on. But yes, from a water balance perspective, you could call that quantification the ecosystem service of the moisture-supplying service from vegetation. And of course, you can combine it with other system models, runs and all that, compare the difference between barren and vegetated land. Alpha: Okay, cool. And so did you look at other places apart from the Amazon and the Congo rainforests, other continents like the ecosystem services providing rain for? Like have you also studied by like, say, in Europe, how land use is providing ecosystem service of rain? Lan: Yes. So one thing with the ecosystem services, it’s not just the amount over the year, but it’s also sort of when you want to look at the ecosystem properly, you actually also need to look at in what way it’s resulting in actual benefits. Right. So actually, you might want to know to what extent is it mitigating droughts or heat waves in the downwind area. And so we had a paper with Agnes Pranindita who looked at it. And so in her paper, she analyzed heat waves in Europe and found that forests tended to have a disproportionate influence on moisture supply during those times, which is very aligned with our understanding of how forests operate that they are able to be this buffer, they can store the water and then release it also when it’s dry, which helps mitigate not only locally, we know that from previous studies that forests have this cooling effect locally, but also remotely by providing moisture. Alpha: So how does this all connect? So you’ve been doing work on this tipping point, right, on all the planetary boundaries? So how does the ecosystem services of the atmospheric water play into the planetary boundary? Lan: So there are several parts to this. If you look at the planetary boundaries in terms of tipping elements, for example, the Amazon forest or the tropical rainforest, they are massive land carbon sinks, right? So they are helping us currently, they are doing this as a service of absorbing CO2​ emissions from fossil fuels. And but when they die, they will instead be releasing carbon to the atmosphere. So instead of helping us, they will make our efforts to come down to the 1.5 degrees, Paris Agreement more difficult. So the moisture cycle of course plays a role in stabilizing those important carbon sinks. There are estimates. If you look at the carbon sink strength of the Amazon, and if you continue to extrapolate that, there are estimates that say that this switch might happen already over the next decade, depending on deforestation rates, not only on moisture recycling, but moisture recycling kind of amplifies that effect, right? So if you cut down the forest, you not only cut down the forest, but also remove the extra moisture supply that comes with the forest. So it certainly plays a huge role there. And you also have the irrigation effect. You have the massive irrigation in India that is depleting groundwater to start with, but also modifying. So you could say that you have the important monsoons in the Asian continent there that is supporting agriculture. So you have the dry period and then you wait for the monsoon for the crop to grow. So it’s very important. But there are also research that has shown that if you pump that much water into the atmosphere, by irrigating the crop lands, you are decreasing the temperature over land, right? So there is then less difference between the land and ocean temperature. So the monsoon is drawn into the land because of the temperature gradient, but it’s warmer over land and cooler over ocean. And the warm air over land is rising and therefore sort of driving the monsoon into the Asian continent. But if you reduce the temperature gradient, you might have an effect on the monsoon. So some research has pointed out that it’s actually delaying the monsoon onset, for example, which is a continental to planetary scale change. These are two examples where this kind of land-atmosphere interaction come into the planetary boundaries framework. And of course, the planetary boundary framework, the way we represent it, we only looked at the percentage of land areas that experience a departure in either stream flow or soil moisture, root-zone soil moisture. So it’s a simplification, but you could say that we looked closely into many, many more. So under the hood, the planetary boundaries conceptually is trying to account for all these things that are happening. And then we provide a simple metric as percentage of land, they’re waiting for those. But the understanding is that all those things are connected. Alpha: Right. It’s a very complex non-linear process that you’re trying to simplify enough so it’s a useful governance thing. So like in the Amazon, if the forest is providing rain, but that rain is needed to grow the trees to sequester the carbon. And so if there’s that feedback loop that if you get past, you’ve crossed the rain cycle, you’ve crossed the carbon sequestration, and then it has all these ripple effects throughout the whole. And the whole Indian continent, if you shift the temperature gradient by what are we doing with the water, then that shifts the whole way that rain cycle gets driven. Lan: Yeah, so these are large-scale processes. And we don’t know all the answers. And there’s quite some uncertainty, which is partly where the planetary boundaries are coming to also just not knowing the large risk or risk in itself. Alpha: And then you also, in this whole planetary boundary framework, you’re looking at green water, right? Can you explain the green water framework for water? Lan: Professor Malin Falkenmark was the one who coined, or colored the water cycle. So she termed the blue water and green water decades ago in an effort to help policy makers to understand the issues particularly related to green water. Because I think maybe still, but particularly decades ago, a lot of the focus on water resources management was on so-called blue water. So the liquid water, visible water in rivers, lakes, and groundwater and much less attention is put into the green water. So the water in soil and that contributes to transpiration. The water that is actually used in most photosynthesis processes by both ecosystem and grown crops. So her point was like, look, we have blue water resources, everyone seems to understand that. We have infrastructure, all the water resource management is looking into that. But how about green water, which is actually over 80, 90 percent in many places. Thinking in South America, Africa, it is still over 90 percent of the agriculture that relies on green water only. So only rain-fed, using very little, our known irrigation water, right? So, yeah, so that’s the difference between green and blue water. So this was actually originally coming from there. And before I worked with the green water of the planetary boundaries framework, the planetary boundary for water was called freshwater use. So also focusing on blue water. The interesting thing is that if you look into the supplementary material of the 2009 paper by Rockström et al., there’s a whole page on green water, on the green water’s role for monsoon system, for Amazon, for tipping elements, for sustainability. So everything is there, but it was under the hood. So somehow it didn’t communicate. And there was lots of misunderstanding on if we just look at freshwater use, how much we use, that it doesn’t really reflect the planetary risk we are facing. What is the Earth system impact of using, you know, a little bit more water in total over the globe? So different kinds of critique. That was one. In other words, that, well, if you lump it into a volume of water that you can use globally, what happens if you use a lot of water in India and none in Europe or US? Is it still safe or not? And of course, what we see is that water changes. The impact on Earth system are much more widespread. It’s not just about water use. It’s not just about how much water you withdraw from rivers. That matters. And it’s there. It’s all there in the 2009 paper, but they just didn’t come out clearly. And by not presenting it clearly, a lot of those things were sort of lost in the margin. So what we did was to say, you know, we’re not interested in maybe freshwater use per se from an Earth system perspective, but we’re interested in freshwater change. And we want to have a sub-boundary for blue water and a sub-boundary for green water. Yes, it was years of discussions with many colleagues. Yeah, as you can imagine, this kind of work really needs interdisciplinary and collaborative work. It was fun. Alpha: The freshwater is made up of both blue and green water, right? Lan: There are two sub-boundaries to the freshwater change boundary now. One on blue water, which is represented by the percentage of land that experiences local deviations from baseline of stream flow, and one for green water that has a similar but measures root-zone soil moisture. Alpha: Right. And so traditionally hydrology in the 20th century was focused on blue water because that’s aqueducts and piping water and everything. But so now you’re saying, the green water, which is the water that’s accessible through the soil, the plants, is actually really key. And you’re also saying this is through teleconnections, right? Like teleconnections being like the water in one area impacts, you know, somewhere else. Continents, right? Because you have the water being transpired and it affects large-scale atmospheric circulation of water and through the atmosphere. Lan: Yes. So water is so much more than just river water, right? So it is, yes, it is the transport of nutrients or pollutants. It is the habitat of life or biodiversity and it is climate. It is the cloud. It is the, you know, and the cloud decides how much of the, it regulates how much of the sun’s radiation reaches the Earth. So it is albedo. So, yeah, I started with like water is so much of the identity of the Earth system. It’s a water planet. Alpha: And the whole atmospheric transport system, we kind of forget about it, right? But like it is actually how water is getting to different places. So have you been trying to work to try and get this into governance and try to get this into the political system to awareness of the importance of all this atmospheric water transport? Lan: Well, there are many efforts on that front. And we see a lot of interest from the UN agricultural extension FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations). With David Ellison, Pat Keys, and others, we wrote an article for the FAO journal clearly describing the water cycle, also including the atmospheric one. And the thing is that when you reach out to policy makers, one thing that is important is also that it’s not that simple. So I think when we have an article showing this is the ecosystem service of the moisture supply of forest. Scientists will understand that this is one of many processes and mechanisms. And when you reach policy makers, you have to sort of put it in the context. It might not be the best idea to plant a monoculture plantation in a dry area, as we know. So context is everything. So it’s very important to, when we reach out to policy makers to do it together with others and both sort of accounting for the multifaceted sort of when is forest benefiting the water cycle as a whole, both allowing local rivers to not dry out, and also, at the same time, promoting biodiversity. That a monoculture is often not particularly resilient and it’s not just about the amount of water in a particular time, but also how sustainable is it? And especially under climate change, the water cycle is changing. So that’s one of my other research projects where we look at the resilience of forest-based climate mitigation measures. There’s a lot of effort and political will, which is nice, to restore forest systems. But how resilient is it? Where should we do it? And also without harming local communities. Whenever you want to do something on land, there is something on that land already. So it’s not so simple. Alpha: So the FAO, that’s one of the leading agricultural global entities, right? It’s a big deal that they’re actually recognizing this. Lan: Yes, I do see that. And also in conferences, more organizations are talking about it. Johan Rockström is the co-chair of the Earth Commission and the Global Commission on the Economics of Water. And they had a couple of reports now quantifying the moisture exchange between countries and frame it in the way that policy makers understand. So if you frame it in terms of the economics of water, if you frame it in terms of a trans-boundary issue. I think it’s really being taken up by people who are understanding it. I’m not sure if it’s been taken up in policy but I see it coming. Alpha: Okay, so it’s being recognized, but there’s not necessarily policy passed to restore land use to increase the rain. Lan: Not that I know of. Okay. Not like particular policies. I don’t know if it’s good or bad because, you know, you don’t want it to be misused. I really hope it’s taken up in a good way and used in the right way. Alpha: In the whole hydrology or climate movement, is it just a very small section of scientists talking with governance people, or is there more. Is it growing?Lan: Sophie te Wierik’s finished a PhD now a couple of years ago. And so she was really focusing on the governance of atmospheric moisture. She’s at Potsdam Institute. I also just generally see more governance people being interested, which is always good because we can only do as much as with our more biophysical background. We can try to reach out, but ultimately you need to work together with governance scholars. We had a collaboration with a number of people who worked on implementing moisture recycling in life cycle assessment. That was one example of trying to implement it in actual thing that are being used by companies. And we have another project working on the Earth System Impact Score, led by Steve Lade in Australia. Who is trying to create a score of planetary boundaries interactions, and we’re not there yet, but eventually we will hope to integrate moisture recycling considerations also in this metric, which is something that can be used by companies and investors to assess not only their local impact, but the normal metric will do the job for, but also how their operations affect a large-scale kind of planetary scale. And it’s a continent or the planetary scale impact. Alpha: Do you personally talk to people at FAO? Lan: I talk to them. We just had put together a a report with FAO together. So I think this organization also is really happy to work together with researchers. And of course, the majority of my time goes to research, but I do try to make a good chunk of time to contribute to reports and policy briefs to the extent that they also reach the policy makers and I think that’s a part of me fearing that our concepts will not be used in the right ways. I can’t keep my fingers away from at least reviewing those reports. Okay, yes, it’s formulated in a nuanced way. But I don’t know if policy makers like that. I think they kind of prefer maybe the simplest straightforward recommendations and here I come with the more nuanced recommendations. Alpha: Do you have any last words to share? Lan: I think this field will continue to move forward and hopefully go more interdisciplinary so that it can have a real impact. I think we are starting to recognize and realize that the water cycle is not just a function of the climate, but a part of the living system. So those that live on earth depend on the movement of water. It’s a tiny fraction of earth water that is fresh that is used for all life on land and the reason it can be used is because it’s in movement. So it’s a renewable resource really. And this water cycle is also then dependent on life. So at the same time that the water is giving life, the life is also giving water. We really need to think of the water as an intertwined thing. The water cycle we have today is not just a biophysical abstract thing, but it’s something that is shaped by the whole evolution of life on earth and a result of co evolution with life. And now we are part of as a species, we are part of shaping the water cycle. And I think we need to be really careful thinking about how we are shaping it, whether it’s in a way that is good for us or in a way that is practically self harm. And we are the only species that is doing this knowingly and consciously. So I think with that lies a big responsibility. ………….Lan Wang Erlandsson’s publications and other info on her web page.This is a reader supported publication that you can help financially by becoming a paid subscriber.“A planetary boundary for green water.” Wang-Erlandsson, Lan, Arne Tobian, Ruud J. Van der Ent, Ingo Fetzer, Sofie te Wierik, Miina Porkka, Arie Staal et al. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 3, no. 6 (2022): 380-392Falkenmark, Malin, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, and Johan Rockström. “Understanding of water resilience in the Anthropocene.” Journal of Hydrology X 2 (2019): 100009.Wang-Erlandsson, Lan, Wim GM Bastiaanssen, Hongkai Gao, Jonas Jägermeyr, Gabriel B. Senay, Albert IJM Van Dijk, Juan P. Guerschman, Patrick W. Keys, Line J. Gordon, and Hubert HG Savenije. “Global root zone storage capacity from satellite-based evaporation.” Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 20, no. 4 (2016): 1459-1481. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

In this podcast, I had the wonderful experience of talking with Douglas Sheil, professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, about forests. Douglas's academic adventures took him on a journey from his homeland to places like the rainforests of Indonesia, where he studied how local communities can help protect forests. He has studied forests in many forms of their complexity and wrote a well-regarded textbook on tropical rainforests. He became interested in questions of forest and water and helped clarify a big issue in the ecohydrology field about whether trees were contributing to or depleting the water in ecosystems. His results showed that when tree cover is done right, and not as dense invasive monocultures, then there would be an increase of water in the ecosystem.As he worked on forest water issues, he discovered Victor Gorshkov and Anastasia Makarieva's work on the Biotic Pump, and collaborated with them on explanations of their theory. Here an explanation he wrote about the Biotic Pump: “For centuries we’ve believed that temperature differences generate the pressure gradients that drive winds and carry moisture inland. The sun heats the land, warm air rises, drawing in winds. These winds carry moisture laden air inland, where it eventually warms, rises, and condenses as rain. There are complications, such as Earth's rotation and atmospheric cells, but overall temperature differences underpin our understanding of how wet inland areas of the planet stay wet. But there’s an alternative: the Biotic Pump. An idea developed and championed by colleagues Anastassia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov. Given common misunderstandings, I thought I would try a simple intuitive summary without equations. Here goes: Imagine two vast areas of atmosphere next to each other: one wet and one dry. Both are at equilibrium with the same surface temperature. Atmospheric pressure follows a roughly similar near exponential decline with altitude in both, but there are small differences. In the wet column, the presence of moisture means that air pressure is slightly lower (compared to the neighbouring dry column) in the lower atmosphere (up to 3-4 km height) and becomes greater above that. These pressure differences mean that if the columns are brought together, and the pressure differences maintained, a circulation is established: At the surface, air moves from the dry to the wet area. At higher altitudes, it flows in the opposite direction. This circulation causes air to rise over wetter regions and descend over drier regions. In the real world, “dry” areas may be just a little less moist. As long as it is sufficiently moist the moister region draws in air from surrounding drier areas. As this incoming air rises, it cools and reaches saturation, producing rainfall. This process maintains the moisture contrast with neighbouring areas, where the now-dry high-altitude air returns and descends. As long as the wet column stays wetter, and has sufficient moisture to maintain the pressure differences, the circulation continues.Forests are key here. Forests generate water vapour more effectively and rapidly than most other land cover types, maintaining a moist atmosphere that is effective at drawing in air from elsewhere and sustaining this circulation deep inside continents. Energy derives from the sun evaporating water vapour. Heat energy still features (because condensation releases latent heat), but in this case overall pressure differences depend on condensation and the removal of water molecules from the air.”For more info here is a link to a paper where is a co-author with Makarieva & Gorshkov. Douglas Sheil and I discussed a variety of topics, like how forests evolve, how to restore forests, and his work on the intermediate disturbance theory for forests. Here’s an abridged edited version of my interview with Douglas Sheil:FOREST ECOLOGY AND WATER SYSTEMSDouglas: My background is very much as a forest ecologist, somebody who's been looking at how we can do conservation, particularly in remote parts of the tropical rainforest. How can we actually work with communities, for example, to actually protect these incredibly rich communities that are often under threat from large-scale industrial transformation, etc? My preoccupation has often been with the biodiversity, the rich species richness of these forests, which of course is famous.But if you're working with communities and stuff, talking about things like water, that's something that really matters to everybody. Everybody needs reliable water, even in wet parts of the world. If there's a big drought, that's a problem. So everybody cares about water. So I guess I've come into the water topic, partly because I see it really matters.Alpha: You grew up in Ireland. Did you then get into forestry immediately, or was it a little bit of a winding route?Douglas: It was winding. When I was young, I thought I was going to be an astronomer or a physicist, because I kind of like these elegant relationships. So I've always had a broad interest. But I think I got jealous of some of my colleagues when I was a student who went on these amazing field trips and stuff. So I thought, well, I really want to do that. That looks like way more fun than living under fluorescent light bulbs for the rest of my life. So I was kind of doing that in my holidays. And then I thought, how can I make people actually pay me at the same time to do what I do in my holidays? So that's kind of been my career trajectory. And I guess I've been super lucky, because it kind of worked out for me.Alpha: Cool. So when you went to graduate school, which department were you in?Douglas: At that point, I had done molecular biology. And then I actually went to a course called Forestry and its Relation to Land Use at the University of Oxford.It doesn't exist anymore. But it was a pretty practical applied kind of research. And I thought, OK, this is a real change of direction, but really exciting. I'd done a bit of holiday work in various remote places. And I thought I really need a solid grounding, some kind of expertise that people are going to employ me for. And then I did a PhD also in Oxford on long-term change in tropical rainforest.Alpha: Cool. And then you ended up writing a textbook about rainforest, right?Douglas: Yeah, that's right. So that was about 15 years ago. I did it with Jaboury Ghazoul - he's at ETH in Switzerland. I'd known him previously. We had worked together a little bit. So that was a real opportunity to actually think more broadly and more widely about tropical rainforest and how they work and why they matter and what we can do to try and protect them in the future. So that was a really nice opportunity to really look around these topics. And that's actually also when I got very much more interested in this forest and water topic.Alpha: As you go about your research, how do you select your problems and how do you then try and tackle them?Douglas: I guess I've been lucky that it's a mixture of curiosity and practical opportunity. I guess a lot of my career early on, I wasn't actually in academia. I spent 10 years in Indonesia with a place called Center for International Forestry Research. That's very applied work, really trying to look at how we could protect forests and also protect the poor and vulnerable people who depend on them. So that was very much a goal for 10 years. I really appreciated that because I think that's so fundamental to what we're trying to do to protect forests.It can't be ignoring the people, it has to be including the people. So it was a real opportunity to go and spend time with these communities and with teams of researchers. I was leading teams of researchers there and trying to look at how we could come up with ways to protect these forests in the long term, that the communities themselves would support. Maybe just to clarify that so much of the cost of conservation around the world is the squabbling and the fighting and the conflict with local communities because the communities themselves are not on board with this. And I think it's a huge opportunity and a huge mistake in the first place to have done that and a huge opportunity to turn that around.Because actually if you work with the communities, particularly in forest-rich parts of the world, like Indonesia, often the communities themselves are also very keen that these forests are protected in the long term. So if we actually ask them how, where, you know, that they would be supported for that, that's such a valuable opportunity. And it sounds very simple.BIOTIC PUMPAlpha: And then how did you get into forest and water and what was the research question you were looking at when you started out?Douglas: I had written this book on tropical rainforests. And one of the chapters that I had decided I was going to draft was about the various services that come from forests. So I was reviewing different articles and reviews particularly and interesting ideas that maybe should go into this chapter. And I found this article from Anastasia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov. And I remember reading and thinking, oh, this is really interesting.I hadn't heard of this. But I put it in a pile for once that I should talk to people who know these topics better. So I talked to various colleagues who had worked on trees and water-related topics. And yeah, it was kind of quickly clear to me that the different responses I got around those ideas. So I should say I'm talking about the biotic pump, the idea that forests actually can create these low pressure areas that draw in winds and moisture, that they actually play an active role in these atmospheric processes.This idea was super interesting. But I hadn't really heard it talked about. So asking colleagues, I quickly got very different answers from different people.Why I should dismiss it. You know, oh, if this was true, we would know already. Or yeah, it's true, but it's a small effect. And you quickly realized there's a lot of conflicting opinions out there which can't all be true. So it made me more curious.So I took more and more about this and realized that really this was quite a novel idea. It wasn't really in the climate models, but that if it was true and it seemed to me plausible, if it was true, then it was super important. So I used to say to people, I don't know if this is true or not, but if it is true, this is super important, we should find out. So I spent quite a lot of time and effort in trying to promote that. And I wrote a popular article about it at the time in Bioscience. Trying to just promote how important this theory was if it was true, not saying it was true, but saying it looked fairly plausible and should be taken seriously.Alpha: And you reached out to Makarieva and Gorshkov, right?Douglas: Yeah, at that time, I also wrote to them. And I think they were away, you know, they spend a few months every year in Siberia offline, recuperating and brainstorming with each other, I understand. So at that time, they were offline.So it was only some months later after the article was really impressed that they finally got back to me. And I think they were happy that these ideas were gaining traction. I think what I saw at that time was part of the problem for people was physicists, Anastasia and Victor, they're physicists.So they were very used to writing in the way that physicists would approve of, you know, in terms of differential equations and making the approximations that physicists maybe would accept. And they found that a convincing argument for a lot of people who work in these topics, the hydrologists or whatever, of course, this is totally over their heads. We can't really say ourselves whether this is convincing. There is an assumption that the physics itself would be already well sorted. You know, it's in the climate models, it gives convincing answers. So obviously we don't need this additional insight.We don't need these additional mechanisms. So I think that was interesting. But I also found that they have published these ideas in physics journals.I think that's something important to highlight because people say, well, you know, if it's true, then they should publish it in physics journals. And the answer is they have. They haven't had any pushback from the physics community. They've had pushback from the climate community. And that was basically because these ideas are not properly represented in the models. I should say, I mean, it always sounds a little bit problematic for people when you start criticizing the climate models, because I know there's this narrative of the climate change deniers.And I should say it's not about that at all. It's about whether the climate models are really capturing the key mechanism. It's not about denying climate change. I think often when I'm talking about this, I have to be very careful that the climate models themselves recognize there's all kinds of discrepancies and details missing in their models. You know, they have to simplify to make it viable. And when I talk to the people who make these models, they're quite sympathetic individually.But they will say, well, you know, join the queue. There are 150 other things they're working on, whether it's sea ice representation or the proper resolution of vortices in the atmosphere or whatever. There are all these topics that other people have highlighted as needing more attention. And the Biotic Pump to them is just another one in this long list. But I think for the climate strategy people, the bigger picture stuff, it is challenging because if a lot of the models are wrong, then a lot of the predictions potentially are wrong.Alpha: Can you describe the Biotic Pump for those listening?Douglas: I guess it's good to start with the traditional idea of how wind circulation works on the planet is you have areas where air is warmer and air is colder. And if you can think of a hot air balloon, why does the hot air balloon rise? It rises because the space that's taken up by the hot air is larger than a similar volume of cold air. And that means it's lighter per unit volume and that air will rise. So the hot air balloon is capturing this low weight volume of air and using it to rise, that column of air, which is warmer rises.So across the entire surface of the earth, the areas which are warmer, typically the air is rising and where the air is colder, the air is falling. There's this constant circulation going on. And that's pretty much how climate models understand circulation.It's all about temperature. In the Biotic Pump, we say there's an additional feature, which is that when water evaporates and condenses, there's a change in the number of particles in the atmosphere. So when you have more humidity coming off a wet surface, you're adding to the number of molecules in the gas.And when you have moisture, humidity, condensing back to water or to ice in the atmosphere, you have fewer particles. And what we're saying is that also has an effect. And of course, physical recognition of how things work. Of course, it has an effect. There is an effect. But traditionally and historically in the models, it's been considered to be a small and possibly negligible effect. And what Victor and Anastasia did in their studies was saying, actually no, because a lot of things cancel out in the expressions. Actually, it becomes a dominant effect in certain circumstances.And it can actually explain certain kinds of patterns that are otherwise difficult to explain. And I guess, I don't know how much you want to go into the physics on this, but the point would be where the air is typically condensing more often, you'll get low pressure on average. And that means air is generally moving to those places. So very moist places, very wet places, where there's a lot of rainfall going on, will naturally draw in moist air from other places. We call that convergence, the idea that there's moisture coming in, the air will be rising, rain will be falling. So you have this active process of moisture being taken from certain areas to other areas, particularly towards wet areas. It's a very clear example of a positive feedback. Wet areas get more rain because of this Biotic Pump effect.Alpha: Yeah, cool, well, that's a good summary. Yeah, and I think part of it was just this mechanism at first was a bit strange that the water vapor, when it condenses, was creating enough pressure that it was creating an effect. And yeah, so I think normal climate scientists thought it was much smaller than latent heat, but when you take out the whole circulation where the latent heat might impede the downward trajectory of the water, I mean, the air circulation, I think they were saying that if you take that into account, then actually the partial vacuum effect becomes important.Douglas: But I think what was interesting, and maybe it's one of the details that often doesn't get so much attention, is one of the comments I got from colleagues earlier on was if you really want to show this matters, you have to show that the current models or the current understanding is somehow inadequate.You have to show this gap. And that is something that we did, or I should say Anastasia and Victor really did, showing how the actual profile of air pressure in the current atmospheric circulation doesn't really fit with what the current theory, so the traditional heat-driven theories would tell you you should see, whereas their model, their understanding actually gives additional insight. So there are various cases like that, also in tropical cyclones, so these typhoons and tropical storms that are rotating systems, also showing that the physics that they're talking about, this condensation effect, actually makes a difference, which is actually allowing you to better fit what you observe. And I guess in science that's key. It's not enough to have good ideas that make sense or are plausible, but actually showing that it fits data. So I think that's really important to underline, because I think a lot of people who look at this, the hydrologists who look at this, they maybe read one or two articles, but there's a whole set of studies out there showing that there is a need for this. There are patterns where this idea actually is helpful, where you provide a better fit to what we observe.Alpha: Right, yeah. So yeah, so they call this condensation-induced dynamics, or kinetics, I think, and so they were looking for other places to apply it to, right? So hurricanes also have this effect, because there's lots of water condensing there. And so they're saying that their calculations, if you use this effect, it gets more accurate experimental results of how the hurricanes actually move.Douglas: Yeah. And initially when they were working on this, I said, you can keep me out of this, because I'm an ecologist. This is very technical physics, and it's very much about the meteorology of atmospheric systems. So I didn't play much role initially, but I did get involved later on just in helping clarify a lot of the arguments. And I do see the point, because it adds to this larger weight of evidence, which shows that these ideas make sense and are valid.I mean, I think physically they already made sense. It was way back sometime in the 1950s when computing power was super expensive. People put a premium on making approximations and assumptions that were giving good answers. And they did that.They made amazing models for what they had at the time. And it's only now that we come back and revisit some of these assumptions that people are super defensive about. It's like, hang on, but we don't have the same computing restrictions as we had way back in the 1950s. We don't have to make these assumptions and approximations.What happens if we don't? And to me, this is something I've been really pushing for the last few years, really looking for people who'd be willing to sit with Anastasia now, because I should say Victor passed away a few years ago, so with Anastasia, and really work through and try and show that models that don't make these approximations and assumptions that they have made historically would actually give better results. And I think that makes total sense.Alpha: And what's interesting, as I looked around, is that there are actually other condensation-induced dynamics that actually climate models do use. I mean, like microbursts is this phenomenon where the cold air underneath clouds condenses. And so it creates this really rapid acceleration. That's like, it could create almost like a tornado, like it hits the ground and all the vegetation gets wiped out. And so that is actually one of these powerful examples of this condensation-induced dynamics that...Douglas: That's right. Now, when we see these things in the tropical forest, because they're amazing, this downburst, exactly what you're talking about, that they can flatten the forest over a monthly energy area. So they are occasional, but when they happen, they are incredibly impactful on the forest. Yeah. So in the Amazon, this has been known for, I think, a couple of decades. And we have something in press showing that it also happens in Africa. So, yeah, exactly that.Alpha: And did you try to see more of this effect? So what is the impact of the biotic pump on ecology? So just looking at more the effect on the ecosystem, what would you say is the effect of this large-scale circulation?Douglas: I guess it's tricky to summarize these things, because you take very different angles on it. I think an angle which is super important is these... What's the consequence of losing forests?I mean, that's an obvious one, but there's this dependence, which is at a larger scale, perhaps, than most of us are traditionally thinking of. Often in tropical countries, we're happy to save any little fragment here or there, because there's important biodiversity. But what we see is that there's also real importance to maintaining really large-scale tree cover over large areas, because this is actually crucial for maintaining the climate system, which these systems have evolved under. So there is a danger when we lose too much forest, particularly in coastal areas, perhaps that we cut off a lot of the flow of moisture to the interior. So when I'm talking about interior, I'm thinking of continents like the Amazon basin or the Congo basin. So to actually get inland there, the water that's coming in has to pass over large areas of land, which is forested.But if we lose that forest, we potentially break that circulation and could dry out those interior areas. So this dependence, I guess in a sense, people were aware of this already. This idea that rainfall is recycled, of course, is very much key. But what we're saying is it's not just the recycling, it's also these atmospheric pressure gradients that draw in the winds that are also potentially vulnerable to these processes. And I think we're seeing that already, I mean, both in the Amazon and in Africa, it's always a little bit speculative, because there are so many things going on in these landscapes. But the loss of tree cover, the loss of forest, forest. I guess something I would really want to highlight, because it often gets a bit, it starts sounding a bit depressing when I start talking through the conservation story, but there's so much we can fix with this as well, because the recognition that keeping these landscapes forested, keeping them green, particularly with native vegetation, this is a real opportunity. And just to highlight that it all is not lost in these systems, because we do have this insight how this large-scale tree cover can really be recovered and bring back these wetter and more productive systems. And that would also be true in many parts of the world, which are already dry and fairly unproductive. That you know, historically, when there was native vegetation, they were probably much more productive and wetter and moister. And a lot of this is an opportunity to bring this back. So yeah, I always want to temper the slightly tragic and pessimistic story with this optimistic one that there's a lot here we can actually fix.Alpha: And people have raised awareness that Amazon rainforests and its impact on rainfall, but the Congo rainforest, it's not, you don't hear about it too much and its impact on rainfall, but you know, it's still a huge effect. And it's just, I think our attention hasn't been on Africa, right? You have work in Uganda.Douglas: The data across the Congo is generally much poorer. So there's been a lot of attention to the Amazon historically and Congo by comparison, there's much less. And particularly if you want historical data series, there just isn't data over large parts of the Congo. So I don't quite know what the situation is now. But I do remember there was even a lack of clarity about where the rainfall gradients were. You know, is this area wetter than that area? It's like, well, we don't know, you know, the data is too noisy, it's too poor in general. So there was a big problem with that. I think it's much improved, but it's still only recent data now that we have.And a lot of the satellite products are reasonably reliable. But yeah, I think we're starting to get a handle on these things better and people are paying more attention to Africa now.[If you have found value in this newsletter and podcast, and would like to financially support the production of it, consider becoming a paid subscriber.]FORESTS AND THE WATERSHEDAlpha: There was a big debate in science around the forests, how they impact the watershed.Douglas: There's been debate amongst those people who think that trees are good for water and people who think trees are bad for water. And what's really striking is it's either good or it's bad, it's never about the nuances, sometimes it's good, and sometimes it's bad.There have been some studies with hundreds of examples, I think it was Jackson et al in Science, where they're basically showing, wherever you grew forest in their study, you had less water in those landscapes. But the problem was that even though they had hundreds of cases, these were all drylands, and they were all plantations of alien species or exotic species. And they were only looking at really dense forests.But if you actually have native species, and often it's partial cover, particularly in drylands, with a certain amount of tree cover, it can be a good thing. We published a study in 2016, based on several years of really detailed work in Burkina Faso in the Sahel of West Africa. It's a drylands area where it's a landscape with scattered tree cover, people have little plots of vegetables, there are a lot of animals grazing around. And in this landscape, people are digging quite deep wells to access water. So a lot of work for people just in daily lives to find the water they need. Every now and then, they would have drought.Water was a real part of the hardship of daily life. The study I was involved with publishing showed that a small amount of tree cover or some amount of tree cover has a dramatically positive effect on the ability of this landscape to retain the rainfall that falls and allow it to absorb into the soil profile and recharge the groundwater. So this is a landscape with hooved animals trampling around. The soil surface is slightly compacted by this. It creates a surface where when the rain does fall, it tends to run off very quickly and is lost from the landscape. Whereas if you actually have the right kind of vegetation, it doesn't run off as much. The vegetation doesn't have to be trees, but trees are good because trees provide other values and services as well. They are providing fuel, they're providing shade.There are other reasons you might want trees in these landscapes, but trees make a dramatic improvement in allowing the water that's falling on these landscapes to be held in those landscapes. And what we were showing is it wasn't just a small percentage, it wasn't just like a few percent, we were talking several times, you know, several hundred percent. This is dramatic because this was something new, something new in such recent times that is such a big effect.So the point here would be you don't necessarily need dense tree cover, you probably don't need exotic species, you just need some scattered tree cover, it has to suit the conditions. It's not like trees don't use water and re-emit it to the atmosphere, they do. This has always been what people say, oh, you always lose water, but it depends, you know, because also runoff is another way you lose water.Alpha: So to summarize, if you have dense, invasive species, monocultures, then what happens is that the trees draw too much of the groundwater and soil water and transpire. And so then the landscape loses water. But if you have less dense polycultures, then the trees can actually allow the rainfall to infiltrate the ground. So you build up the groundwater. So actually, there's a net positive effect on the water.Douglas: Yes, exactly.If you plant a big plantation of Australian trees in Africa, it's often not good. It doesn't have the right phenology. Phenology is when the trees are actually leafing up when they're actually transpiring, when they're losing water into the atmosphere. If you look at native vegetation, everything is adapted to the local conditions. And particularly in these drylands, when the timing of when species actually produce leaves and how they transpire, how deep their roots are, all of these biological details, obviously, these are crucial to the survival of these trees, but they're also tuned to the local conditions over centuries, over millennia.These communities have become very much tuned to this. There's a really interesting observation that I think highlights this tuning is in many parts of the drylands around the tropics, you have what we call monsoon weather. So a lot of the time it's dry, and then suddenly, generally around the same time of year, every year, it rains, right? And this is crucial when it rains and how much it rains is crucial. This is the monsoon systems. And what you find, in most dryland native systems is before the monsoon comes, before the rain falls, the plants are already greening up. And what we see is that greening up is using these last little reserves of moisture that have still survived all through this dry season, that the vegetation has been holding onto to allow them to produce these green leaves, these young green leaves, and they already start to transpire, even though it's been dry for maybe several months, maybe half a year, very dry conditions, but the plants are adapted to provide this pulse of moisture. And this actually helps trigger the monsoon.Where is this happening? All across dryland Africa. So you have this very specific ecological evolutionary tuning of the vegetation, which is not only adapted to the monsoon, but also to bring the monsoon. And I think this is crucial. It's this two-way relationship that it's not just that the vegetation is a consequence of the weather, but it has interacted and evolved over time to have a big impact on these processes. So we very much believe that the monsoon is dependent on a certain level of moisture in the atmosphere to trigger it. And having a large extensive area of vegetation transpiring is very much helpful for triggering this start of the monsoon. If you don't have that, then you can delay the monsoon. Maybe when it comes, it doesn't even happen. It should have come.‘having a large extensive area of vegetation transpiring is very much helpful for triggering this start of the monsoon’Alpha: This is cool. I knew this was happening in the Amazon rainforest and the Congo rainforest. I didn't know it was also true of less tropical regions too.Douglas: It's one of the reasons why we can't just replace native vegetation with pine trees or eucalyptus all over the world. I think this is going back to why some trees are better than others. There's a lot to be said for local vegetation just because we know it's worked in the past without human intervention. And I think there's a lot of, I mean, it's not so much a scientific statement, but maybe a respect statement, respecting nature has done this pretty well without human intervention.So we shouldn't necessarily be so arrogant as to assume we can just replace this forest with that forest and it has no impact. People quite often ask me like with palm oil in Borneo. We've seen a huge decline in rainfall in Borneo, for example, with deforestation there. And then say, well, why doesn't the oil palm compensate? Well, it's a totally different kind of vegetation.It is a rainforest palm, but the vegetation, it's behaving very differently. It won't have the same responses. It's not so deep-rooted. Yeah, it's not so deep-rooted. It won't have the same responses.I can't say in any detail which of all these differences really matches in this case, but we're worried that, yeah, it's much less robust, much less resilient. And we have seen very dramatic rainfall decline in Borneo with deforestation, for example.Alpha: Yeah, and so that's the other thing too, that when they talk about like this whole climate and water thing, because when the hydrologists look at the impact of forests on the water system, they're just saying you lose water because of transpiration, but that's forgetting the climate aspect where that transpiration comes back down as rain. And so it's because you're only looking at half the equation, you sometimes make this wrong assumption that transpiration is all loss.Douglas: Yeah, so in a sense it is always a local loss, but it's a regional gain. Somebody is gaining your rainfall. In some parts of the world, like if you're a farmer in China, there are huge populations of people, your rainfall is almost always coming from somebody else's land to the west. So that's crucial.And I think in some ways it's obvious with modern understanding, but I still don't think we've quite caught up with the implications. You know, the land cover upwind of you is obviously crucial to you. I should say with the Biotic Pump, it also matters downwind because that's the forest cover that's actually drawing in that moisture. So people often emphasize the upwind where the rain is coming from, but we also need that process that's drawing the wind right to you with the moisture, which is due to these low pressures that are also behind you as it were when you're facing where the rain is coming from.So we need both. But it's these large-scale processes we're still in the early days of trying to understand. There's some work in some parts of the world where there are big river systems which cause conflict like with the Nile. Now all of these countries need more water or many of them need more water and there's a real potential for conflict as to who gets the water. I think it's going to be the same potentially in the future when we have a better understanding of how rainfall is translated from one area to another. Just thinking how we can fairly make sure we maintain these cycles that the farmers in China or in drylands Africa who are getting the rainfall from other land. There's a responsibility there which we haven't really engaged with yet.Alpha: Yeah, like for instance in the Sahel there's a Great Green Wall of Africa being built, and people don't realize that they need to restore the Congo rainforest to help the Sahel, because a lot of the rainfall from the Congo rainforest actually flows northward to the Sahel. Just like the Amazon rainforest supplies rainfall for other South American countries.Douglas: Yeah, yeah. It's a source of rain and also all these circulation processes. It affects these air currents.Alpha: And regarding the Nile issues between Egypt and Ethiopia, they are not realizing the potential that if they help Ethiopians restore their land, they could generate a lot more rainfall which will increase the amount of water that goes into the Nile.Douglas: Yeah, I think there are a lot of opportunities out there and I think some people at least are increasingly looking at these things and there's open-mindedness about it. I mean, I know a lot of colleagues are looking at that. What I do see in this realm, as I say, I'm not a hydrologist, I'm an ecologist by background. What I see is we all have our little window we're looking through, but these are big picture questions and it's really important, I think, to bring the different expertise together.And if we disagree, then we argue and we think how we're going to clarify. What's frustrating me at the moment is there's a lot of dogmatism or outdated thinking. People who are just dismissive of certain things or not interested in certain things and that's a shame because these opportunities are real, the problems are real, and the opportunities to fix them, I think we need to come together and actually think how we can bring the different expertise and ideas together. So that includes what I would call the controversial ideas.Alpha: And there are a bunch of climate scientists who are going around proposing that the different countries have to make these agreements. Just like with rivers, you have to deal with the atmospheric water because the downwind, the upwind countries are affecting the downwind countries' rainfall.They're suggesting that they need to start making agreements across transboundary, transnational agreements around how you're affecting each other's rainfall. But it's still early days. But there are climate scientists going around trying to promote these ideas.Douglas: Yeah, exactly. I think this is increasingly true. I think it was a bit of a fringe thing but it's beginning to get traction. I think the circulation process is everybody nods their head and agrees. There's nothing controversial about the fact that it happens. I guess the role of land cover in maintaining it, that's still controversial. And many details are still debated. Particularly what can you do locally and what are the effects locally?FOREST RESTORATIONAlpha: There are a lot of tree planting and forest restoration projects, but some of these are not so good. As an ecologist, what would you say—what are some of the things we should be aware of when we're trying to plant trees or when we're trying to restore forests?Douglas : I'm very much coming to this from a conservation perspective and background. So I'm always valuing the native vegetation as much as possible. The things that should be there because they were naturally evolved and adapted to the local conditions. And I think we make a mistake often in just using the word forest as if all forests are interchangeable.We need more emphasis on working with communities to see what it is they're interested in having and willing to support, rather than kind of bringing in huge plantations over their heads, but actually what it is that they would like to see in their landscapes. Often they're totally on side with wanting richer and more diverse systems, pleasant places to live.So there's a lot of opportunities there. Planting itself is even an issue, I would say, because planting often means you really need to do an intervention. But trees are pretty good at planting themselves in most cases. And if you create the conditions, I would say this is kind of a lesson for restoration projects in general.People really like to show they're doing something. But often the most important thing to do is be able to step back and let nature repair. And I think we're very bad at that because we want targets, we want to actually have something physically we can show in the photograph with the local mayor or whatever, you know, where they're planting the tree.And this is again, this is a sort of a human nature thing. But actually letting the forest replant themselves, they're pretty good at it, you know, as long as you create the right conditions. And to me, that's going to be a more interesting and more robust forest. It doesn't mean you never need planting. There will be cases where systems are too degraded, or where there's been too much lost or whatever. And you do need to kickstart.And that can be valuable. But in general, once the system is up and running and self maintaining, yeah, we shouldn't have to be having to do these planting things. So every time I see all these big targets of that tree planting, I'm thinking, oh, no, this is a little bit misguided.What we need to do is be able to think why the forest isn't there in the first place. You know, what were those forces? Have we managed to address those?What's the reason the forest is gone? If it's goats, or if it's kind of uncontrolled harvesting, then obviously we need to address that. If it's fires or whatever, we need to address that. There's so much that we should be addressing. And these are not big, visible things that you can set easy targets.Alpha: So yeah, I guess birds drop seeds and monkeys pass seeds around, squirrels, animals trample the seeds into the soil to help them grow. So you're saying that if we're not doing detrimental things, like maybe just cordoning off that area and allowing that forest to naturally reproduce and grow in larger areas, is that a good way?Douglas : That would be perfect. I mean, you should be able to do this over large areas with much less work. But the point is in the long term, even if you plant, you're going to have to protect against these forces that cause deforestation in the first place. So we need to fix those things anyway. And if we fix those things anyway, I think the forest in most cases will come back. As long as I say, I mean, there are cases where it helps the plant because the soil is too degraded.So you need to loosen up the soil, whatever, your mind reclamation or whatever, you probably need to give it a kickstart. But in most cases, nature is remarkably robust. I mean, I'm used as a conservationist to kind of also claiming the opposite.It depends on the case. But nature is robust. If you give it the opportunity to come back, it'll come back. And I don't know if you've ever had a chance to go to like the islands of Krakatau in Indonesia, you know, this is this was sort of famously sterilized by this massive volcanic eruption back at the, you know, the end of the, what was it, 19th century. But yeah, this is lush forest now covered in fig trees, lots of birds and animals, you know, the forest comes back. And we have to think long term, because you're never going to grow a forest in two or three years. It's always going to be long term. But ultimately, if we want forests of native species, you know, all that richness, all that biodiversity, and I think most of us do, you're going to have much more interesting and much more robust forests if we allow nature to do its thing.Alpha : And so what's the time scale we should be thinking a decade, two decades?Douglas : To have a reasonably good forest? Yes, in most of the tropics, things are actually quite fast-growing, particularly in the wetter areas. You can see a good forest in two or three decades indeed. In drylands, it's less clear. It depends how dry and it depends how degraded. Often these landscapes, as I say, like in Africa, there are a lot of grazing animals.So that's a whole different set of issues. But I think it's remarkable how quickly things will bounce back even then. I mean, there's this really positive story coming out of much of dryland Africa about the fact that it really is greening up at the moment. I think it's a combination of communities themselves, recognizing the value of tree cover and recognizing that some trees in your field is actually much better, and slightly wetter climate just naturally, just due to variation.So it's largely greening up, but we are really seeing a lot of greening up in parts of dryland Africa without much outside intervention. So I think that's hugely exciting.……………Douglas Sheil’s Wageningen webpage ………….. 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Where does the evapotranspiration that rises from forests and grasslands come back down as rain? This was the question that Ruud van der Ent asked as a hydrology graduate student. He wondered if he could make a map of the world that would show this flow of moisture around the world.Van der Ent worked with his professor, the renowned Hubert Savenije to make this map. They published this in a paper called “Origin and fate of atmospheric moisture over continents”. Their map has been quite influential and attracted quite a lot of attention. One of the most popular articles in this newsletter has been on their work. This is the map they made. It shows where evaporation that goes up, will become rain again on the same continent. Red areas means 60%-80% of the evaporation that rises from that area will come back down as rain on that continent. So you can see that a lot of the evaporation rises from the west coast of North America, will come back down as rain somewhere in North America. A significant amount of the evaporation from Brazil and the Amazon rainforest, will come back down as rain somewhere in South America. Much of the evaporation from Congo and East Coast of Africa will come back down again as rain somewhere in Africa. Much evaporation in northern India and western China will come back down on the continent.This is a map they made showing the origin of rain. It shows the amount of rain in that area that came from evaporation off the land. So in the Rockies in the US, you can see that a lot of that rain there originated as land evaporation. In northern China, you can note that a lot of the rain there came from moisture that evaporated off the Eurasian continent. I was really happy when I managed to track down Professor Ruud van der Ent, and he agreed to do this interview. Below is an edited excerpt from the interview.Alpha: When you were doing your Master's, was that when you first met Hubert Savenije? Ruud: Yeah, he was a professor in hydrology, a very inspiring person, very enthusiastic, full passion for hydrology and how things work. In one of the courses that I took, we had to read papers. I think the majority of the papers we had to read were his own papers. He did some work in the 90s on moisture recycling in the Sahel. He developed his own approach to the question of where does the rain come from and how much of the evaporation comes back to the land surface. Savenije took the perspective of let's follow the trajectory of moisture and then calculate along that trajectory how much is being recycled. His estimates were rather kind of surprising to me, eye-opening. As you go from the coast of West Africa up north into the drier parts, the amount of precipitation in those drier areas that stems from land sources is actually greatest. So they have a region which actually depends on the land for rain. When he did his moisture recycling equations in the 90s, the computational power was much less than we have today. Also open data was also much harder to access. You couldn't access the big climate mobile data sets, reanalysis data sets that we can access now. So he did it all with analytical equations. I said, I want to pick up this research for my Master thesis. Alpha: Savenije was very much his own independent thinker, right? He was positioned in Africa during his early days. And because there was no internet back then, he had to figure out everything himself. He was trying to figure out this whole precipitation recycling thing. Around that time researchers had just discovered that the sea surface temperature seemed to correlate with the droughts in the Sahel in Africa, and so these researchers thought most of the rainfall was due to the oceans. But then Savenije plotted the amount of rain as you move inland, and he found the rain didn't go to zero. It would have dropped off to zero if precipitation was only due to moisture from the oceans. So he figured out that the land moisture was creating precipitation.. [Hubert Savenije]Ruud: I think sometimes, maybe its a blessing, you know, back when we did not have access to all the information on the internet, because you spend more time actually thinking about your own theories and develop your own methods, which is pretty cool. People also find it very difficult to kind of get their head around that there's moisture coming from Europe that could contribute to rainfall in the Sahel because how's it possible that the moisture crosses the Sahara? There is no rainfall there. There's no rainfall there, but there is still there is still moisture in the air, right? It still crosses the desert. And that's really amazing. Alpha: Yeah, it just doesn't reach the dew point to rain out over the desert. Ruud: Exactly. Yeah. Alpha: Savenjie came up with this idea of quantifying the amount of moisture recycling or precipitation recycling by how much it came back down on the same continent. He was saying the amount of water that transpires off the continent, that then comes back down on the continent is the best way to measure the moisture recycling ratio. Ruud: Yeah, so there's also been a bit of a discussion where people were we just draw a box and we calculate how much recycles within the box. His point is that close to the coast, there is not a lot of moisture recycling. The further you go inland, the more recycling you get .Alpha: So he was talking about this in class when you were in class. And did you somehow think, you want to take one of these ideas as a stimulus for your research? Ruud: Yeah. I did a bit of searching on this moisture recycling topic. A lot of Amazon work pops up. But I had the feeling the global picture is missing. I just wanted to know what the global picture of moisture recycling looks like. And that's why I said, okay, I want to pick up this moisture recycling work. There was also a lot of other literature on this. I think I had a very unusual approach to to to my research compared to to a lot of students in my own class or the kind of students that I see doing their their thesis. They spend only a tiny amount of time on the literature review and and and want to immediately dive in do calculations. I spent like two three months, just reading. If I want to push the edges of what is known, I felt I should first have a complete understanding of what is known about this topic. Alpha: Was this for your Master's topic or for your PhD? Ruud: For my Master's. But the Dutch is a bit different than the American system and in our system you really have to finish your master's before you could start a PhD. For my master thesis I got such interesting results that Savenije said - I have some funding available, do you want to turn this into a PhD? I very quickly had my first paper and then this turned into a PhD. Alpha: When you're choosing your topic in your Masters you don't want to choose something that's too ambitious because you only have like one or two years right. Were you worried that this was a very ambitious topic when you were looking at it? Ruud: Yeah. Yeah, I was worried a little bit because what if things are complicated? But I also thought maybe this is the only time in my life that I have a significant amount of time that I can default to what drives my own curiosity. Alpha: Did you have to learn some of this climate modeling because you were in hydrology?Ruud: Yeah, for sure. I taught myself along the way. I was doing a kind of a bookkeeping approach of the atmosphere. I learnt from friends and colleagues in the the moisture cycling field that had more meteorological background. Sometimes I would teach them about hydrology and and and the land surface and how those things work. Alpha: So how exactly do you calculate how much evapotranspiration is happening off the land? How did you figure out where that water went? Do you run a climatological model? Ruud: My work is running a moisture tracking model. But it's not a model. Well, I need a model but it's reanalysis data. So there are data based on global weather models that are updated with global observations of the weather so they provide a best estimate of what we have globally of historical weather which provides precipitation, evaporation, humidity and wind at different levels in the atmosphere. I do a bookkeeping approach, keeping track of what comes in and out. I think a nice analogy is that of a dye. So suppose you have a tank of water and you put the dye in there and this is also what we do in the moisture tracking model. We put a dye - but I mean the dye is a label that you put in numerical code but essentially you put a dye. I want to know from this specific area where does the water comes from. You label that water and track it through the atmosphere.The tracking happens offline, that's how climate scientists call it. So offline meaning that you already have a run of the climate model that gives you the raw data on the fluxes and the exchanges of the water, and then I just take out the relevant input and output fluxes and then, not running the climate model, but really running only the bookkeeping or the moisture tracking part. I do not - we do not alter the total fluxes, we just say okay well we are particularly interested in the precipitation here or the evaporation there.[This is a reader supported publication. Your help keeps this going.]Alpha: Okay cool so what were some of the results you found?Ruud: What was most striking to me personally was eastern Asia, China specifically. I thought China is close to the coast, so probably they receive most of the rainfall from oceanic sources. But actually we found that in some specific regions in China, like the Tibetan plateau, up to 80% of the rain that falls there comes from evaporation locally or in the Eurasian continent in general. So the recycling there was so high, it was not something that I anticipated beforehand.I think a very relevant part is the Amazon. I'm not the first one that found this, there are several studies before, I've just shown it in a slightly different way. The case of the Amazon, especially the northern part of the Amazon providing water through atmospheric moisture recycling, providing rainfall for the western part and the southern part of the Amazon, but also providing even further than that. The big agricultural areas of Brazil actually rely for a large part of their rainfall on the Amazon.The most worrying part, we all know the ongoing deforestation, which is already bad in itself, but now a big part of this is it reduces rain. I mean the whole idea of the deforestation is to increase agricultural productivity there right? I mean that's the goal. Due to cutting trees, which leads to less transpiration, this may actually backfire.Alpha: Right it's very unfortunate. The food production depends on the forest but they're cutting down the forest to produce more.Ruud: So it is a feedback loop. It's a very negative story.Alpha: And then it also affects the rain in countries south of Brazil too right?Ruud: Yeah, also Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay. Colombia also...Ruud: One of the things water managers are focused on is this river flow because you can see it is a reliable source. But we only do this because we cannot rely on the precipitation itself. But that is in general the source of all water resources.Alpha: So one of the ways to increase water for agriculture is actually look to increase rain by restoring land. Ruud: If you just look at this from the moisture recycling perspective, you know that the water travels hundreds or thousands of kilometers so if you restore land in a particular area then maybe this benefits other areas but not necessarily the area itself. Alpha: Right, that's where transboundary agreements come in. Lot of rivers already flow through different countries, and countries make transboundary river agreements. Some researchers are now looking at how different countries should make transboundary agreements about the atmospheric water too.Ruud: Yeah, true. I'm also involved in some of that work. I suppose that the research community has figured it out that that should really happen. It’s not my specialty. I would guess that maybe the road to the policy table is still a bit of a long one.Alpha: Yeah, it's like, first people have to even be aware that this is an effect.Ruud: Yeah. And I think more and more people are becoming aware of it. I mean, these things have also been mentioned in policy briefs mentioning these things. So, there are people definitely aware of it. But yeah. Alpha: You wrote a paper on on Kenya. You said 75% of Kenya's rain, or Africa's transpiration comes back down in Africa, right? And 15% comes back down in Kenya. So Kenya has some effect on its own rain, but then it has the Congo and Tanzania which is downstream. Ruud: Yeah. People that are wanting to manage transboundary rivers would probably already affirm that it's already quite hard to make agreements between countries on the river flow. And then, if we're talking about atmospheric water flow, which is part of an invisible process, it may be hard to have some agreements on there. My hope is that big countries like Brazil, China, the United States, where they don't need this transboundary water management - if those big countries start realizing it, then this may trigger them to have specific policies on it because they want to keep the atmospheric water cycle functioning. This may then also trigger other countries, which are involved in this transboundary part, to start taking it into the agreement process.Alpha: The US is big, right? So we're in the Southwest of the US, we have the Colorado River. It's supplying water to seven different states. It's a big deal that it's drying up. But people are not looking at how land use affects rain, which then affects the Colorado river.Ruud: Yeah, so it's up to you and other US researchers, like Pat Keys and Francina Dominguez, to try and get this on the policy table in the US. Alpha: You worked with Pat Keys. He's at Colorado State. He did work that showed that for 19 out of 29 cities, if they restore some of their land use, their local land area will affect a third of their precipitation. There are a number of big cities in the world that can have a significant effect on their own rain, without needing transboundary agreements.Ruud: There is lots of great work being done on how cities affect precipitation. But probably also still too little. Cities also emit heat, they have a different albedo, so it's not just that they evaporate less moisture. Alpha: What is the percentage that land affects the rain in the world?Ruud: In the world, it's about 60% of land evaporation that goes up comes back as precipitation on land. 40% of the precipitation comes from land evaporation.There are areas where this can be much higher - Central South America, the East, or the Center East of the United States, China, big parts of West Africa and the Sahel where that number is much higher. So there's like 60-70% of the rainfall that comes from land-based moisture recycling. For the west coast of the US about 70% of the water that evaporates there comes back down elsewhere in North America.…For more info see Dr. van der Ent’s page at Delft University, and his list of publications here. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

A wonderful new documentary, Our Blue World, is out, and it offers a panoramic exploration of how communities across the globe are learning to live in greater harmony with water. The film highlights a wide range of innovative and traditional practices—from China’s sponge city initiative, to New Zealand’s recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person, to the ancient Peruvian techniques for guiding water into mountains so it reemerges as springs. It also delves into the Biosphere 2 project, where twelve people lived in a sealed dome for two years and had to rely on constructed wetlands to purify their water. The documentary further explores the shift along the Mississippi River from a levee-centered approach to one that embraces wetland restoration, as well as efforts to restore Ireland’s bogs—offering a hopeful vision of how we can reimagine our relationship with water. The film is produced by Paul O’Callaghan, directed by Ruan Magan, and narrated by Liam Neeson (the action movie actor) in his voice that oozes gravitas. The movie has beautiful images, and wonderful music that connects us to the local geography and culture.[Peru: still from movie].I think documentaries are a great way to movie the word out about the water cycle, so I was glad for the chance to chat with producer Paul O’Callaghan about the movie.Trailer: Here are some abridged excerpts from our conversation, which covered topics from the movie:On sponge citiesPaul: The idea of a sponge city was very evocative. It captures your imagination. It's like, what is it? It's these two words that you're familiar with, but not together in that context. So anytime I would have talked about this, people became very curious. I was really lucky that we got introduced to Kong Jin. And I remember the day we had the call. It was chaotic in my house at the time. But we had this really great call with Kong Jin and struck up a very good rapport with him. And he kindly was willing to take part in the film. This was just post COVID-19. So China was locked down pretty much for two plus years. We were at the embassy trying to get our visas and get in, which wasn't easy. Kong Jin is a revolutionary, a visionary, something of a rebel, and a landscaper architect who felt that China was going in the wrong direction. They were following the West blindly. They were pouring concrete at an absolutely incredible race. And when he looked at that, he thought, that's not the right way to go.[Kong Jian : still from movie} He'd grown up in the 1960s in China, where it was a beautiful wonderland. It was a paradise. But nobody listened to him when he said we should embrace traditional ways of managing water like rice paddies, for example, which are stepped and terrest, the nearly room for water to ebb and to flow. That was how people lived for 5000 years along the banks of the Yangtze, the Pearl and the Mekong, where in actual fact, the fitness to govern in China was correlated with your ability to control water or at least live with the ebbs and the flows of those mighty, mighty rivers. So it's always been something fundamental to Chinese philosophy and political systems. He wrote 500 letters to 500 mayors and it landed on deaf ears. He was cast out as a pariah. Until one mayor, who later became a minister for the environment later on reached out back out to him and said - I'd love to try that idea that you had in Hainan. That was where the first sponge city was created. And these things look beautiful. When you think about China, oftentimes we think of concrete high rises, skyscrapers, maybe a lot of road traffic and air pollution. Well, these aren't like that at all. Certain parts of the city have tree lined along the streets. They may have mangroves on the coast. There large areas that are allowing rivers to ebb and flow, with constructed wetlands that look like parks. Alpha: Yeah, it's amazing that he had the persistence to do 500 mayors. It's like sometimes to make these paradigm shifts in work, you really have to push. It reminds me of little Peter Andrews, the Australian guy who did natural sequence farm. He just kept pushing, pushing against and all these people say no. But yeah, it's interesting. Not everyone has that ability to push so hard. And sometimes it takes that to get it out there. Paul: And you never know, it only has to land with that one mayor, 499 would never have listened to him. When you write these letters, when you advocate, when you communicate, none of us can really understand the wrinkles that are going to take effect downstream of this. He engendered a spirit of pride in a harkening back to perhaps a wisdom of a 5,000 year old culture. In doing so, he wasn't alienating people with some theory that they wouldn't understand. He was advocating for traditional wisdom. Alpha: And what is some of that traditional Chinese wisdom? Paul: We've been trying to flatten a variable signal, particularly in monsoon type climates in South Asia, where you get these incredible flows, certain times of the year, which can cause rivers to burst their banks. Nowhere is that more true than in China. They had names for these rivers. One was called the Scourge of the Sons of Han. People began to come together and work together in collaboratives, particularly in an agrarian society where the most fertile places are along the banks of these rivers. We saw that in Egypt along the Nile, which, you know, sustained a very rich culture for hundreds, if not thousands of years. And China for five thousand. One of the reasons they haven't had a collapse, like many civilizations have had, is because the rivers constantly replenish nutrients on the lands. They do that by flooding and edding and leaving room for the river. The concept was don't try to canalize it, channel it, control it, straighten it, put it underground and make it move in straight lines. That's not what water wants to do. And Erica Gies, extremely eloquently, captures this in the idea that ‘water always wins’. It's about the power of a tree to break the fall of the water, slow it down. In the root zone of these plants, you've got at least the same area taken up as the complete canopy, not to mention the mycorrhizae structure in the root zone, which is acting like an incredible sponge to hold water. He has been able to integrate this into modern cities. He's got at least over 50 sponge cities, if not more now. Others adopting and embracing the same idea, Bangkok and Thailand. You'll see examples in South Korea. I would say what we see happening in New York, and Copenhagen. Same as in Hamburg, in Germany, New Orleans. And that was one of the interesting things about this film project—you always learn something.We saw stuff that you could join, but they were arising independently, in synchronicity with one another, without anyone really having got together and come up with any particular master plan. What they found was a swampy area that maybe was low-value property—you know, nobody wants to live there. It was kind of almost wasteland, duck land. But when they went in and regenerated it, rehabilitated it, actually the price of the property increased dramatically—because people now wanted to live there.In China people were embracing this. Elderly people are out there in the morning, in this wetland natural park, where you can eat fruit from the trees, and there are fireflies buzzing. It sounds idyllic. You’d see young couples on a date walking together, holding hands through this area. You know, people pushing strollers with babies.The city came alive—through a combination of walkways and boardwalks—in an area that was functioning to protect the city from the disastrous effects of flooding. It was also purifying water. And if you come from a background in water engineering, and you look very closely, you can—you can totally see how the levels are being adjusted, and how it’s flowing from one pond to the next pond, and how it’s all connected.But you know, for most people, it just looks like a beautiful park. And that’s all they see. But it allows—and then, you know, other things: stress levels go down. When we do these types of things, suppression levels go down. People’s social interactions go up. These are externalities you can’t even measure when you think about these projects.On the Mississippi Paul : If you're American, the Mississippi is so iconic. I don't know if you grew up reading Mark Twain or Huckleberry Finn or those kinds of Mark Twain stories. I did. I think for kids all over the world—some of our first romantic, notional images of America came from the idea of two kids going down a river in a raft and having adventures. And that's timeless. It's that freedom that the river brings, the life on the river. It links from the Great Lakes down to New Orleans. It's a mighty, mighty river.In 1927, they experienced an absolutely incredible flood. That led to the displacement of 400,000 people. Many of those people would have been sharecroppers, people who were already quite poor and not well off to begin with. This is from all the area down towards New Orleans, the Delta—particularly where the blues music was, like Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters.Alpha : It was really nice to have the musicians play the blues music in your movie. I really liked that feeling.Paul : Such a treat—it really was. We wanted to show that rivers help foster culture. Rivers are melting pots. One of the reasons that blues, bluegrass, country, and jazz emerged was that people came together with different influences from different places. It’s a melting pot. We see this in rivers in Colombia with music there too. I'm glad you liked it. For me, that was a real highlight. I grew up loving Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and Lead Belly and all that music. And it came from this small area—incredibly rich.When those people moved—many of them moved north to Detroit and took jobs in the automotive industry in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s—and to Chicago, it was one of the reasons why blues music took hold in Chicago and why Motown exists in Detroit. There’s an interesting cultural aspect that the flood had as a knock-on effect.That was 1927, and they haven't seen a flood like that since, but there are times when it gets close—dangerously close. So the mayors along the river realized that there's no levee you can really build that will be powerful enough to protect you. But one of the things they're doing is finding node points all down the river to just leave a bit of breathing room, like a pressure relief valve, where they can set aside areas that can take that water, hold it, and release it back in slowly. That’s their approach, and they're doing it quite collaboratively. Because if they don't, they could be looking at something like 1927 again.Alpha : So they're building all these wetlands. It's a different approach than levees, to deal with the overflow.Paul : A levee is a Victorian hard engineering solution. “We can do this. We can control. We are in charge of this situation. We dominate nature. We have dominion over nature.” That idea is a 19th century, maybe even 18th century idea that worked—particularly when you'd see a one-in-a-hundred-year storm every hundred years. But that's no longer the case.A levee is a hard answer to a problem. A dam is the same. And we're now getting rid of some of these dams as well. We've interrupted the flow in 80% of the world's rivers. We've drained our wetlands. This has been the direction of travel. But now the idea is to leave room.And you know, it’s funny—the Dutch live underwater. And every Dutch person knows that. They're incredible masters of water engineering. They have dikes and levees. But even there, they're leaving room for the river. They're allowing rivers to expand and flood in a way that wasn't part of the traditional Dutch approach. And that's the approach we’re seeing adopted up and down the banks of the Mississippi.Alpha: In hydrology, there's the idea of gray infrastructure—all the dams and levees, the concrete—and then there’s the idea of green infrastructure, like wetlands. There is a switch to the paradigm of a living river, as opposed to forcing the river to do what we want.Paul: When you get atmospheric rivers in the sky, and you can see in Spain, for example—in Valencia—you can get a year’s worth of rain falling in an hour. You see cars washed up and down the street of a Spanish town. Nothing we’ve built is in any way prepared for that.I think it’s like that story of King Canute trying to stop the tide from coming in. Good luck with that. These other solutions make imminently more sense—financially, ecologically, from a biodiversity perspective. The race now is to cross-pollinate ideas between, say, civil engineering within a city council—where that department has that job—and new approaches.Even the city where I live, in Cork, I’ve been terribly disappointed to see hard flood defenses going up on that river, up to maybe a meter, 1.5 meters. One thing is, it isolates people from their river. You can barely see it. It’s like there’s a barrier. And it’s not going to work anyway, because eventually the water’s going to come up through the manholes or some other way.I’m just disappointed that, unfortunately, people are still doing what they always did—because that’s what they learned in university—instead of looking around the world and saying, “Hey, look, there are people doing things differently.” These are what we call the lighthouses. If you look and see, “Oh, they're doing this in Shanghai,” or “Oh, it’s working in Beijing,” or “It’s working in Bangkok.”I’m not saying there’s no room for gray infrastructure at all. But the sole reliance on it—the idea that it’s the only solution—is very myopic. It's Maslow’s Law of the hammer: if you pour concrete, every problem looks like it can be fixed with concrete.In one sense, it’s easy. You work out your designs, you draw it up, and you pour your concrete. But maybe it’s more of a headache for the people in the city council to say, “Oh, maybe we’ve got to leave a bit of room further upstream there. Maybe we need to work with the landowner, work with the farmers.” But ultimately, that’s going to give a better solution. It’s like taking a headache pill versus thinking, “Maybe I should rehydrate so I don’t get headaches in the first place.”Alpha : In the movie, you show the different mayors—how they’re actually speaking with other mayors along the river, which is an interesting way to manage it. It’s almost like a communal thing. Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, called this polycentric governance—where you have multiple centers of decision-making. It seems like that’s what was happening along the Mississippi River: the mayors were talking to each other to help manage the floods.Paul: The nice thing is, it’s not a partisan issue. It doesn’t recognize party lines. Whether you’re a Democratic mayor or a Republican mayor, the people in your city experience a flood in the exact same way. So people came together and collaborated on this unifying issue—rather than a divisive one.And if you think about it, cities are where the people live. It’s almost like a return to the idea of the city-state—like Venice once was in Italy. I do think that a city like New York or New Orleans, with the population and the power of the mayor, can have a strong influence.If you view the river as the natural connection point between cities on its banks, you get a very natural form of polycentric governance—unified by shared interest. Because they are all reliant on this river for transportation, for water, for agriculture.On how to clean our waters with natural processesWe also talked about topics outside the movie, like John Todd’s work. Paul: The idea that moss could be used to purify water is fascinating. We can embrace these blue-green infrastructure solutions using constructed wetlands. Willow coppicing is brilliant in its own right. A lot of biological purification processes are simply accelerations of natural processes, natural cycles. And we can go towards circular economy solutions where we can even produce moss bioplastics or alternative feedstocks that are not coming from petrochemicals but are coming from other cellulose or sugar-based feedstocks. There's a ton of exciting things happening in that area.Alpha: Are you aware of John Todd's work with the living machines? Paul: Oh yeah—when you look at nature-based solutions, all roads lead to John Todd. It’s like tracing the start of the Big Bang. My very first proper job, after I came back from Malaysia and studied water with the World Wildlife Fund and completed my master's, was with the cosmetics manufacturer The Body Shop. They had a living machine, and it was pretty much John Todd's design—maybe licensed in the UK, but still his vision. Completely inspirational. John Todd continues to have an impact. He's still alive, thankfully. But his approach, once viewed as fringe in the 1960s through the '90s, is no longer marginal.John Todd’s idea was to replicate natural purification in a controlled way. Wetlands purify water much like kidneys do in our bodies. The system I worked in was a greenhouse filled with round tanks and floating rafts covered in reeds—phragmites, typha. It looked like something from the banks of the Nile, lush and vibrant. My job was to figure out how it worked because no one at The Body Shop really knew. Walking into it didn’t feel like entering a wastewater plant—it was like stepping into a jungle. And you had to manage it: cut back reeds, manage flows.Todd's genius was in harnessing biodiversity. In the root zone of the rafts, bacteria would grow—microbiomes forming on the roots—and they’d build the base of a food web: rotifers, protozoa, and higher life forms all interacting, breaking down waste, recycling, and purifying water. And it worked—very well.The microbiome essentially learns to clean. It adapts, much like your gut microbiome adapts when you eat a diverse diet. If that system sees chemicals coming from shampoos or conditioners, its diverse microbial population can start processing them—so long as it’s not overloaded. The Body Shop used natural ingredients like Brazil nut oil, but also detergents like sodium laureth sulfate and preservatives like methylparabens. The living machine handled them, provided the load wasn’t too heavy.Overload was exactly the issue I had to deal with. There’s a tipping point: if too much comes in too fast, the aerobic system can’t keep up. Aerobic metabolism is key. It’s like how we function—until we hit our anaerobic threshold and get muscle cramps. Similarly, when you lose oxygen in these systems, you get objectionable odors from sulfur-reducing bacteria. Keep it aerobic and it works well. But hit it too hard and oxygen levels fall off a cliff—and performance collapses.There were also funny side effects. We were using shampoos, so there was foam. A lot of foam. Sometimes on Mondays we’d arrive to find a 12-foot wall of strawberry-scented foam—a byproduct of weekend production. It was hilarious, but also a design challenge.The system was made of a sequence of tanks—two trains of eight, sixteen total. When you charted the chemistry, tanks one and two did the heavy lifting. The rest? Polishing. Removing trace elements you didn’t want reaching the environment. You could have one big tank, but the sequential approach allowed for each stage to refine the water further. First tanks removed bulk contaminants. Final tanks added the finishing touch.It’s amazing to think how green this paradigm is—so different from chemical treatment. Findhorn, in Scotland, runs its whole village wastewater system using this approach. That system was designed by Galen Fulford with Aquamatrix, and it’s a mirror image of the one I worked on. These systems all trace back to John Todd. It’s hard to say how many are out there now—but it's definitely in the hundreds, possibly thousands.San Francisco Water uses this method in urban buildings. Mars—the candy company—uses it. Organica in Hungary deploys it. It's a mainstream solution now. It's what happens in nature, after all. This planet has been purifying water through ecosystems for billions of years. These systems are just miniature biospheres—internalized ecosystems.You’ve probably heard of Biosphere 2—that radical project in Arizona in the early 1990s where eight people lived in a sealed geodesic dome for two years. It had a rainforest, a coral reef, a desert—all built under a giant glass structure in the middle of the Sonoran desert. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s designs, it was built by the Institute of Ecotechnics, a group of visionary thinkers who called themselves something like "a bunch of visionaries in search of the impossible." They sealed it tight, and for two years, the crew had to survive off only what they grew, breathing only the air inside, drinking and recycling the same water—cleaned through living systems.You don't come out of that the same person. Living inside a miniature Earth forces you to confront the reality of closed-loop systems—where nothing leaves and everything must be accounted for. It's a reflection of the larger truth: our planet is a giant living machine, and our best shot at sustaining ourselves is to work with, not against, those natural processes.You can see more about the “Our Blue World” movie here : www.braveblue.worldIf you would like to show the movie in your area, reach out to the documentary team. …….This is a reader supported publication Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Laura Norman works for the USGS (United States Geological Survey), a US science bureau, studying water flow through our rivers and landscapes. There is a slow water movement underway, being spread by permaculture, agroforestry, Natural Sequence Farming and regenerative agriculture, promoted by people like Erica Gies, the author of ‘Water always Wins’, and its essence captured by Brock Dolman’s phrase ‘slow it, sink it, spread it’. Laura Norman has been helping make the impact of slow water more scientific with her hydrological modelling and observational studies, and helping bring these slow water ideas to US governmental agencies. It is perhaps a surprising idea that putting rocks in streams would have an impact on hydration of land around it, but slowing down flowing waters, can give them a chance to seep into soil and aquifers, and then spread sideways. It is also perhaps unexpected that the creek flow can increase by about a quarter as a result of putting rocks into it. A common assumption is to think the rocks are blocking the water from going to downstream people. But it actually increases the water available to downstream folk, because it reduces peak flow during big storms in the winter, and parcels out that water to flow more in the future - the creeks flow four weeks longer and with more volume into the dry season. Whats further intriguing, is this simple idea of putting rocks in streams can actually lessen wildfires. This is because the water now has a chance to seep laterally into the floodplains through the soil and aquifers, allowing the plants to be hydrated into the dry season. Its a similar effect to what beaver dams do to the water flow. There are a number of famous photos floating around the internet, of the vegetation in the floodplains around beaver dams being unscathed by fire, while the area around them is burnt. Norman studies how gabions and check dams, rocky structures that slow the flow of water in our streams, impact how water flows through other parts of the watershed, how they help farmers deal with droughts and floods, and how it provides us with a more nature-based way of water management.Here;s our interview (lightly edited):Alpha: Today I'm excited to have Laura Norman from the USGS, the United States Geological Survey. Welcome.Laura: Thank you.Alpha: Cool. What is it that you do with the USGS?Laura: I am a physical supervisory research physical scientist. I've been working at the USGS Geological Survey since 1998. And I study watershed modeling and all of the components of the water budget related to dryland regions. And so my research has been looking at how people can impact water budget parameters in models and trying to develop scenarios that are beneficial for management. Water budget meaning like the water cycle. So I look at all the components of the water cycle. So everything that comes into a watershed, what happens to the water when it is here and how it leaves.Alpha: How did you get interested in water and land?Laura: Well, I am originally from the swamps of Rhode Island. And so I grew up in a wetland in the coastal region of New England and went to school at Oregon State where I studied forestry. And I was very interested in the big trees in the Pacific Northwest and maintenance of big trees. And I ended up learning about watersheds when I was there. So I took a job with the state parks and some other jobs in between and ended up coming back to school to the University of Arizona, which is a water-limited area here in the desert, the Sonoran Desert. And that started studying watersheds here in the arid lands and trying to figure out how to best manage water.Alpha: Cool. And then did you work for a while before you ended up with the USGS, or you were already there?Laura: Well, I had a couple of seasonal things, internships and such. But when I came to Tucson, I got a job working for the University doing geospatial analysis. So my expertise in my master's degree in watershed management was the advanced resource technology option. I was using GIS. When I did my dissertation, I started employing remotely sensed data. So using satellite imagery within a GIS, within models. I worked for the University of Arizona for a couple of years and then started volunteering at the USGS until I was finally contracted on.Alpha: Do you want to explain to the audience what GIS is?Laura: GIS is geographic information systems. And so it's basically making maps. So I use a lot of different data. I mentioned satellite imagery, but a lot of people these days are most familiar with GPS, so global positioning systems. So using that type of geospatial data within a computer software to develop maps and do analysis in a spatial context.Alpha: Cool. And then the USGS, which is the United States Geological Survey, which is kind of an intriguing name because I don't think most people know what a geological survey is. What does it do exactly and how big is it?Laura: I think the USGS has 6,000 employees all over the country. And we currently have six mission areas. I work in the core science systems mission area, but we have biological resources, water resources, geologic resources. And so it's divided out into these types of things. Most people that are familiar with the USGS are familiar with us because of our topographic maps. So when you go to go for a hike in the forest, you get out your your map. And that's the USGS map. And we've, you know, been kind of made popular with the laypeople for that reason. But we also have our hazards and minerals explorations. And so when you hear about an earthquake or a flood event or volcano, that's the USGS will be the first person to be contacted in response for that. So we have a lot of different science. We're the science arm for the Department of Interior. So we do all the science for the parks, the BLM, Fish and Wildlife Service and BIA, Bureau of Reclamation. So that's our hat.Alpha: BLM is Bureau of Land Management.Laura: Yeah, yeah, a lot of the national land, but not the Department of Ag. So Forest Service falls in that part, but we're the Department of Interior.Alpha: OK, cool. And Geological Survey, I take it means surveying all the geographical features like the land, the rivers, how the water is working.Laura: Yeah, that's what it has has become. I think originally we were a little more focused on the geology. But of course, we still are focused on geology, which has kind of broadened our scope to include some more of the geographic features.Alpha: So the people who are doing the water resource management in the US, they need to know some of the signs of how the water is moving through the landscape. And so that's where the USGS comes in play, right? They try to understand the hydrological cycle and how it interacts with the ecosystem.Laura: Yep, 100 percent. We have gauges all over the US monitoring surface water flows. We monitor wells and we have protocol to make that information available online in real time. And so it's where we are a public service agent. And so civil servants, everything that we do is is made available to the public.Alpha: What was your project when you came to the USGS?Laura: I started working on a geologic map of the US-Mexico border. So I was digitizing and putting old geologic maps into geographic information systems, started analyzing those in relationship to environmental health in the US-Mexico border. And that evolved into mapping colonias that did not have adequate infrastructure, such as sewer lines or water lines or adequate housing and trying to identify those communities, they're called colonias, on the US-Mexico border that needed to have some recognition for that lack of infrastructure. So I started working on projects like that. Funding came from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and working with partners both sides of the border to do that. Both of those are all three of those projects. And then I started doing some watershed modeling, looking at how flooding might impact the infrastructure and also the housing communities that I had been mapping.Alpha: So looking at which towns were getting flooded or were in danger of being flooded?Laura: Well, one of the the biggest flood hazards for the state of Arizona is the city of Nogales, Arizona, which has a sister city in the Sonora side, Nogales, Sonora—so Ambos Nogales. And that was where I ended up doing most of my dissertation research, looking at the impacts of flooding in the flood plains there. But there's flood issues in a lot of desert towns. It's kind of surprising to people because you think there's not a lot of water. But when it does rain, the systems are really not equipped to handle high energy and high amounts of or volume of water. So it becomes hazardous.Alpha: There are different types of solutions for floods, right? There's nature-based solutions. And then there's also the dam-levee solutions. So do you want to say a little bit about that kind of thing?Laura: Yeah, I have only studied the nature-based solutions. And one of the first structures that I started looking at was looking at gabions, which are rock structures that can be installed in channels. They're wrapped in chicken wire and they're very popular in Mexico and in Europe and in other dryland regions and different countries, but not very popular in the United States for looking at flood detention. So we looked at the impacts of putting some rock gabions around the city of Ambos Nogales and modeled the impacts of different locations and size of structures, trying to prioritize areas that would benefit from that type of solution.[Drawings by Chloe Fandel, Univ of Arizona grad student]Alpha: And where do you put these gabions?Laura: A lot of people use gabions to line the banks of sandy arroyos. So our streams are very mobile. The sediment moves very quickly in our dryland streams. And so they can be used to line the banks, but in this case, they were being used across the width of the stream channel. So in series, putting in structures. In Nogales, they ended up putting in quite a few. I think 15 structures have been put in and the flood detention is great.Alpha: So they're kind of like a check dam or a beaver dam analog in some way.Laura: Yeah. And I actually have been trying to make that connection because there's a lot of people that are interested in beaver dams and beaver dam analogs these days in wetter parts of the country. But in the desert Southwest, beavers have a harder time existing because we don't have so many perennial water supplies. And so in our region, which is the Madrean Archipelago ecoregion, people have been installing rock detention structures for thousands of years. So we've dated structures that have been studies in almost every culture in this ecoregion for which dryland farmers were using rock detention structures to help with farming. So a lot of those are still in the landscape today. So it's really—it comes natural when you start thinking about it, especially in relationship to the wonderful ecosystem services that beavers provide for people. People can be the beaver.Alpha: And how does it help the farmlands?Laura: So you slow the flows, you reduce the flood detention, reduce the flooding. So like I mentioned, these dryland arroyos, when a big event comes through, sometimes that can just wash out a crop downstream. But most people try to take advantage of the rainfall as irrigation here. And in the past, of course, that's what they were doing. In addition to slowing the flows, you are accumulating sediment. We've had studies that have documented increased organic matter behind structures, increased vegetation response behind structures. And so that's something that those dryland farmers were taking advantage of for their crops.Alpha: In the permaculture world there's this whole slow water idea/movement, encapsulated by Brock Dolman phrase ‘slow it, sink it, spread it’. Erica Gies has been promoting the idea of slow water. People would be interested to know that the USGS, this formal body, is also interested in slowing the water.Laura: Yeah, yeah. I got to meet Brock last year and got to visit his farm in California. I was truly amazed by his energy. I've met Erica as well. Truly impressive person—I admire her books and writing. So it's just kind of, I think, kind of a movement that started and we all kind of got on board around the same time without knowing about each other, but using different avenues to explore and express and find different results.[Laura Norman sitting on a rock structure that has been put in to slow the creek flow]Alpha: So the USGS got interested in the slow water ideas.Laura: Well, my project is unique in the USGS. And so I had been looking at ways to develop scenarios that would benefit the people that were living in the Twin Cities of Nogales. And I started modeling different scenarios and got the International Boundary and Water Commission, which is the part of the Department of State, to fund my research to look at the potential of putting those structures in to reduce flooding there in 2010. And then I was at a conference and I saw this fantastic scientist, Ron Pulliam, talking about some structures that he was studying that looked exactly like the gabions we were putting in at Nogales at another location on the border where they were using the gabions to create habitat.And so it kind of went like that—you know, kind of fell into this new vein of research. And we looked at those structures, and when we looked at those structures, we were looking at the increased vegetation. And we found that where there were structures, there was more water availability, evidenced by increased vegetation or at least maintained vegetation over a 27-year drought period, up to five kilometers downstream from each structure and one kilometer upstream from each structure. And that was really kind of a turning point for me because a lot of people were concerned about structures stealing water from downstream users.And my research identified in that one scenario—and then many more scenarios—that the structures actually protect the water from being evaporated in our hot and dry desert ecosystem by putting it underground and making more water available downstream to the users. So that was kind of the kickoff to the rest of the research that I've been doing.Alpha: Oh, cool. Yeah. So you found out from the gabion that it actually caused water to go into aquifers and then come up again further downstream. Is that right? And then you—who proposed to the USGS to do this kind of gabion slow water idea?Laura: Well, I proposed it to a couple of different people. The USGS has been supportive of my research since I began working here, but I've also had a lot of outside support from different departments of the Interior and also private funding to do studies to look at these potentials. So, you know, the work at the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, and the Gila-San Bernardino area—some of that was done with the International Boundary and Water Commission. We had some support from the Bureau of Land Management just north of there, and the Fish and Wildlife Service was cooperating with us at that time. So it’s been kind of a grassroots-style effort: developing projects, getting funding to do science—but with the USGS backing.And, you know, when we do projects at the USGS, we have these standardized protocols and we're mandated to do unbiased science. So we have this rigor that’s associated with our science, which is very useful for adapting across different landscapes.Alpha: So when you put in the gabions, how far away did the water get impacted? Like, you're shifting the hydrology—does it shift the hydrology at the watershed level? How far would you say the impact goes?Laura: That’s a good question. I haven’t really found the boundaries of the impacts yet. But I’ve had a couple different studies looking at hydrology—not just flood detention, but actual water provision.I mentioned the vegetation study that we did in San Bernardino. But we’ve also looked at water volumes. At El Coronado Ranch in the Chiricahua National Forest, we looked at a stream that had been treated with over 2,000 little rock check dams, and compared it to an adjacent watershed with similar climate, elevation, and vegetation. One was much larger than the other, but when we calibrated for size, we found that the watershed treated with structures had reduced peak flows, like the ones we saw in Nogales with the larger gabions—but it also had more water coming out of the system. Twenty-eight percent more volume coming out, which is a really big deal in dryland watersheds.But what was really interesting was the delayed flow. In addition to having more water, it was coming out three to four weeks longer than in the untreated watershed. So when you asked what the dryland farmers were looking for with the structures, I think extending their growing season was one of the benefits they found.Alpha: So when you say 28 percent, you’re saying the water gets delayed, the peak goes down, but then it’s coming out three to four weeks later—and that’s the 28 percent?Laura: It wasn’t just the timing, though—it was the amount of water. So, think of a bare surface like in the watershed without structures—it’s just a bedrock channel. If you throw a glass of water down it, it just rushes down the channel and evaporates quickly. In our area, relative humidity is very low—everything gets sucked out into the air.When I lived in San Francisco, I’d get out of the shower and my towel would be wet for two days. In Arizona, it’s dry in an hour or two. The atmosphere just pulls moisture away.But in the channel with structures, water gets held back and tucked into the dirt that’s collected behind those 2,000 structures. We hypothesized that those were forming perched aquifers—little spongy wetlands holding water underground and releasing it slowly.Alpha: What’s a perched aquifer?Laura: A perched aquifer is like a small sponge sitting on top of the rocks that form the channel. Later studies—most recently I published a paper on leaky weirs and managed aquifer recharge—showed that what we thought were perched aquifers at El Coronado Ranch might just be alluvial storage created by the structures.So I’ve gone from thinking it was the vegetation, to thinking it was the rocks, to now thinking: it’s the dirt. It’s that combination—soil, water, and carbon—that forms when sediment gets captured by a structure. That becomes a fertile ground for storing water and growing plants—and it just wouldn’t be there otherwise. Each sponge behind each structure is additional storage.Alpha: How deep does that go underneath the creek bed?Laura: It depends. All of our findings are place-based and geology-dependent. If a structure is on bedrock, it might not go that deep. But if you have sediment being deposited, water gets captured and pushed around the structures—what’s called lateral flow—into the banks and even underneath when faults or fractures exist.So surface aquifers get inundated and start releasing water downstream. And in some cases, water might even seep into deeper groundwater if fractures or springs are there.Alpha: Cool. So the farmers like this because now they have one more month of water into the dry season?Laura: Yes. And we also found that areas treated by structures become wetlands—either restored historical wetlands or new ones created by the structures. At all these wetlands, we see earlier greening up in the season. So the extension isn’t just into the fall—it’s also happening in the spring, a month or two earlier. That’s a pretty big deal for the growing season.Alpha: And how far do these wetlands extend past the riverbanks? How much wider are they?Laura: I don’t have a specific number yet. We are documenting lateral flow into the banks. We did a vegetation study in the channels annually and now every five years in the overbanks to see how far those impacts go. But as water accumulates, it gets pushed out—laterally, down, and under the structure. When you have a lot of them, you get a chain of pools or wetlands.Alpha: Is that the natural state of rivers in the past? I talked to Stuart Andrews from Australia—he said that’s the natural state before the water cycle was disrupted: series of ponds like a beaded structure.Laura: Yeah—what do they call it? A chain of pearls or something. I’ve heard that from the Mulloon Institute. In our region, I’m not totally sure. But most locations we work in—where structures go in—it’s in response to erosion and gullying. These areas used to be more stable but are now degraded. Headcuts just travel upstream, draining the grasslands or shrublands.Plugging those gullies can recreate what used to be there. In many arroyos, you can see old cobbles and paleochannels—evidence of wetter environments. Then we came along with cattle, roads, groundwater pumping—everything that causes erosion. So restoring it is like maintenance.Alpha: What’s a paleochannel?Laura: Historic riverbeds. You can see them in soil layers and even aerial photos—like 1935 photos of the Colorado River, you can see old meanders. But today, many of those are gone because we channelized the rivers for urban development. So part of our goal is to put the “wiggle” back into streams—to slow flows again.Alpha: And the farmlands—are farmers happy because they can pull water from the river? Or is it also seeping under their land, hydrating their soil?Laura: Both. Water’s available at the surface—so cattle go to stock ponds, and wildlife shows up. We’ve had scientists put cameras around areas with and without structures—wildlife clearly prefer the structured areas. Bears play in the pools. You see dragonfly larvae that wouldn’t be there otherwise.But the vegetation benefits too. Ancient farmers probably used both surface and subsurface water.Alpha: So these ponds—are they forming laterally away from the river?Laura: Not quite. They’re forming adjacent to the river—just like those Australian pools.Alpha: And on farmlands adjacent to that—do you think it’s seeping far enough laterally that their land is getting hydrated?Laura: Yeah. As it flattens out into floodplains—that’s where a lot of desert farming used to occur. Like the Hohokam farmers—we still see their canal systems on the landscape. Connecting rivers to floodplains makes all that surface saturated—so more water available for longer.Alpha: Cool. So this is kind of amazing—you just put rocks in a river, but it ends up hydrating a much wider area laterally.Laura: For sure. We’ve also looked at temperature. Around rock structures, you see decreases in temperature after rainfall—held for a few days. Just a couple degrees—but that’s significant when you have thousands of structures. You’re creating microclimates—cooler temperatures, more vegetation, and better resilience.Alpha: And this helps with flooding too, right? Slows the water so it doesn’t flood downstream?Laura: Yes. It reduces flood hazards, drought hazards, and food insecurity. It keeps sediment in place—so it improves air and water quality. There’s a lot of ecosystem services tied to rock detention structures.Alpha: Do you think it reduces wildfire risk, too, because it keeps the floodplain more hydrated?Laura: Taking a cue from my colleague Emily Fairfax—and her work with Joe Wheaton—yes, I think there’s real potential there...Alpha: Wow. So the CCC is the Civilian Conservation Corps.Yeah, that was around a long time ago in the U.S. And, uh, so they did stuff like this. Amazing.Yep. So, yeah, I mean, it does seem to me like using these rocks is a much more, I mean, it's a nature-based solution. It's a much more mild way of, I mean, it seems like it's helping restore the water cycle as opposed to a normal way of building big and bigger reservoirs and then aqueducting the water in, and, uh, you know, like the Colorado River right now is being under threat because we're taking so much water.So if in Arizona you, there are more of these gabions, you don't need to take as much water from the Colorado River or pipe it in. Maybe not. Yeah. Cause it seems like the farmers could get a month more extra hydration. So yeah, it's kind of amazing. Like this, this kind of solution can help with drought, with floods, wildfire and with getting water to farmers. And yeah. Yeah.Laura: Yeah. And what's really amazing, you know, I mean, I'm not, I'm a high tech girl, you know, I work in a high tech world, I'm a computer all the time, but this is a really low tech solution, you know, and it's low cost and low, you know, low investment with a lot of benefits, for sure.Alpha: So it's so amazing. How come you think it's not more known?Laura: I think there's been a lot of, a lot of misunderstandings about structures. And the biggest is that people think that the structures are stealing water from the downstream user. And that just isn't the case.So as I'm hoping that as science is able to continue to develop these studies and create these metrics, describing the impacts of structures that more people will be enthused to start using them and that some of the restrictions on permitting can be lifted.Alpha: Right. Well, I have this metaphor I used to try and explain it. So like if you have a museum and you have people coming in, and so you maybe have this rush of people coming in, like that's like a big storm. And then if there's not that interesting a museum, people will just kind of come out again very quickly, right? But if you have a lot of really interesting exhibits or something, then people may stay for two hours, three hours. And so, and maybe in the past, like no one was coming out in the afternoon, because they'd all gone in in the morning, come out by the morning.But now you've actually delayed their staying. And so they're actually trickling out all through the afternoon. And so you're still getting the same flows out because people have to leave the museum. So you're not losing the water just by, all you're doing is slowing it down so that the people are staying in the museum longer than they're coming out again. And so, so yeah, so the total water is still, you're not losing the water by building these check downs. Yeah.Laura: And I would say, in this case, people aren't being evaporated into the sky at the museum, but we do see that that tucking the water into the landscapes behind the structures really helps to keep it around and makes it so that more people come out of the museum than they would if unless they were being evaporated out. Cool.Alpha: And you've come up, you had a name that I hadn't heard before, NIDS, right, for these kind of structures. What does that stand for?Laura: Natural Infrastructure and Dryland Streams.Alpha: And where did that name come from?Laura: Well, I started working with the, you know, the scientists around the country, some of the beaver scientists and carbon, soil carbon scientists and Michael Pollock and others talking about these different types of structures and everybody's kind of got their own name for them. It's one rock dams or zuni bowls or earthworks or weirs or check dams. And so we wanted to just try to lump the beaver dams and the beaver dam analogs, whether they were leaky weirs or there's a lot of different names. So we just said, let's call them NIDS and include them in the whole category. And because what we're finding is that the impacts of whatever type of structure, as long as they leak, as long as it's a permeable structure, it's not damming the stream, but just slowing the flows. Right.Alpha: Yeah. Because I guess it does have many origins, like many cultures have discovered them like I know in the Middle East, the Fertile Crescent, they had these gabions and then Peru, they had these slogans. So like, yeah, and they've all kind of, I guess each of these cultures then has its own name. And then there was different groups like Permaculture, which study a lot of these structures and then we named them Earthworks. And so yeah, so now we have tons of names.It is interesting that it's been rediscovered so many times and maybe the western science of hydrology - in the fifties it was really focused on big dams and big aqueducts, but it seems like in the eighties and nineties, they became more interested in, or it started becoming more interested in nature-based solutions - there's this shift in hydrology to now to these things that we discovered in ancient times.Laura: Yeah, go figure, huh? Yeah, it is nice though, you know, to be able to get some of it documented and hopefully, you know, then we can make the next step, you know, to changing some of those policies and mindsets so that more structures can be installed.Alpha: And so there is a whole world of hydrological modeling and groundwater modeling that, you know, all these hydrologists do. How many of them now are starting to look at nids or these kind of slowing, slow, how slow water systems affect the whole hydrology in doing that modeling?Laura: Well, I don't know of too many in the United States, but there certainly are a lot, you know, in China, people that have been studying the impacts of structures in the Laos Plateau for a long time, often citing that in the Middle East, the sand dams in Africa. So it's just something that is kind of coming back to the United States at this time, but wasn't really forgotten in Mexico or some of these other dryland regions. So yeah, I think more and more are now.Alpha: And so they're doing this hydrological modeling in China, in the Loess Plateau, where they're slowing. the water. Do you know anything about what they found with this hydrological modeling?Laura: Similar effects. So we often cite each other. You know, when I get requests to review a paper for a journal, it's often on looking at the impacts of different structures in different locations, and vice versa. And so, you become more and more aware of different people's research in different countries.Alpha: Okay, cool. And in China, were they doing—was it streamflow slowing or was it other types of slow water stuff?Laura: Yep, watershed modeling. So, looking at Chinchero-style structures. Looking at hillslopes and putting in structures on the hillslopes to slow flows—a lot of check dams in the riparian areas.Alpha: And then also, because China had, you know, millions of people evacuate because of certain huge floods, they had this whole sponge city movement. Now, I think many cities are trying to absorb more of the rainfall. And I assume they probably do hydrological modeling when they start to create all these sponge cities in China?Laura: Yeah, modeling is really useful for planning—trying to predict where to get the biggest bang for the buck. You know, is this structure going to create recharge, or whatever it is you’re putting structures in for—is it to slow flows, arrest gullying, or increase recharge? You can use models to try to predict which areas might be most receptive to putting structures in. I often use models that way.But also, I use models—if we get measurements out in a watershed, then I can use a model to extrapolate. So, taking the measurement at one site and then kind of folding it out into the rest of the watershed to see what those impacts would be if you put more structures there—or if there were structures there, you could see what that would be at a larger scale.Alpha: And what about the modeling of the hydrogeology—the aquifers? Because I know it's kind of hard to model the aquifers because it's so complex, how it's seeping and everywhere the rock formations are different. Are people doing that too—to model how much the aquifers are refilling when you put in slow water structures?Laura: Yes. We're doing a project right now in La Paz, Baja California, looking at the impacts on the groundwater aquifers and using groundwater models. We also use groundwater models to interface with watershed models to look at the surface-to-groundwater interactions—at a project here in the San Pedro River, the Babacomari Ranch.But what we find in some of those deeper aquifers is you have water that's older, and so it's a little harder to track whether or not there's change in recharge around the structure when the groundwater is not getting recharged for 60 to a thousand years.So, it’s hard to really get that documented. But we are using our understanding of the geology to look at fractures and conduits to the deeper groundwater. We have a study where we're putting dye behind structures and then looking at the time for that dye to reach a potable supply well downstream. So, we have some studies looking at that. But again, with groundwater, sometimes the age is difficult to monitor.Alpha: That’s cool that you’re doing that modeling. And then there’s also this effect where trees can bring up the water, right? Hydraulic redistribution—where the tree roots can bring up that aquifer water. And so I guess other people are modeling that too? Like, as you slow the water down to recharge aquifers, actually there’s more water available to the whole ecosystem because plants can bring it up now.Laura: Yeah, yeah. That ET cycle—that's evapotranspiration. So looking at how plants are using the water and how plants impact the water budget is definitely a focus of our research all over dryland areas.Because, you know, just looking at the impacts on the climate—I mentioned the shade potential, the fact that when water is in the environment, it’s a little bit cooler. And so, yeah, it’s a very interesting cycle. As you degrade a system—I always think of that snowball effect. You get a gully and it just starts unraveling, the whole system becomes unraveled and it just drains out. But it’s the same for restoration. When you put a structure in, the whole system kind of snowballs back the other way. All the processes kind of work together to roll it back up—to sew it back in. It’s really phenomenal.Alpha: And this whole water budget idea, right—because I think maybe a lot of listeners may not have heard of this idea of a water budget. But basically, it’s a fundamental concept in hydrology where you have the inputs and the outputs of the water budget, right? So you have the precipitation, and then you have the streamflow, which can be an input but then it can also be an output, and through the aquifers—where it goes down and goes up. So you put all these things into an equation.Laura: Yeah. People often think of a bathtub. You’ve got the bathtub there, then you have the water coming in—that’s the precipitation—and then you have this much water in your bathtub and that’s your storage. And as the water leaves the bathtub, that’s the change in storage.And then you have the drain—you have the surface water coming out, you have water going into the earth (into groundwater), you have other water coming out from the ground, and then you have the water leaving with either evaporation or transpiration with plants. So that’s the full cycle in a nutshell.Alpha: Yeah—in a bathtub. Because sometimes you can kind of forget where the water could come from. I think people sometimes forget that if you recharge the aquifers, you can actually give more water to the plants through that part of the water budget, or through the tree roots bringing it up. It’s kind of a forgotten part.Laura: I remember when someone first mentioned to me the idea to rehabilitate a spring, I thought—how can you make more water come out of a spring? That doesn’t really make sense. And then I saw that occurring at the San Dimas Experimental Forest, where leaky weirs were put in. An old spring that had kind of dried up had this new bank put in—a new water bank—and the water budget there was increased because of the storage. And so it allowed the spring to recharge and start expressing water into the arroyo again. It’s really fantastic to think about that.Alpha: And is the term "slow water" in the hydrology world? Is that a term?Laura: It is now.Alpha: Okay. And are people—are just very few people studying how slow water affects the whole hydrology system, or is there beginning to be a bit of a movement studying this?Laura: Yeah, I think more people are interested. We've definitely had people come to us and ask us to look at different projects—“Is this actually changing things?” Most hydrologists understand that if you're slowing the flows, there's more opportunity for infiltration. So it seems kind of common sense for people who have studied water their whole lives.But then when you put the application in—the real-world application—it kind of marries the professional to the practical. You think, “Oh, this is something we can do ourselves, at the surface.”Alpha: Yeah, I remember we were in Spain talking to some of the city hydrologists—all the municipal hydrologists. They were getting too much water in the wet season, and then not enough for the people—there were water shortages, and even they had to turn off the taps in the dry season. And so their problem was moving the water from the wet season to the dry season. And I was with some of these more water cycle restoration people, and we’re like—well, you can actually slow the water, you know, with stuff like check dams and all this. But it seemed like the municipal hydrologists weren’t aware of these techniques.Laura: Yeah, it’s funny. I learned about check dams in relation to erosion control—in my watershed management classes. Taking it to the next level—well, yeah, of course it's going to slow the flows. That’s why it’s controlling the erosion. But yeah, stepping back through the lessons and seeing all of the different impacts.Alpha: I mean, in some sense, one of the central issues—ever since thousands of years ago in hydraulics—is how do you get the water from the wet season to the dry season?So that’s kind of the central thing. It’s just that we’ve moved to this dam-aqueduct model—or at least in the ’50s—and we’re moving away a bit from it now. But that became the idea: collect the water from the wet season in the big man-made dams, and then just deliver it through aqueducts. But we've forgotten these more simple, low-tech, natural solutions.Laura: Yep.Alpha: Cool. Is there anything else you want to share about your work or this whole...Laura: No, I’m happy that you're interested, though. Thank you so much.Alpha: Yeah, cool. Are there future projects that you're looking toward—or the USGS is looking at in this area?Laura: We’ve had a couple of ideas—talking about the potential for growing specific crops behind structures. Is there a way to increase range production? Is there potential to grow mushrooms or other specific crops behind structures? Can you accelerate it with compost?We have a couple ideas coming up, but right now, we’re just trying to get some publications out—describing the cienegas and the extended seasons and our research down in Mexico looking at water augmentation. So, getting those wrapped up first.Alpha: Okay, cool. And if people are interested in finding out more, you have a staff page on the USGS site, right?Laura: Yeah, the Arid Lands Water Harvesting Study. Or my USGS page.Alpha: Okay, cool. And are there any papers that you might suggest people look at? I’m sure you’ve written a lot—are there any particular papers that people might want to start with?Laura: Yeah, that summary paper that introduces the NIDS topic would be a great starting point. We have some beautiful graphics developed by Hartwood Visuals, describing 20 years of papers—20 years of research of my own, but also my colleagues Ellen Wohl, Michael Pollock, Emily Fairfax, Rattan Lal, and Alan Gellis—comparing our research around the western United States looking at different types of structures. So that’s the NIDS – Natural Infrastructure in Dryland Streams paper. Natural Infrastructure in Dryland Streams (NIDS) Can Establish Regenerative Wetland Sinks That Reverse Desertification and Strengthen Climate Resilience. That’s a 2022 paper from Science of the Total Environment.…..related articles in this newsletter “Slow Water”, “Beavers, biology and slow water- Brock Dolman”, “Slowing our waters-Erica Gies”This is a reader supported publication Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Peter Andrews, also known as PA, was an Australian racehorse breeder who in the 1970s bought a piece of property, in the state of New South Wales, to raise racehorses. However the land he bought, the Tarwyn Park property, was degraded and the water on it was salinated. After a lot of thought and experimentation he developed his own set of restoration techniques.He looked at the dried up patterns in the floodplains to figure what used to happen on the land. He saw there used to chains of ponds. So he started to work to rehydrate the floodplains. He repaired the degraded flow lines. He used willows and reeds to restore the river banks. But the neighbors keep bringing the authorities to try and stop what he was he was doing. Stubborn, brash, and confident, and because he knew he was onto something important, he continued to work anyways. The plants started bringing back the wet paddocks, and refilling the aquifers. The land turned into a flourishing, vibrant landscape.The work became known as Natural Sequence Farming. Peter Andrews went around around proselytizing the work - badgering governments, media and land owners, to get them interested. This was a process, he said, which could save Australian farming, help them stay hydrated even with the droughts. His work got on the Australian news, and word spread.The focus on getting the message out though meant Peter lost sight of running the farm as well, and the bank foreclosed on his property. But then Stuart Andrews, his son, was able to buy back the Tarwyn Park property back from the bank. Stuart had to teach himself the ways of Natural Sequence Farming to run the farm. He then worked with Duane Norris to build a training program there to teach others the same techniques. ( I had became friends with Duane a little while back, and he was very encouraging of my work during the early stages of writing this newsletter. I recruited Duane in my project three years to develop a set of principles that succinctly encapsulated the important aspects of the hydrological cycle.)Tony Coote, a successful jeweler, who had bought a property on 3 kilometers of Mulloon Creek in the 1960s. He approached Peter Andrews about restoring it. Early on the brought 6 truckloads of blackberries trees and canes to plant, which then started a feedback loop that slowed the water down, which then brought in more vegetation. Fish started coming back. And now there is a Mulloon Institute that teaches and consults on the Natural Sequence Farming work also.……………………………..Here is info about Natural Sequence Farming from the Tarwyn Park Training site :Natural Sequence Farming (NSF) is “a regenerative practice that restores landscape function, soil health, water retention, and biodiversity by working with natural processes. It explores the principles, emphasises the role of plants and water, and provides practical insights for implementing these principles in your own landscapes.The key to NSF is that plants manage water; that's what built all the environments we see. Plants are the engineers that build everything, and water is the carrier of the nutrients that feed them. Our landscapes operate in a continuous feedback loop connecting three main areas: Accumulation - The highest area where fertility is built. Production - The area where production takes place. Filtration - The lowest area where fertility is recycled.Our landscape no longer operates like this; it has become disconnected due to the way humans have managed their land. Natural Sequence Farming is the solution to that. It is about understanding how this system works and implementing works to reconnect the pieces like a puzzle. We need to understand the landscape first. And once we recognise the landscape and how it functions, it is about setting it up to work correctly once again.”[aerial view of Tarwyn park, photo from Tarwyn Park Training]The five principles of Natural Sequence Farming (NSF) are: 1) Slow the Flow: Emphasizing the importance of slowing down water flow to allow infiltration into the soil. 2) Let All Plants Grow: Promoting plant diversity and allowing natural regeneration of the landscape. 3) Careful Where the Animals Go: Integrating livestock management with the natural sequence of the landscape. 4) Filtration is a Must Know: Understanding the role of natural filtration systems in purifying water. 5) Return to the Top to Recycle the Lot: Recycling nutrients and resources by returning waste products to the top of the soil.…..I was really honored to get a chance to interview Stuart Andrews, the son of Peter Andrews. Below is part of our interview (slightly edited):Stuart: PA [Peter Andrews] was running a horse stud farm at the time. He wanted to expand. He wanted to be able to produce the best racehorses. So he was looking for an area where he could potentially produce the best racehorse. So he looked around and he realized that the horse market was better in New South Wales.So he then looked for a property over there. The horse salespeople told him about this property that had come up that was in the 1940s-1950s, one of the leading stud farms in New South Wales, producing some of the best horses. But it had deteriorated. It had salinity come in, so now it wasn't performing the same. Animals generally had ill health.So he was able to get it at a fair price. So he purchased that, and that's where his real experimentation started off, because he had a place now that was full of what would be determined as weeds, and that had this high water table—but saline water. So it was restricting the growth.So he had a fairly degraded landscape to work from. So he thought how do I get that functioning again? He started reading these patterns in the landscape. And once you've been out there, and you spend enough time looking at the landscape, you can realize that the patterns are the same everywhere you go. They just vary in size.You're looking for the patterns that water has created over the landscape. And in conjunction with plants, what role did the plants play to enable that transition to happen?So Tarwyn Park was predominantly, mostly what we would call floodplains. So it was probably more than half—maybe 60 or 70%—of the property was floodplain. So therefore, it had the potential to have an aquifer of fresh water underneath it. And that's how it evolved. It evolved to be like that.But since white man had come in, the landscape had deteriorated. They cut a channel right through the floodplain. So instead of the floodplain filling with fresh water, it was recharging from the side elevation with saline water out of the ridges, out of the slopes. And the fresh water all ran away out through the eroded channel.And I see the same thing in the States. It's no different. You’ve got all of these now-eroded channels which drain the landscape. Our whole landscapes around the world are set up as drainage mechanisms. So Australia, because it's such an arid environment, generally—when white man came here—they set about draining the only areas that were quite wet. And the drainage ended up being uncontrollable because the vast amount of water moving down these systems created bigger eroded channels. So he said, well, this landscape can’t function as a drainage landscape. What do we need to do to turn it around from a drainage landscape into a landscape that recharges, recharges the aquifer.He started playing around in the creeks—what we would refer to as a creek, which really is just a drainage line. It’s an eroded channel. But what our government determined this eroded channel to be—they just called it a creek, rather than recognizing that it never actually existed prior to agriculture taking place. Those creeks were never there. It was generally what was referred to as a chain of ponds—so water was ponding, slowing, then moving on and repeating this pattern as it went down the line.Alpha: The chain of ponds that disappeared by the time he got there?Stuart: Yes. Yeah. It was already an incised channel by that stage. The eroded channel cuts through the floodplain. Everything that goes into the floodplain leaks into the channel and then runs away.It never used to be like that before, because the landscape had created what we call steps. They’re areas where the landscape levels out slightly, and the type of plants that grow there are able to manage the flow of water. So rather than allowing the water to freely flow away, it would grow this dense vegetation—what we call reeds would grow in this area—and the reeds would manage how quickly the water moved. So they would create these ponds behind vegetation rather than behind earthen banks.The plants build everything. You know, all of our landscapes around the world were built by plants. It’s only when we came in—doesn’t matter what humans they were, whether they were Indigenous or white people coming into landscapes—we all have an impact on a landscape. If we’re running animals that are interfering with the plant species, then those animals have the potential to remove the plants that are critical to managing that system.The whole idea is that because the plants are no longer there and the system is so degraded now, the plants can’t manage it. So the plants need help.And so with Natural Sequence Farming - that was what it ended up being called- that’s where you can come in with soft engineering to manage that initial flow so the plants can take over. And it’s critical that if we don’t understand that these processes are all run by plants—if we focus on the engineering as the solution—we will just fail every time. Because the Australian landscape was built and managed by plants.Now, something that I think is critical in what he’s tried to get across to people is that the Australian landscape is the laboratory for the world. Because it’s the oldest, the flattest, the driest inhabited continent in the world—with the least amount of climate backups.It holds all the keys to how we can rebuild landscapes everywhere—no matter where they are. See, Australia didn’t have snow or ice forming in the high country to provide a controlled release of fertility and water over the landscape each year like we did. Australia hasn’t had that for millions of years since it separated from Gondwanaland.So the big question is: why didn’t everything wash into the sea? Because by all accounts, it should have. In just the last 200 years, since European settlement, an enormous amount of soil has been lost into the ocean. If you extrapolate that over a few million years, the continent shouldn't even be here anymore. Why didn’t it all wash away? That’s the critical question. The processes that stopped that from happening—those are what we need to understand. If we can replicate those processes, we can reverse desertification anywhere in the world.Where do you find these chains of ponds? Mainly on floodplains and flatter systems, but you’ll also find them on slopes, typically along flow lines—because water always concentrates where gravity pulls it.And I think anyone living in a suburban street can observe this. After a rain event, look at the gutters. You’ll see spots where soil or leaves have accumulated and formed little ponds. One pond here, another down the line—each formed from deposited material. That’s how a landscape builds. That’s how it functions. And all you have to do is repeat that.But first, we need to open our eyes and read what the landscape is telling us. These processes exist everywhere. Wherever water flows, it behaves the same. If it’s carrying material—rocks or fine sediment—it deposits them based on the water’s energy. Coarse material drops out first, finer stuff settles later. If you watch a gutter during a rain event, you’ll see larger particles dropped early, finer particles farther down. Leaves tend to float to the edges, to higher ground, while coarse materials settle in the flow line. That’s the beginning of a process. Next, plants start to grow in the finest material, where the soil is most fertile. If the street sweepers don’t come through and remove it, the plants start to manage the system. Every time it rains, the plants trap more silt, building more soil. Water flows around them, spreads out, slows down, then gathers again. You’ll see this zig-zag pattern—out around the plants, back in, out again. Have you seen that? Been out in the rain and watched how it works? It’s like a feedback loop—leaves, silt, and water weaving together. These patterns are usually overlooked. Our brains struggle to grasp processes that unfold over time. Plants take time to rebuild a landscape. Our role is just to start that process.That’s it. We’re not going to rebuild everything all at once. We just need to put little pieces back in place, start the process, and then let it run. The faster we get plants growing, the faster the system restores itself.So what’s the nudge to get it going? Rather than waiting for natural deposition, we read the landscape—ask it where this used to happen, before erosion took over. Where did water used to slow down?You go to those points and use earth—because earth grows the best plants. In high-velocity scenarios, like rivers, maybe you use rocks or timber—something stable. Once you get deposition going again, the plants will come. Then the plants manage the system forever.All we have to do is stop removing the plants. That’s it. The whole landscape will rebuild itself. So yeah, that’s what Dad was trying to do, trial and error to figure out what worked. How long before he got it right? We’re still working on it. Still trialing, because every scenario is different. But the key is understanding: what’s the one limiting factor? What reduces the success of everything we try? It’s the energy moving the water. In our training, when we talk to farmers or land managers, we say this: two main forces run a farm—sunlight and gravity. That’s it. Those two energies build or destroy a system.Now think—what does a landscape look like where those two energies aren’t being managed?If gravity isn’t managed, everything washes away. If sunlight isn’t managed—if you’re not capturing it with plants—nothing grows. So what do you call that? A desert.And that’s what we see, even in places we think are productive. Drive through cropping country—in the U.S., corn and soy; here, wheat and cereals. In summer, once the crop’s harvested, there’s nothing green left. Could be the best soil, but it’s still a desert. Because there’s no green plants managing sunlight or holding soil in place. It’s a dysfunctional landscape.So we base everything around managing those two energies. The simplest way to do that? Grow more plants.Peter Andrews came to Tarwyn Park, did his research, ran a development project to prove the validity of this landscape science—which has always been out there. It’s not new. It’s just that no one paid attention.We keep thinking about how much we can impose on the landscape, rather than asking: how did nature do it for millions of years without our help? So he asked the landscape: how did you manage yourself? Because the continent hasn’t washed into the ocean. That alone proves it worked.How do you figure out how the land used to function? By reading the landscape. It’s written out there, in the patterns.Take the gutter example again. Water moves out, back in, out, in—it splits, spreads, then reunites. That divides and dissipates energy. Water de-energizes itself through movement. So how did the land do that? With plants.If we can do it with plants, that’s the first goal. But in many places today, things are too degraded for plants to manage it on their own. So we use soft engineering to recreate those patterns of water movement. Even in degraded systems, you can see remnants of those patterns trying to reform—but the energy is too great.Once you’re out in the field, it’s easy to see. Hard to describe here, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The same patterns repeat, just at different scales. What you see in a gutter happens on a floodplain.If you looked at a map—here or in the States—of a floodplain system, you’d see the same pattern. Water leaves the main channel, flows out, then returns. Out and back in. It’s like an hourglass, not just a snake. Indigenous people in Australia saw these patterns. They painted them—used them in their art. Most of us think of rivers as winding snakes. But that’s just part of the system. There are other arterial flows that only activate during floods—patterns that help de-energize the river. But most rivers today are so deeply eroded that water rarely gets out of the banks, so those patterns never engage.It’s like being a detective—reading the flows and energies of the past. And yes, it depends on the plants too. They’re part of it. When we recreate that, we slow water enough for it to infiltrate the soil and recharge aquifers. That means plants can access that moisture during dry seasons. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

I had the joy of interviewing Charlotte Qin who is a water artist working to capture the emotions and spiritual essence of water through her paintings and her reciprocal performances where the audience engages in a connection with water. I was moved when I watched a performance of hers where glacial ice was brought in, and people spoke embodying the glaciers spirit, as the glacial ice melted. She comes from a physics background, and integrates science and policy into her art works, seeking to educate people about the many dimensions of water and watersheds. She writes on her Meeting of Waters project and organization site: “Water is at the heart of life, yet it remains one of the most overlooked crises of our time. Climate change, environmental degradation, and political conflicts have turned water into both a casualty and a weapon. Despite its fundamental role in sustaining ecosystems, communities, and cultures, the urgency of water issues has yet to fully resonate with the public. The complexity of water governance often keeps it siloed—separated across scientific, policy, and artistic spheres. But water is not just a resource; it is deeply woven into our histories, emotions, and faiths…. The name Meeting of Waters originates from La Jonction, where the glacial waters of the Rhône and Arve rivers merge—one clear, one sedimented—visibly illustrating the confluence of forces, ideas, and communities. What began as the artistic practice of an individual has grown into a movement—bringing together scientists, policymakers, artists, and cultural voices to reframe water not just as a crisis to solve, but as a relationship to restore.”……………………………..I was excited to connect with Charlotte, because I’ve been working on a number of water art and dance ideas, and interested in bringing together artists, who work with water, and also dancers who would like to do dance pieces around water and watersheds. I have a still emerging idea of collectives of artists and dancers working together to activate the restoration of watersheds. Drop me a line if this sounds interesting.………………………………Here’s part of the conversation I had with Charlotte, for full conversation check out the podcast.Alpha : So after graduating physics, you went and studied art, is that right, or design? Charlotte: I was doing this joint course between the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. It was called Innovation Design Engineering. In my impression at the time, it was the marriage of art and science, except that everything is applied. We tend to think science and engineering, art and design, as two pairs, right? But in fact, our artists and scientists think more similarly, whereas designers and engineers were actually, you know, the similar family in terms of how they think. It was a very challenging course for me because I had to think about the users, think about solving problems. Whereas in my natural state, I would just be conceptualizing, trying to understand the system, and then going very deep in my thinking. In that course, I had to prototype. I had to think deeply about sustainability and why the world is messed up the way it is. And that was also when I found water. Not that I wasn't interested in water previously, but it around the same time I had kind of an environmental awakening. I realized I could feel the pain very deeply how water feels. And yeah, so I changed my direction completely. I was doing some cool technological projects involving water in my first year. But then until that awakening came and I was feeling the pain, I realized that water needed help, water needed healing. And it's not something that more technologies can fix. Or it's not something, you know, it's no longer, it shouldn't be used as a commodity again and again, especially by me, to further our egoistic creations, technologies, and crazy stuff we could make. You know, imagine, you know, the, there's so many incredible properties water manifest and we could apply it in so many different ways. But what's the point when the majority of the water bodies are suffering and are broken and needed help? Actually, people don't realize, right? It's the water's voice that needed to be amplified. So that was when I changed my project completely, almost failed my course in the end. Alpha: How did this come about that you felt the pain of water? Charlotte: I was in Spain. I went on a meditation trip in the middle of nowhere in Spain and then so I flew over from England. And then after three days, I think I just shed a tear at the end of the meditation and I just realized that, oh, wow, I was chasing after something shiny. My soul was not quiet enough until then to know my purpose or to hear water. So I really had to quiet down from, you know, all the crazy things going on in London and also my course, you know, imagine this bling-bling technology design course in the middle of London where the Industrial Revolution first started, right? And at that time, I was trying to reinvent more technology to solve something. Well, you cannot fix a problem using the same solution where that created the problem, right? So that was, I felt like that was what the course was driving us to do without making us critical thinkers first. So that's why like the whole designer engineer, scientist, artist complex came in because I felt like I wasn't taught in the course to think critically. I had to go back to my, perhaps my original training. I might take a bit longer than most of my classmates to get to where I need to be. But I had to think clearly because I am not here just to resolve a symptom. I want to solve the deep, deep rooted issue, the societal issues. And when we talk about climate change and ecological crisis, it's all rooted in water. Water is the first thing we need to look at. So that's something I strongly, deeply believed in until years and years later, you know, as I was in Geneva, I was an artist and advocate. I just suddenly realized that, wow, people, people, we speak about the same thing, but we don't see this the same thing at all. Like imagine, like at that time, I was before going to COP and all that, getting into climate change and all that stuff. I thought climate was water, you know, like water is climate. It's like so obvious, right? But then I was like, actually, not, not everyone thinks the same. Like maybe 90, 95% of people don't think, don't see what I see. And I was really shocked. I think like more and more, it's happening more and more now when I realize, oh, okay, I've been just in my own head. Alpha: How did you come about the connection of climate water? Was it through readings and books or articles or through your own thinking or what? Charlotte: Just through my own thinking, you know, like, because I felt like because of my, okay, long story short. Fast forward from my masters, right? Finishing my master, I tried to live like a normal person, getting a job and all that stuff. It didn't last for very long. Less than a year later, I found myself in the middle of COVID and I was just re-experiencing the pain that I was feeling for water. And I literally had to come out and become an advocate through my art because there were times and days I could only paint. And suddenly I get an exhibition and all that. And so I became an advocate. I was telling water stories through my painting. That was 2020. And because of this connection with water and I, it's almost shamanistic, right? I feel like I can feel water's pain. I can tell water's stories. I feel like water needs a voice. And I'm willing to do that through me, through my art. And then I was like, okay, let's bring it to the society. Let's collaborate with people who are also working in the water space. So that's when I slowly, more and more created this meeting of water's initiative that is making everyone do art. And so we tell the water stories through different voices. We personify water by imagining ourselves being water bodies, which we are. But we just kind of have to link it so that we can emphasize with natural water bodies that are some, you know, most of us think is inanimate. But to me, even scientifically speaking, a lake, a river can be a macro organism. They hold so many different lives, right? We can imagine the river becoming, being a dragon, a Chinese dragon, right? The water creature that is a collage of so many different animals. The snake, the turtle, the deer and the tiger and all the life that whose life depend on the river. So that's one way of seeing it. But for me, just like it is an organism which lifetime is much bigger than us. You know, it might have been sick for 30 years in our time. This river has been poisoned, has been deadly, but it might have been, you know, five minutes for the river itself. And it also has this self-generated mechanism, right? If we leave it alone, stop the incoming root pollutions, for example. So that's kind of where I come from. I have this, just kind of like a personal connection with water. And then I remember going to the climate space this year. I discovered your article. It was, I had to write something for, to kind of prove my point, right? So I was like, okay, I'm going to look into science and if there are papers who describe what I think after discovering that most people in the climate don't see what I see. And then I started just Googling water climate something in Google. And the first article popped up was from, from URF, which we both know as the, these common friends from Geneva were some regenerative olive trees. And so in his article, he was like a very, very article for laymen, right? But then in his article, he referenced Milan Milan. And I got in touch with him, discovering he's also from Geneva. And then he sent me the podcast from Milan Milan and also was your kind of water project. So with your articles, I can, I found out more and more scientific research in the area and relearning to translate, you know, my integrate synthesize, you know, the scientific language into my, my understanding, I guess. So it's coming from both ways. Alpha : In terms of the painting, is that something you grew up doing? Charlotte : Yeah, yeah. So I'm always been doing art since I was little. My parents used to leave me like painting the walls, because we were moving. So I just like do those all around the house. But then it never was my goal to turn it into a profession. In fact, right now I don't see myself that way. I spent a couple of years following a normal artistic path. Maybe I spent one year just chasing after galleries, exhibitions, art fairs. But that year was like, okay, I'm going just after the business. But then I got very depressed. I felt like that was very unauthentic. I felt like I cannot be a just like a normal artist or a normal scientist or designer, you know, I just can't fit myself into a box. But this year I've been really working on my nonprofit Meeting of Waters, which is an art project. But it's also in this policy in the science space. I just want to work on water, you know, I call myself a water artist. For that reason, I don't want to limit myself into just one professional one tag. I can use my science brain. If I need, right, even though it's a bit rusty. But it's still working somehow. And I can be an engineer one day if needed, you know, writing some software and stuff. Designer as well. So like I don't really want to limit myself into okay, I'm a painter. I'm a designer. But I think, you know, all of it come hand in hand. My performance is very much coming from the emotions I feel for water. But without the knowledge, right, and the people and everyone's contribution. So like the performance is the meat of this meeting of waters, the nonprofit, but it's contributed by more than me. People who come in from humanitarian and scientific fields who are also working on water. That's what makes it special. So it's bigger than me. That's why I created a new entity that is not, you know, a Charlotte NGO. But it's a meeting of different water bodies presented by human beings from different walks of life. Right. Alpha: So you're doing a lot of different modalities. When you first started doing water art in the design schools, when you started with water paintings is that the form of art that you first decided to try and capture the essence of water? Charlotte: Yeah. And at that time I was using a simple brush with Chinese ink. That's how I started Chinese ink. I think it was really a technique that dives into my ancestral roots. And it's not something I was trained in, but it just came out so naturally. I did not know that, you know, everybody paints like that in China. Like in ancient time and modern days, I thought I was so special in Europe because I was just like, wow, I just have this wonderful technique and it just flows so well. Years and years after, just by practicing every day, it just feels like a meditation, you know. And then the brush stroke also evolves over time. In the beginning it was very tight and then it becomes looser and looser and then it flows more freely. And then I continue to adapt it into different techniques. And obviously right now I'm working with mostly acrylic with Chinese ink as well. Like they're all always in liquid form. So the black parts, they always integrate with Chinese ink or maybe when I'm doing the composition, I start with Chinese ink in black. But the idea is the same. Alpha: You showed me that painting that you have [photo above]. When you started out, did it look somewhat like this? Charlotte: This one is the same technique I mentioned, but then in acrylic ink. So in the background we're talking about the lowest part where it was painted in yellow and green. And then after this dried and I went with with the Chinese ink. Alpha: Do you want to describe what's happening in this? Charlotte: The scene is talking about regeneration and and the rain. It feels like a bird eye view and we are looking down from the sky. Seeing a wet land just below the clouds. Well, maybe it's even invisible - this atmospheric river. But in this painting, because the water describing my art is not about water at all, it's more about motions, the fluid motions. So when we talk about the Navier Stokes equations as describing motions of the universe, whether it is dark matter or atmosphere or or lakes. The motion is like the fingerprint of God where everything is written in this formula. So when I paint water, it does not look exactly realistically like water. You know, some maybe some European historic artist does it way better than me, but my, my water is about the motion. So here in the front. Front ground, you see the motion of the atmosphere. We're in a background. It's the wetlands. Artwork called Dark MatterAlpha: At some point you started doing these group setting events to where people are coming together around water, sitting in a circle. I saw that piece with ice on a platform that slowly melts, representing glacier melting. Do you want to talk about how you moved into this kind of form of art, what do you call that kind of artwork where you're involving the audience in the whole performance of it? Charlotte: We call it reciprocal performance. So the performance because of the intimate setting in a circle and then audience being very involved energetically in the creative process. This performance is rather reciprocal that I am influenced by the audience in motion. And the audience is also influenced by, you know, the whole performance music, art, altogether, the perceptual experience was so much more than, let's say, an academic seminar or just the PowerPoint presentation. So this is what we want to emphasize, you know, the highlight of this methodology we bring in. And that's why we call it reciprocal performance and artistic performance rather than a seminar. So we started it as a kind of a youth project. So at that time, because of this inner drive that I want to, I want the world to hear the voice for water, you know, I was around the time I could really cry. When I talk about water to just to a random audience and I would start crying as I talk about it. I think it's this authenticity touched people. And then I had many youth or grownups, no, we're all grownups, but I think in the policy space, there is a trend in a lot of governments and international organizations to involve youth in their process, whether it's a big international conference or just supporting youth in their projects for sustainability or climate change and all that stuff. I was involved in the World Economic Forum. We have a youth initiative called Global Shapers. I used to work at a graduate institute for international relations in Geneva. I knew some of the students who were involved in water diplomacy. There were students more focused on water management, inter cross boundary water relations and all these subjects. So we formed this community around my art studio at the time. And that year, we received funding from a Chinese foundation. And we decided, okay, we're going to do two projects involving climate change. And the water bodies we wanted to involve was the glacier, one of the oldest water bodies on the earth. And then the oceans, somehow it's all shared stateless, you know, so we were all sharing the oceans. The ocean was very far from Switzerland but it did not really matter because we all carry the ocean in our bodies, the salted water. So the glacier was somewhat very close to proximity and the culture of Switzerland. And it was the first performance we delivered. And it was also by accident on International Women's Day. We had this message of mother nature. It's also a female entity, right? Yeah. So that was the background story of this performance. And it was very much remembered. Even after two years, people were still talking about it because it was so intimate and the piece of glacier that was actually taken by one of our performers, an anthropologist who's also a mountaineer, growing up in Chamonix, the French Alps. So he actually went to the Swiss Alps to bring a piece of ice to the presence of the performance. And we also returned this piece of ice a year later because after this performance.I also suffered this strong ethical struggle that was it fair that we took this piece of ice from a glacier that is already suffering just because we wanted to make a beautiful piece of art for our human purposes, right? I feel like we've done that so, so much in every sector without asking nature for consensus of what we do. So that made me cry for hours, the day after the performance, even though I was receiving all the compliments from everybody who was there. And I was really justified with my ethical code of conduct. It was like Olafur Elias and the well-known Danish, Icelandic artist, he brought tons of ice to the plaza in front of Tate Modern in London, watching mouth over 10 days or something. You know, that was a big performance also hits, I think during our age in the contemporary art. I was really justified with, okay, if I could make the impact, right, I would, I think it's okay. But then again, I think it was the same sensitivity that has been guiding me to create. I felt the pain of glacier again, and I just felt really a lot of regrets for what we have done. I spoke with with John, who this anthropologist who took the glacier and we made an appointment to bring it back to the glacier. So we kind of had this very, let's say, pagan ceremony and stuff. Let's thank the glacier for bringing the story to Geneva to an audience. [Painting of the Glaciers that was made during the reciprocal performance. Made with the melted streams of Glacier de Pièce. This is the painting after when its mounted]Alpha: So you had someone bring in a glacier water, and then you're all watching it melt? Charlotte: So the performance was consistent of three movements. The first movement was, so we have three performers, they all spoke in the voice of glaciers. So imagine I am someone who studies the glacier, I deeply feel the emotions, seeing the, the leading life of this almost an elderly in a family in a water family, if you can imagine. So I projected my emotion onto this piece of glacier. So I speak, my name is glacier, I am something like 700 years old and then I'm retreating, things like that you say. So the first part was just a brief introduction and the speakers coming from the region, you know, they are very emotional. And they just speak about how they've been guarding the water for Switzerland year after years, you know, where all the rivers all come from. And the second movement was the current state of glacier. It was the climate change coming in and the glacier was talking about how it's no longer receiving as much snow as before and the summer mountain is very rapid. And things are not going great. And imagine that throughout these movements, the DJ is also playing and the sound was sent by the gesture of my paintings because my canvas was made into an instrument covered by conductive ink, Chinese ink. My body is also a circuit of conductive water bodies. So we basically connected a circuit and every time when I make a stroke with my brush, it sends a signal to the DJ. So he's mixing in a background as we are going through the movement, movement one, movement two, and movement three is about saying goodbye. The end felt like a funeral. And then the glacier was speaking that speaking like I am, I'm leaving but do not be, do not be sad. Live your life. Something like that. And then we're all projecting this emotion down to the glacier. And at that point, the glacier on my canvas melted so fast that it's covered already all of my white paint. And the music was playing was just very, very sad. And, and then, yeah, and that was pretty much the end of the performance when we're just saying goodbye to the glaciers. It's almost like, you know, when you see an elderly in your family passing right we tried very, very hard to sustain the life for an extra day. Extra few days is possible with technology with money with everything we can. Just like how Swiss event with all the money and technology they put blankets over the glacier, but they couldn't do more than that you know they're still going to be melting away. So, in the end, it was a raising awareness, perhaps self therapy, expressing those emotions and grief. And that was still early, early time. I feel like this year starting this year, everybody's talking about water. Every single body. ……One of Charlotte’s projects as part of Meeting of Waters is Water Persona - “Water Persona boldly combines art and science to visually depict the critical relationship between water and climate. It is rooted in a wide range of scientific data and aims to illustrate the profound impact of water on ecology, human populations, wildlife, and industries. Ultimately, the project seeks to shift the focus from imminent catastrophe to fostering deep emotional and psychological connections, and providing actionable steps to care for the Earth by improving our relationshipwith water.”…………………………………….‍ Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

I met Sieger Burger a few years back, and we have had quite a few interesting conversations about water over that time. He is a hydrologist and writer. In this conversation we range over many aspects of the water cycle, with a focus on hydraulic redistribution (how plants bring up groundwater), and foliar water upake (the process by which leafs can take in water).During Sieger’s Dutch childhood, he became interested in water - “water was fascinating to me. Water is this weird molecule that is both bringing life and also bringing death. It's really about water—where the sweet spot is, of the right quality. Not too pure, because with water, we can't have distilled water. Also, not too salty or polluted. You need to have the right quantity, if you have not enough, then we dry out, and if it's too much, then we drown. It's this fascination with water as a life-giver.” [quotes in this essay have been slightly edited to remove conversational filler words]Burger went to Delft University to study integrated water resources management. There he took a class from Hubert Savenije, and met Ruud Van der Ent, who was Savenije’s graduate student. Van der Ent and Savenije created a map of the small water cycle (precipitation recycling), showing where the evapotranspiration in one country, comes down as rain in another country. (The article on this map was the most read piece in this newsletter last year). Burger says of their work-“I think that it is fascinating what their work has started. The whole concept of precipitationsheds was, more or less, based on Van der Ent's work [developed formally by Patrick Keys]. It shows where my precipitation comes from, you know, so that you get an understanding of the range of area where your rain has been evaporated. If you talk about having enough water, especially in drier areas, that's really useful to know because that helps you realize: if I am in Kenya, where does my water originate from? If I'm in Kazakhstan, where does my water originate from? If I'm in the Sahel, where does my water come from? I think that that work has really helped to get a much, much better understanding of the whole hydrologic cycle. And I think it also has made it possible to visualize things. One of my first lectures was ‘A picture tells more than a thousand words,’ and those pictures from Van der Ent and all the others have really helped tell that story of the small hydrologic cycle.”As a hydrologist, Burger went to work in Uganda -“Uganda - lots of people call it the paradise. Around Lake Victoria, where we were based, it was between 15 and 30 degrees. It's perfect growing conditions. Lake Victoria rehydrates the air so that you have very high rainfall. So everything grows.But at the same time, more and more forests were cleared for growing large-scale annual crops. Then, if you get your tropical rains, all the soil can erode. I tried to encourage people to go into agroforestry. I was able to implement a few agroforestry projects to really showcase the combination of the design and plant growth. The fascinating thing about the tropics—things grow so quickly. So, with the right design, with a syntropic agroforestry system, you get after a year, the fast-growing pioneering trees at like four or five meters tall, from a seedling that was 15 centimeters. The soil comes alive, and you just create this life-giving ecosystem that is productive. We got cassava growing there, and the roots were massive, bigger than most people had ever seen. It's all about how you design it in order to give life—make growth possible so that water becomes a life-giver."Curious about many aspects of the water cycle and ecosystem, Burger started a blog “A journey of discovery into the world of food, soil, and water”. ( Its in Dutch, but you can click the translate into English button.) On why he began a blog -“I started a bit in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a sad country because since '79, it's been in war. When I was there in 2011-2013, all the hills were denuded, all the trees were cut, all the grass was gone. And you just see terrible things environmentally happening because it's just a man-made desert. And that made me realize I just need to dive into how this works. When we moved back to the Netherlands, I got more into agriculture. Everyone was saying agriculture is causing lots of issues, like, what does that mean? What is it? You know? That made me first try to understand how this whole agricultural system works. It's a dive into the negatives, but you also need to have an alternative. And that where I started to dive into all the aspects that nature is providing, is giving us, and that we can use. That is where I got into all kinds of aspects of plants, of trees, of the biotic pump concept. It's all these things that just made me realize it's such a complex ecosystem altogether. It's really trying to get a much better rational picture—be able to tell the story much better. That's why I dived into it.”On how plant leaves can drink in water vapor, in a process called foliar water uptake. Its a process that is for instance important in California, where redwoods get up to a third of their water from the fog which they ingest through foliar water uptake :“Fascinating enough, if the plant becomes very dry, it appears that there are plants that can absorb water from the sky. It’s mostly water drops that are falling on the leaf. So it can be dew, it can be fog, it can be rainfall after a very dry period. At that point, the water pressure just becomes zero because there’s water available. So then the water can be sucked into the plant and is just filling up this gap of water shortage in the plant. According to one paper, we know this already for quite a long time, for a few hundred years. Now that we face more and more droughts and water becomes more scarce, we start to think, how on earth do we keep our plants and vegetation alive? Are there alternative water sources? This foliar water uptake, as it’s called, is becoming an interesting alternative, especially if it’s then combined with hydrologic, hydraulic redistribution [plants bringing up groundwater] , as well as some plants can do. The drier it is, the more significant this will be. Foliar water uptake in certain redwood tree ecosystems has been measured as a third, and in the Negev Desert in the south of Israel, it was three quarters of their total water budget. In dry climates, this can be really significant. Orchids have a huge percentage because they have no roots, they are more or less largely depending on foliar water uptake. It has now been found in all climates—in tropics, in arids, in subtropics, Mediterranean—whatever climate there is, these plants have been identified to do foliar water uptake. From Sieger’s blog article on foliar water uptake“Because the process of water flow through the plant is driven by tension differences, water can also be absorbed in the leaves if the tension gradient is directed inwards. This can occur when it starts to rain after a very long dry period (see image below). The tension in the air becomes 0 MPa, while in the soil it is still around -1 MPa and in the plant around -2 MPa or higher values. When it starts to rain, the leaves are the first to get wet, while in the plant/tree and in the soil there is still a high suction tension. Water can be absorbed via the leaves and reduce the suction tension in the plant/tree. The longer it rains, the further downwards the water can be sucked (the flow direction then completely reverses). At such times, water can even go from the leaves to the roots and ultimately infiltrate into the soil.In the last 20 years has much more research been done into Foliar Water Uptake and more insight has been gained. The consequence of this, however, is that many processes have mainly been described as possibilities, but have not yet been sufficiently studied. The research into Foliar Water Uptake has therefore not yet provided any clarity on how exactly the process works, and especially, how the water enters the plant from outside. It is clear that the water enters the plant based on voltage differences (hence the dive into the depths on voltage differences at the beginning of the blog post), but where exactly that happens is not yet clear at this time. Foliar Water Uptale has already been found in more than 233 species, spread over 77 plant families in 6 different biomes… it seems to occur everywhere. This study used shows 5 possible locations where water enters the plant:* through the stomata* through the top layer or cuticle of the plant (cuticle)* via the endophytes (endophyte)* via the hair or trichome of the plant (trichome)* through the water pores of the plant (hydathode)On the complexity of the water cycle and how vegetation supports it:“Just the amount of feedback systems, feedback loops, and buffers, and everything that’s in there—it’s just mind-blowing, yeah. And that it is also the whole thing that also makes this planet stable and allows it to receive water everywhere, you know? All these recycling loops make sure that water is brought to say China, because it’s just recycled, recycled, recycled. That’s what keeps this planet alive! We should nurture that. We should make sure that keeps happening, you know? If we all end up with extreme weather everywhere, and you end up with a flood every autumn and 40–50 degrees Celsius every summer, then it becomes uninhabitable. Vegetation can do a lot, to mitigate that at least.”On floods and droughts : “What most people don’t realize—floods and droughts are brothers and sisters, you know? They often come together. And people ask, “What? Do they come together?” If you have a flash flood, all the water is gone afterward, and then you end up with a drought. And because you have a drought, there’s no water, so the soil starts closing up—it clogs, it hardens, and soil life begins to die. So you just get this hard crust on the surface. If you then get new rainfall, it’s even worse! Then you get into this downward spiral of a dying landscape. And a dying landscape becomes even hotter, making it even more unbearable. We need to get the water back in order to create a much more pleasant environment to live in.Milan Milan is saying, more or less showing, that the landscape has changed so strongly that the summer rains have disappeared. On the other side of the coin the forests have all disappeared, the soil sponge has disappeared. So then you get these massive floods that’s caused by the removal of the forests, in combination with the heating, which creates more extreme rainfall, extreme weather, higher temperatures, more water in the air, all that kind of thing as well.It’s a complex system. It’s not like you can point at one factor, but the sponge in the landscape in a lot of places has been removed. And when the sponge is gone, then you get flash floods and droughts.”On biological matter nucleating rain :“The pollen, the fungal spores, and the bacteria are needed for cloud formation. There is this lovely paper putting together all data on cloud freezing nuclei and the temperature at which they freeze water. Biological freezing happens at much, much higher temperatures than chemical or mineral freezing. Forests creates all kinds of cloud freezing nuclei, which allows rainfall to happen at a higher temperature.In high school I learned that water freezes at zero degrees, you know? That’s what everyone knows. That’s how we calibrate thermometers. Freezing water is zero. That’s high school physics. Well, if you have pure water, it freezes at minus 40. I mean, I was like, "What? Why did no one tell me that before?" What? Pure water freezes at minus 40?Biology is able to create freezing at very high temperatures, like minus three to minus 15 Celsius roughly. But a lot of the mineralogical and chemical particles that cause freezing are more in the spectrum of minus 15 to minus 30 Celsius.”ReferencesBerry, Z. Carter, Nathan C. Emery, Sybil G. Gotsch, and Gregory R. Goldsmith. "Foliar water uptake: processes, pathways, and integration into plant water budgets." Plant, cell & environment 42, no. 2 (2019): 410-423Limm, Emily Burns, Kevin A. Simonin, Aron G. Bothman, and Todd E. Dawson. "Foliar water uptake: a common water acquisition strategy for plants of the redwood forest." Oecologia 161 (2009): 449-459 Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

The Los Angeles wildfires hit close to home for me. In the wake of the fires, I started working on an expansion of an article “Rehydrating California to lessen wildfires” I wrote a couple of years back. Then I remembered that Didi Pershouse and Walter Jehne had run a Rehydrate California project awhile back. So, instead, I thought to have a dialog with her, as a way to provide an overview of the subject.Didi has a wonderful, warm personality, and is a leader in spreading the word about regenerative water. She teaches workshops about soil and water, wrote the book The Ecology of Care, and founded the Land and Leadership Initiative. I had her on for a great previous podcast where we talked about metaphors for understanding water and soil - bread, museums, and wicks. Here is a portion of our dialog, edited for clarity and context. You can listen to the audio for the full dialog. (The title picture above is the Ballona lagoon in LA which spanned thousands of acres in 1900.)Alpha Lo: I was around in many of the California wildfires during the 2010s. At one point, I thought, "How come no one's looking at the restoration of the water cycle to deal with the wildfires?" The talk was all about fuel reduction, cutting down brush and trees to stop the wildfires, but very few people looking at how we can rehydrate the land to lessen wildfires. One of the few who was talking about it was Zach Weiss, who was talking about restoring land and the small water cycle. His mentor, Sepp Holz, was talking about how draining the water from the land leads to more wildfires. Another one of the few was Milan Milan who was studying how the degrading of the landscape led to the drying up of the landscape, which lead to the loss of rain and an increase in wildfires in Spain in the 1990s. When he came to California, a US forest service person said to him, "If your ideas are correct, California is going to have a lot of wildfires in the 2010s." And lo and behold, it did. At the start of this year, a number of us who had been promoting water cycle restoration noticed that wow, there's suddenly a lot more interest around this topic and its importance in relationship to climate change. The word was getting out. When the LA wildfires hit last week, it seemed like there was a lot more talk than in the past about how rehydrating the land could be a way to deal with wildfires. Didi Pershouse: One of the phrases that's been going around is that wet wood is a lot harder to burn. So there's the basic principle that when vegetation is hydrated, when the trees and grasses have enough water, it helps with fire prevention. Even just when a lawn has more water in it, it affects the soil sponge. Healthy soil has pore space or void space. The structural integrity holds that together so that water can soak in and stay in this underground reservoir. In places like California, where there's a rainy season if you're lucky, you can have a much longer green season when you have water at the root zone for plants. There's an issue of plant health, particularly tree health. Trees are so long-lived that a tree under drought stress is much more likely to be stressed by viruses, fungal diseases, and insects. So you're much more likely to have damaged trees that are dropping limbs, falling over, etc., in a landscape where there's not enough water being held in the land at the root zone for the trees.Not only is wet wood harder to burn, but fuel on the ground doesn't break down when its dry. Limbs, leaves, dry grasses that have been trampled to the ground by foot traffic in a dry landscape will just oxidize. They're going to slowly dry out, lose their biomass into the air, and become crispy, crumbly, and fire-prone. We see this in the Southwest, where fence posts put up a hundred years ago are still standing because they haven't rotted off. But in a wetter landscape, or in a more biologically active one where you have more fungal activity from saprophytic fungi that biodegrade wood, a fence post will rot off after 10 years. Here in Vermont, you can't leave a fence post forever, or a log on the ground will turn into beautiful soil in just a few years. I can't leave firewood on the ground here for my wood stove; it has to be up off the ground because the fungal hyphae and spores will go right into that and turn it into soil. So that's really different in places with seasonal rainfall that haven’t found ways to preserve the water that was once in the land. In a more Mediterranean climate, you need the beavers, you need the wetlands, you need the soil sponge. You need a way of being in the land that does not disturb its ability to hold water. Those are some of the foundational ideas. There are ideas of biotic pump, cloud formation, precipitation nuclei, and the issue of transpiration and latent heat flux.Alpha Lo: There's some interesting studies about soil moisture correlating with wildfire risk. For example, NASA and other researchers have looked at places with more soil moisture, and found they were a lot less vulnerable to wildfire risk. Nick Steiner, who works with Zach Weiss in water stories and does a lot of water restoration work, recently did a video where he shows a plant that he watered a lot and another plant that dried out. He then took a small blowtorch to both, and the one that was dried out just burned, while the one with water didn’t burn at all.Didi Pershouse: Yep.Alpha Lo: So, it’s key how we hydrate. Another factor I’ve been trying to raise awareness of is groundwater levels. In California, we've drained a lot of the groundwater, so much so that in the Central Valley, the ground is actually sinking because of groundwater loss. In LA, there's a freeway going through there called the Artesia Freeway. An artesian well is where if you swing a pickaxe into the ground, the groundwater will spurt up like a spout. That’s how LA used to be, with groundwater all the way up to the surface. When the groundwater is that high, plants are a lot more hydrated. If the groundwater drops beneath the roots, you can't bring up that water. If groundwater levels are reachable, the trees can bring it up, pass it into the soil, and also transpire it, making the air more humid. The groundwater also helps increase the rain through precipitation recycling. If we increase groundwater levels we will decrease wildfire risk. People think that LA is a desert, but if you look at old photos from the 1800s, you’ll see it was actually wetlands in many places. Rodeo Drive was where the rivers met, with a significant chunk of Beverly Hills being wetlands. It's just that we've kind of forgotten because we paved over it. During the floods of the early 1900s, we channelized and concretized the LA River, which made it really ugly, and also funneled water out of the landscape without allowing it to infiltrate. Thankfully, we’re starting to restore some of it now.Central Valley use to have big lake, Tulare Lake. The area was one-third wetlands.Didi Pershouse: And now Tulare is basically gone. So, yeah, there's a tremendous amount of water that has been drained off of the land. I think of having groundwater as a result of the soil sponge. The soil sponge can replenish it. We've seen places where the groundwater levels come back up again when people start managing the surface better—allowing cover crops, diverse vegetation, less or no tillage, and not using nitrogen fertilizers, which break up soil aggregates and interfere with the microbial work that forms those aggregates. Without those aggregates, there’s no pore space between the mineral particles. When we interfere with soil sponge formation, groundwater levels decrease. Alpha Lo: Right. Several researchers, Lucas Zeppetello and Marysa Lague, have shown that soil moisture in the southwest United States, including California, correlates with moisture from previous seasons. Less moisture in the spring and winter leads to more heat in the summer. So, infiltrating water into the land is key. LA had big rains last year, but because it didn’t stay in the landscape, it influenced conditions a year later, leading to more wildfires.Paul Dirmeyer started the Global Soil Wetness Project, mapping soil moisture worldwide. By including soil moisture in weather and climate models they improved weather predictions. They found that soil moisture can influence the landscape hydration even long after it disappears initially. Some moisture moves down to groundwater and returns, some moisture hops through the air to nearby areas.Didi Pershouse: It's interesting that LA had all that rain, but scientists are making the jump to how more vegetation leads to more fuel for fires when it dries out. While that's partly true, they aren't factoring in how we manage soil surface and water availability. If the snowpack on mountains is intact and not polluted, it will gradually melt throughout the summer, providing water during dry seasons. If we don’t channelize that water and instead allow it to spread across the landscape, we can store it in soils or holding tanks. This is one way to address global warming’s effects. Snowpacks have been interfered with, especially due to pollutants.The sequoias used to capture fog, and some still do. I remember a forester telling me that along the Pacific Highway, even during droughts, water would always be running across the highway because of fog-harvesting trees on the hillside.Alpha Lo: Yes, fog is a key component of California's water budget, like a secret neighbor delivering water. Milan, the meteorologist, noted that California’s Mediterranean climate relies on cold ocean currents evaporating water in summer, which brings fog. Redwood trees get a third of their water from fog via foliar uptake.But as we develop the coastal areas and heat them up, fog evaporates before reaching land. That’s why it’s important to rehydrate the coastal areas so that fog can travel further inland, helping reduce wildfires by adding moisture to the soil. Soil moisture has a memory that stretches over seasons. It moves slowly, moisture hopping through the landscape.Didi Pershouse: It’s also about condensation. Fog, already in droplet form, gets captured by trees, dripping down to the roots and lower vegetation. It’s a process nature has perfected. Cool nighttime temperatures also help, as they allow water to condense on vegetation, replenishing the landscape.If we take care of the land, we can capture water in many ways. We’ve interfered with these natural processes. Climate whiplash, like longer droughts and heavier rains, makes it even more important to slow down water flow. Slowing water down allows it to stay on the land and hydrate plants through the dry season.Alpha Lo: Exactly. If water from the wet season isn’t captured and stored, it’s drained before the dry season. By slowing it down and using techniques like swales or permaculture earthworks, we can store water in the soil and groundwater for later use.I remember Zach Weiss working on a project in California, where he built a pond to capture water, that kept vegetation hydrated. Hydrated vegetation is much more resistant to fire. When fires came, his neighbors’ land burned, but the land he worked on did not. Decentralizing water storage—having ponds and groundwater sources—helps us manage water more effectively, especially in times of crisis.Didi Pershouse: Yes, it’s important to decentralize water storage. Relying on centralized reservoirs isn’t enough when you need water during wildfires or droughts. We need to store it on the land, in the soil, or in ponds to use when it's most needed. Without this, we face challenges in managing water during dry periods or extreme events like wildfires and floods.Alpha Lo: Water stored in the land—whether through soil, groundwater, or vegetation—works as a buffer, especially when the system is hit by extreme weather. It’s about creating a resilient ecosystem that can handle both drought and excess rain by maintaining that balance. And these solutions are scalable. If we applied these methods more widely—across cities, regions, and even nations—we could reduce the severity of floods and droughts and help protect our ecosystems from climate change. It's about working with nature, rather than against it.California has a centralized way of managing water, using large reservoirs. It has an incredible number of dams—something like 1,500. Zach Weiss talks about how this system is very energy-intensive; California spends 20% of its energy budget just moving and cleaning water. This means that 20% of the state's energy contributes to global warming, which in turn further disrupts the water cycle. So, moving water around with large reservoirs and aqueducts is causing more global warming and not offering a sustainable solution.It's also disruptive to ecological processes, like the salmon swimming upstream, which are a huge part of the ecosystem. Bears eat the salmon, and their waste helps fertilize the forest. A significant amount of the nitrogen in forests used to come from the salmon swimming upstream. By blocking the rivers, we’re cutting off this nutrient cycle, disrupting both the forests and their contribution to the small water cycle.An analogy that was shared with me is that blocking our rivers is like clogging the arteries of our body. To further the analogy, think of society emitting industrial carbon as a person eating toxins. To regain our health we both need to stop eating toxins; and we also need to unblock those arteries. Decentralized water flow is critical to restoring the health of the landscape.Didi Pershouse: There's a beautiful little book called Water : A Natural History by Alice Outwater, which talks about how animals like salmon, beavers, and buffalo managed water in the landscape. For example, the buffalo would roll in the ground, creating small potholes that collected water. Also, prairie dogs or gophers, with their tunnels, could store large amounts of water underground, helping it percolate down quickly. It's really about the anatomy of the landscape and how these animals, along with plant roots and fungi, play a huge role in water management.These underground systems, which are invisible to us, are just as important, if not more, than the visible processes we can see with animals like beavers and buffalo. The complex soil food web, earthworms, and fungi all do vital work below the surface.Alpha Lo: Beaver restoration is a big deal—at one point, there were somewhere between 100 million to 400 million beavers in North America, and they created massive wetlands. These wetlands help with precipitation recycling, and with landscape hydration that allowed more forests to grow.Beavers also help regenerate the landscape, and efforts by groups like Brock Dolman and the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in California helped get beavers reintroduced to the landscape. There’s even managed to get a beaver department into California’s government recently.Didi Pershouse: That's fantastic! I know another friend who's been working on beaver restoration, and there are several great books on the topic, like Eager. One of the amazing things about beaver dams is that they're designed to fail over time. When a beaver dam breaks down, it creates rich soils in the wetlands that then support different vegetation. This leads to a patchwork of ecosystems within ecosystems, which is essential for biodiversity.This diversity is necessary for the proper functioning of ecosystems, including the rain cycle. Diverse forest landscapes contribute to the production of biogenic volatile compounds, which help create clouds and rain.Alpha Lo: Beavers are truly amazing. I had Leila Phillips, who wrote Beaverland, on my podcast here. She talked a lot about the incredible role beavers play in our ecosystems.Wildfire is a natural part of the ecosystem process. But when we dehydrate the land, wildfires no longer follow the pattern they use to. We now have much more intense wildfires. We have hotter, drier winds fanning the wildfires than in the past.That’s another aspect I’ve been thinking about, inspired by Milan Milan’s insight when he studied wildfires in Spain. He could actually track which winds created the fires and measure how much moisture was in those winds. Because there was less transpiration feeding moisture into the air, the winds were drier, which contributed to the wildfires.The timing of the LA wildfire was strange because it happened in winter, whereas wildfires usually happen in summer. I was talking to a friend in LA who’s over six feet tall, and he got blown over by the winds—they were that strong. These Chinook winds come from the Great Basin in Nevada, blow across the desert, go up the mountains, and then as they come down, they gain speed, becoming hotter and drier. By the time they reach LA, the Santa Ana winds are strong, dry and hot.Some scientists, like Roni Avissar and Francina Dominguez, have studied how trees help slow down winds. When there are fewer trees, the winds pick up speed. On top of that, the Great Basin area has lost a lot of vegetation and groundwater, which makes the air drier and less humid. That’s a problem.Reservoirs on the Owens Valley side of the Sierra Nevadas also capture water that would otherwise hydrate the landscape, making the winds even hotter and drier. If we rehydrated the landscape all the way from the Great Basin to LA, it would make a big difference.Rehydrating, though, can create more vegetation, which could fuel wildfires if not managed carefully. That’s why the worse things get, the trickier the solutions become. We need a strategic plan to get water back into the landscape. That’s why techniques like terracing, swales, rainwater ponds, and groundwater replenishment are so important. If we can hydrate the vegetation, it’s less likely to catch fire.Didi Pershouse: The same principles apply whether you’re looking at wind or water. A complex, “messy” landscape with diverse vegetation slows both. On mountaintops or flat plains, the more complex the vegetation, the slower the wind will be.Alpha Lo: Unmanaged forests tend to have fewer wildfires. Chad Hanson, Curtis Bradley, and Dominick Dellasalla found that unmanaged forests on the West Coast had less wildfires than managed or plantation forests. In plantations, where forests are monocultures, or where logging has taken place, the risk of wildfires is much higher. Unmanaged forests retain dead logs and brush, which can absorb up to 20 times more moisture than soil. This creates a humid, air-conditioned environment that makes it harder for wildfires to take hold. Anastasia Makarieva, a Russian scientist, studied boreal forests and found the same thing: logged areas or plantations in Russia are where the wildfires happen, while unmanaged wilderness areas remain resilient to fire.Didi Pershouse: We don’t hear enough about this. The idea that monoculture forests or heavily managed landscapes are more prone to wildfire isn’t widely understood, but it makes sense. In any system—whether it’s agroecology, permaculture, or regenerative agriculture—biodiversity is key to health. Diverse systems create resilience, whether it’s through feeding soil communities, retaining water, or supporting above-ground life like pollinators and birds.Alpha Lo: Monoculture forests are like a body missing its defenses—the system is less equipped to deal with stressors like pests, drought, or wildfires.In Iberia, they’ve planted huge eucalyptus monocultures for the toilet paper industry. Eucalyptus trees draw up groundwater faster than it’s being replenished, leaving the landscape drier over time. It’s important to remember that drawing water up through vegetation isn’t inherently bad—after all it’s needed for transpiration and rain creation. But when water is being pulled up faster than it can be replenished, it creates long-term problems.Didi Pershouse: And monoculture forests likely don’t produce the same terpenes, pollens, fungal spores, and other compounds that biodiverse forests do—compounds that are essential for healthy rain cycles and cloud formation.Alpha Lo: I want to bring up some ideological shifts that have happened the LA Department of Water and Power. Many years ago, they were much more focused on a drainage paradigm of water management. But Anthony Lipkis and Accelerated Resilience LA, pushed for a new approach involving rain infiltration and the rehydration of LA. He got six other agencies in LA to study the idea. Those agencies then helped prod the LA Department of Water and Power to alter their ways. The department use to view stormwater as a problem to be funneled out as quickly as possible to the sea. "Now there's been there's been a shift in that thinking," Art Castro from the department says. "Now we see stormwater as an asset." As a result, they’ve started implementing rain gardens between streets and freeways. There has been progress, laying the groundwork for a broader paradigm shift in LA and California is happening. There is still a long way to go as LA is so overly concretized, with relatively little capacity for rain to infiltrate. The Chinese Sponge City initiative is a great model. In any one city they will implement over 300 projects to improve rain infiltration and slow water flow. It has been successful in China, and other countries are now copying the Sponge City concept. This could serve as a template for LA and other California cities, like Fresno, Bakersfield etc. However, it’s tricky because implementing this would mean “undeveloping” some areas.In China, they’ve adopted the concept of “negative planning,” which involves depaving and undeveloping to make space for nature to infiltrate rain. At some point, the US will need to generate cultural momentum around becoming aware that restoring floodplains and removing certain concrete areas is essential.Didi Pershouse: That’s a critical point. I was talking two nights ago with a group I meet with weekly—the Land and Leadership Development Community, which includes people from LA. They’re part of a group called the Soil Sponge Collective. They talked about opportunities in neighborhoods where rebuilding is necessary. As people rebuild, it’s an opportunity to create not just fire-hardened houses but also landscapes softened against fire. Instead of paving everything or relying on rock gardens and bare rooftops, there’s potential to design LA to act more like a sponge city.The LA River is a big part of this. In the sponge cities in China, you see marvelous parks along rivers designed to infiltrate water as it falls and flows.Alpha Lo: The LA River is starting to be re-greened, which is great, but there’s still a long way to go. One challenge is that the river has been so narrowed that re-greening leads to difficulties as that causes the bends in the river to change.There have also been proposed projects in LA for aquifer refilling, like a plan to drain stormwater towards a new wetlands park in Burbank . There are nine wetland parks proposed for LA County, but to make this happen, we need cultural momentum.This year, there seems to be a growing awareness of the importance of restoring the water cycle for climate resilience and wildfire prevention. If we keep spreading this message, it will become easier for people to support the necessary changes, even if it requires sacrifices, like undeveloping parts of LA to allow more rain infiltration.Didi Pershouse: When we toured California in 2018 with the “Can We Rehydrate California?” speaking tour, we saw similar challenges. I was speaking and listening to people during long sessions. At that time, California culture had just caught on to the idea of soil carbon as a way to address climate change. There was so much excitement about soil carbon as a drawdown solution—people were already doing soil carbon planning, using biochar, and promoting soil-focused initiatives.It was like, “Don’t tell us about other solutions; we’ve already picked our plan.” There were real champions for promoting soil carbon, which isn’t a bad thing. But we were about seven years too early for people to really hear the water message. Michal Kravčík had the same experience. Around the same time, he gave talks about water restoration, but people weren’t ready to listen because they were so focused on soil carbon.Now, we’re realizing that while the carbon cycle is important, it’s only part of the picture. We can’t adjust the climate through carbon alone—we need to address water, biodiversity, and other processes as well.Alpha Lo: That’s a good point. I think we’re at the same stage with the water cycle restoration movement as the restorative soil movement was 10 years ago. Things are moving faster now, though, and I think the water restoration movement can take off more quickly.For example, soil carbon reached the national debate stage during one of the elections, which was surprising. But the connection between soil and the water cycle isn’t as widely known yet. This year, it seems like people are finally starting to understand it.We owe thanks to people like Walter Jehne, Zach Weiss, and Michal Kravčík, who’ve been pushing this message for years. Kravčík has been doing on-the-ground projects in Slovakia and elsewhere. He even came to Ventura, near LA, and calculated how much rain infiltration would increase rainfall in that area.California, and LA specifically, has lost about 30% of its rainfall over the last few decades. Some of that is due to global warming and ocean warming, but not all. A significant portion—maybe half—is due to land degradation.We need to push the message that restoring the land can restore the rain. Thankfully, more people are starting to share this message. Zach Weiss’s recent video on the LA fires reached half a million views. Let’s summarize what we want to do to rehydrate California and LA to lessen wildfires. What's the strategic plan?Didi Pershouse: Yeah, there is a larger strategic plan, and there's also what people can do locally. We start by thinking about what people can do as they rebuild, or as they're building new homes, or planning commissions for their neighborhoods, etc. It’s about softening the landscape while hardening the houses. So, harden the structures to make them less flammable, but also de-pave, create rain gardens, and plant Miyawaki mini-forests with lots of diverse vegetation close together. And finding ways to put gray water, or leftover water, back into the land. Finding ways to capture water as it moves through the landscape. Green rooftops, rain gardens, and permeable pavement for driveways. Anything that allows the water to soak in. On a larger scale, that's like turning the LA River into a whole Sponge City park.Alpha Lo: Yeah, those are great suggestions for local efforts. Also, hugelkultur, where you use logs to absorb water. Let your lawn grow, turn it into a polycultural piece of land.At a slightly larger level, at the municipal level, we could create watershed councils that look at restoring creeks, restoring land, infiltrating rain, pushing for more permeable pavement, replenishing groundwater etc. Grass Valley, California, is a town where the groundwater is at a level where tree roots can in some places reach, but in others not. Working with swales, ponds, leaky weirs, could help increase groundwater levels to levels where it would lower wildfire risk in the area.Water management experts and land managers could work with state legislators to create laws that allow more decentralized water bodies, promote beaver restoration, and similar initiatives. There are probably 50 plus organizations in LA interested in rehydration, so they could come together to create a rehydration plan. We also need to focus on the area all the way from San Bernardino to the Great Basin, including the Central Valley, and cities like Fresno, and Bakersfield. The more these areas are rehydrated, the more moisture gets recycled, the more that helps areas like the Colorado River and even the Midwest with downwind precipitation recycling. This is important on a larger scale. Once we have enough momentum, we can shift the narrative and policies. Didi Pershouse: Yeah, I agree. I have three other areas I think we should focus on. We've talked about the homeowner, neighborhood, city, and state levels, but also thinking about three types of land management. In forestry, we need to shift away from monoculture plantations and the idea of managing by cutting. Instead, we should focus on increasing water supplies within the forest. This could include allowing more beaver activity, using fungal biostimulants to help degrade wood, and bringing in what’s needed to help eucalyptus trees degrade so that we have more humus and less fuel on the ground. We also need healthier forests by increasing diversity and recognizing how to create windbreaks to protect these areas. For grazing, we need to move away from areas where grasslands are just cut or left unmanaged with only a few animals grazing randomly. This leaves woody, flammable shrubs, which animals will eat if they are properly managed. Shifting to holistic management means making decisions about grazing, using fencing, and moving animals in large groups. Some people are using goats, which are great at clearing out flammable plants. Lastly, in vegetable farming, we need to shift away from monocultures and move towards polycultures, using cover crops and animals to graze them down. Tillage is one of the main things that destroys the soil sponge and makes it harder for rain to be absorbed. We need to preserve the soil structure to allow for more water retention. When you use four plant families and sixteen different species, quorum sensing occurs, and the soil food web becomes much more active. This activity helps store more water underground, as more organisms interact and the underground ecosystem flourishes.Didi Pershouse: So, shifting away from monoculture in both forestry and farming is essential for these systems to thrive.Alpha Lo: Cool. Yeah, beavers, soil, cover crops, polycultures—those are all great strategies. I also want to add that, at the larger level, once we have enough momentum, we need to address the whole human-made dam paradigm. Dams are blocking the natural flow of water, and the Klamath River is an example where they are starting to work with indigenous people to remove dams. We need policymakers, sustainable land groups, and indigenous communities working together to "un-dam" rivers. Hydrologists have mainly studied how dams work, but they should focus on how they don't work, because they’re actually degrading all the land downstream. That land cannot then absorb the rain as well, and so decreases precipitation recycling. Its the atmospheric scientists who study precipitation recycling, and its the ecologists who maybe are most likely, if they even do, to realize that the land is not infiltrating rain to provide for precipitation recycling, so hydrologists can forget that factor when they build dams. It’s crucial to bring all these groups together—hydrologists, climate scientists, and ecologists—to demonstrate why dams are a huge problem. This is a larger goal, and it will take time, but we’ve already started with the Klamath, so maybe we can start removing the 1,500 dams in California. Once we start doing this, we’ll see huge ripple effects in rehydration.Didi Pershouse: And if that water were available, I think the green vegetation would stay green longer into the dry season, which would reduce flammability and extend the time those plants are putting out root exudates, feeding the soil food web, and creating the sponge structure. It all builds on each other. The hopeful thing is that we’re starting to see how it all works together. We don’t have to say, “Here’s a problem and here’s a solution,” because we can start to find these key intervention points. If we do this, 25 other things will change in ways we can't even imagine yet.Alpha Lo: Yeah, exactly. When the dams come down, it will allow for decentralized water storage, and the landscape will continually be hydrated. That means plants will stay hydrated, reducing wildfires.Didi Pershouse: Yes, and keeping the snowpack for longer is part of that. We need to stop crop burning and tilling in the Central Valley. The soil has been degraded to the point that it’s like flour, not bread. When wind comes through, that soil is lifted into the air, and some of it lands on the snowpack, reducing its ability to retain water. If the soil structure is healthy, the wind can pass through without moving the soil. This will help keep the snowpack longer. And it also cools the surface temperature. If soil is covered, it might be 80°F, but uncovered soil could be as hot as 160°F. This difference impacts the air temperature, which can be 20-30 degrees warmer above pavement than above soil or grass. This can make a huge difference in air temperature.Alpha Lo: There's also a danger right now where many people think the solution to wildfires is just chopping down redwood trees to prevent fire. It's crucial to get the message out that if we hydrate vegetation properly, we don’t need to chop it down for fire prevention.Didi Pershouse: Hydrating the landscape itself helps prevent that.I suggest that we take context-specific situations—like the Central Valley, LA, or other regions—and really unpack them. We need to examine how all the pieces fit together in those places. Depending on who gets involved, we can choose a few regions or bioregions to focus on and work through their challenges. The goal would be to produce some write-ups that can be handed to policymakers, neighborhood leaders, or community groups. These documents could say, “Here’s how you can prevent flooding, fires, droughts, social unrest, water insecurity, food insecurity, and even landslides.”Alpha Lo: A bioregional plan is so crucial, and something like that could be handed over to the local hydrology department or other relevant agencies—it would have a real impact. The Transition Town movement actually started in a similar way. Permaculture students in Totnes, UK, created a plan to address local economics and resource management, and that grew into a viral movement.Permaculturists often do final projects designing plans for individual pieces of land, but imagine if they took on entire bioregions instead—like LA County, Cascadia, or other watersheds. They could create comprehensive watershed, soil, and land-use plans for those areas.We can have city planners, permaculturists, regenerative land managers, regenerative water people, local hydrologists etc working together, to co-create these regional plans for soil, water, and land management that integrate permaculture principles with urban planning strategies.………………………………………..The word has been starting to spread about using water cycle restoration to deal with wildfires, but there are still so many more sectors, and organizations and people that this word needs to spread to. The more those groups and people hear about this from different angles, the more likely they will investigate this way of dealing with wildfires that they may have never thought of before. If you forward this discussion onto different folks and organizations, especially ones in LA and California, and ones that are working to deal with fire, that would be awesome! 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Trees, stout and rugged, once dotted the valleys in the Makkah province in Saudia Arabia. An indigenous system of community land management called Hima allowed nature to flourish for thousands of years. But then in 1950s Hima was abolished, and desertification set in. People cut down trees, so they could have money to import food for their animals.The land became austere. The sun seared desolation into the hills and wabis (the valleys). The earth became dry as a parched throat. Xerophytic plants baked in temperatures that reached 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). Animals were rare, except for the resourceful camels that weave their way through the landscape. [Al Baydha, from the “The story of Al Baydha - A regenerative agriculture in the desert” video]This is the land Neal Spackman came to help restore. One of the keys to restoration was to capture the rare rains, the rains that came once a year, or sometimes even less. These rare rains would turn into angry floods that left deep scars in the landscape. The important step was to turn these watery forces of devastation into a force of regeneration. He worked with the community to pile rocks into gabions and check dams, to slow the flow of the waters, then created initial plant beds to absorb the rain. Over the course of many years the vegetation came back, with the growth of plants like zizyphus, acacia, and sesbania seban. Biodiversity returned.I had the honor of having a dialog with Neal Spackman in this podcast episode. He is coming with us as we return to Iberia, to look at how to restore the water cycles and the rain there.This is the fifth article/podcast in a series that has a connection to restoring the Iberian water cycle and rain : 1. “Restoring Iberian rain” 2. “What implementing agroforestry on farms would do to the rain : a European perspective” 3. “How eco-tourism can help the regenerative water movement : Anna Pollock interview” 4. Regenerating a farm and a semi-arid region: Silvia Quarta.Global warming causes the air to be able to hold more water like a sponge, which means droughts are longer. But then when the sponge wrings out, we are beset with bigger storms. This week the eastern and southern coasts of Spain were pounded by huge rains. In Valencia, which was hit the hardest, rivers of mud devastated the city. Unfortunately many died. A landscape of buildings were destroyed. The road to recovery will be a long one.Preparations can be made for future large rains. We can work to restore the land, so it can absorb more of the rain, so that it can lessen the amount of that water that reaches cities downslope of it. Floods will then be a lot smaller.Just like in Saudia Arabia, the power of devastation can be turned into the power of regeneration. If there is vegetation, soil, and earthworks to slow and spread the stormwaters upslope, then more of the water can then sink into the land to refill the aquifers. That groundwater can then be brought up by trees in the dry season to hydrate the environment, and to evapotranspire to increase the small water cycle, and bring back summer rains. Nature can dampen the wild variability of our climate - lessening the impact of the big rains in the wet season, and increasing the rains in the dry season. Spain’s future food systems are being threatened by the droughts in regions like Valencia and Andalusia. Nature can store and dampen the big wet season rains, to help create summer rains that aid agriculture. ……..Here is part of the podcast dialog between Neal and I, recorded before the floods hit. Neal talks about his ecorestoration work in Saudia Arabia, and proposes some ideas for water related eco-restoration in Andalusia, Spain. (Dialog edited for brevity, grammar and clarity).Alpha: Do you want to share a little bit about how you got into the whole regenerative sphere and your background?Neal: I spent two years in Guatemala in my early 20s, and while I was there, I became very interested in sustainability in food systems and in the built environment. I met a group of corn farmers whose farms had failed. They were forced to leave everything behind and move to the city, hoping to find a better life for their kids. That sparked a question for me: why does a corn farm fail in Central America? What’s really going on?I grew up thinking I'd be a doctor like my dad, who was a cardiac anesthesiologist. But I became deeply interested in sustainability—specifically in food systems, building materials, and all that. At that time, I didn’t think I could make a living out of it, so I majored in Middle East Studies, Arabic, and did some economics work in undergrad. Then, all those interests converged when I was offered a co-founding role at the Al Baydha Project in Saudi Arabia. Back then, we thought of it as building a “green village,” and it evolved in many directions. Al Baydha was funded by Her Royal Highness Princess Haifa Al-Faisal, the youngest daughter of the late King Faisal, and for her, it was a humanitarian effort. We were working with settled nomadic tribes south of Mecca, and the project encompassed a wide range of community development—education, infrastructure, and more. My role was focused on the land, water, and economy side, working with people to bring life back to degraded landscapes in ways that could restore nature and allow people to make a living off their land again.Al Baydha is about a 45-minute drive south of Mecca, in the foothills of the mountains, where we averaged around 60 millimeters [2.3 inches] of rain a year. It’s minimal. And that's an average, but in deserts, averages don’t count for much. You might go two years with no rain, and then in the third year, get six inches over a couple of events. So you’d have 24 hours of rain spread across a thousand days. It’s an extremely austere landscape. And that’s part of what made it meaningful—we were working in conditions many thought impossible, yet proved restoration was achievable. What resonates with people about Al Baydha is the way we approached it—holistically, and under such harsh circumstances.Alpha: What kind of background did they hire you for?Neal: I already had experience living in the Middle East, knew the language, and understood the culture. I also had the theoretical knowledge about land restoration, but no hands-on practice. I think they wisely chose someone with social and cultural skills over technical land skills, because I believe the socio-political and economic aspects are actually more challenging than the land itself. Once you get that right, nature has a way of filling in the rest. The complexity is really in working with people, not with nature, which is fairly straightforward once you're moving in the right direction.Alpha: And where did you get your theoretical background from?Neal: I’d done some permaculture, including a Permaculture Design Certificate course, and read a lot about traditional systems—Nabataean water management, Incan water systems, agroforestry practices in the Negev Desert, and similar topics. I was passionate about polycultural, agroforestry, and agroecological systems, including silvopasture. In the project, we ran hundreds of small experiments to see what worked, building on tiny successes.Alpha: What were some of the main techniques you used to restore the land and water?Neal: We focused on what’s called “natural” or “green infrastructure.” We experimented with gabions, check dams, one-rock dams, zuni bowls, zai holes, fish scale berms, and basins. These small earthworks intercepted water flow in different parts of the landscape. We also constructed about four kilometers of swales, both on and off contour, some based on keyline design. These helped us manage water across the dry river valleys and floodplains.[check dams made of rock to slow the waters. From “The story of Al Baydha” video]Alpha: So you essentially slowed the water down and gathered it, right?Neal: Yes, exactly. In that environment, we didn’t have sticks to use, just rocks and dust. By placing structures on or off the contour, we managed how water flowed across the land. Geoff Lawton, an early consultant, helped guide us, and I also trained in aquaponics and took courses with people like Darren Doherty on keyline design. We didn’t adopt every recommendation, but these early steps got us moving in the right direction.Alpha: After managing the water, did you start building soil or planting?Neal: We manually planted trees, trialing about a dozen species—half native, half non-native—to create microclimates, provide economic outputs, and withstand the climate. A key goal was silvopasture because the local culture is still pastoral. We needed to grow trees that could feed camels, sheep, and goats, which were central to the community’s identity and livelihood. So, silvopasture was really our end goal, and ideally, we’d also develop a high-value crop to sell in export markets. Silvopasture means tree-based grazing systems, a traditional agroforestry practice. Historically, in that climate, there was enough rainfall for a summer and winter growth cycle. Rain would trigger a brief growth of annual grasses that would seed and die off quickly, allowing grazing for a few months. Then, during dry months, people would rely on trees for grazing. This cycle sustained camel herding, with the Hima system managing land fertility and productivity. Our project aimed to restore something like that, supplementing it with potential tree-based cash crops.Alpha: You mentioned the social side was even more challenging. What were some of those difficulties?Neal: Building trust was crucial. Our vision was to empower the community to sustain these systems long-term. We needed them to know we weren’t there to exploit them but to work with their traditional ecological knowledge. Building trust takes time and showing that we were trustworthy.Secondly, it was about understanding how our ecological goals fit with their practices, ensuring we weren’t imposing something foreign but collaborating. Revitalizing rather than restoring their economy was key, respecting the socio-political and economic realities they lived in.Alpha: What were the ecological results of the project?Neal: I published an article on LinkedIn last year showing satellite data on the site’s NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), which tracks photosynthesis. Before we began, there was little response to rainfall. Now, the land’s response to rain has drastically improved. Even though we stopped active work in 2016, it’s getting greener each year, which shows we pushed the ecosystem to a more productive state. This year, it’ll likely stabilize at a new level, where rainwater more effectively drives biological activity.[vegetation grows back in Al Baydha]While working there, we saw life come back in stages. First, fungi and plants appeared, followed by insects, birds, and small mammals, eventually leading to the return of predators. It was deeply fulfilling to witness life coming back to a once-dead landscape.Alpha: Did you inoculate the soil with mycelia initially?Neal: No, we didn’t. We added no inputs—no compost, no mycelia, nothing like that—because it was too costly. We only focused on water management and manual planting. One interesting experiment involved composting a camel carcass, which I did to teach my team about biodegradation, which is very slow in such a dry environment. Without interventions, organic material doesn’t break down naturally there. It was part of understanding that fixing the water and mineral cycles was essential for ecological rehabilitation.Alpha: So, you focused on water, planted some trees, and let nature take over?Neal: Exactly. We gave the ecosystem enough of a push, and then nature started filling in the gaps. It’s an accelerating cascade. When I returned in 2020, after two and a half years without rain, the land was lush compared to how we left it. While it’ll never be a rainforest, it’s reached a state where a wet season brings vibrant growth. Native species have even started regenerating on their own.Alpha: So, by setting it in motion, you created a self-sustaining system.Neal: Yes, we gave it the push, and now nature is re-colonizing the area. Watching it unfold and seeing biodiversity increase has been incredibly rewarding. It's deeply satisfying to help bring life back to a barren place. We saw the fungi come back first, and then plants and insects started reappearing. Then birds and lizards returned, and eventually mammals. Within four or five years, we even had predators on the site. When we first started, there weren't even ants. It actually took three years for ants to show up.Alpha: Wow. And you didn’t notice them until they were right there?Neal: Exactly. The first time I saw them, I was like, “Wait, there are ants here!” Then I realized their absence had gone unnoticed until that moment. They’re so ubiquitous—they should be everywhere. But they weren't on our land until three years in. It’s hard to describe, but bringing life back to a place that felt dead is an incredibly satisfying, even sublime, experience.Alpha: So, it’s like you set up the water system, plant a few things, and then nature takes over, right? Once it’s over that initial hump, the vegetation attracts more wildlife, and you’ve started a rewilding process that can sustain itself.Neal: That’s right. We gave it enough of a push that nature said, “Okay, let’s re-colonize this place.” And the speed of the cascade only increased from there. In 2020, I returned to capture the “after” footage for a project. I’d been away for two and a half years, during which there’d been almost no rain. Some of the trialed trees didn’t survive without irrigation, but we had cut the water on purpose to see which species could adapt to the ecosystem naturally.When I got back, the once dusty, rocky landscape had transformed into this amazingly lush green space. Now, it’s not a rainforest, and it never will be, but it’s developed into an area with a defined wet and dry season. When it rains, it’s truly green, with native ground covers and trees starting to grow on their own.Alpha: I wanted to ask your thoughts on regenerative practices in places like Spain and Portugal.Neal: My experience in Iberia is mostly in the south, around Cádiz. The dehesa and montado systems—the traditional cork oak agroforestry—are stunning. They create this beautiful, self-sustaining landscape that produces delicious food. Iberia is also sparsely populated, with large areas where agriculture has been a way of life for centuries.For example, I know about a cooperative of rice farmers near Sevilla, along the Guadalquivir River. The river’s tidal influence now pushes saltwater over 100 kilometers inland, affecting freshwater irrigation and decimating farm productivity. These farmers are struggling to adapt to the high salinity and water shortages, often leaving fields fallow.Alpha: So what’s the solution? Do you have suggestions for these rice farmers?Neal: They could explore salt marsh agroecology. I’ve collaborated with Seawater Solutions, which works on marshland restoration and promoting halophytic (salt-loving) crops. There are plants like salicornia, also known as sea asparagus, that can grow in saltwater. Halophytes are especially promising for regions with soil salinization challenges.Alpha: So you’re saying they could switch from rice to these halophyte crops?Neal: Yes. Growing rice is likely no longer viable for them, but there are many salt-tolerant crops they could farm profitably. Salicornia, for instance, has been eaten for centuries, and Distichlis—a salt-tolerant grain—also has potential. Halophyte farming is still a young industry, but it could be transformative for coastal areas dealing with salinization and water scarcity.Alpha: And restoring these coastal marshes could also improve local water cycles?Neal: Absolutely. Coastal areas often suffer from disrupted small water cycles due to degraded ecosystems, like drained mangroves or marshlands. Restoring these areas, whether for agroecology or conservation, can significantly influence local evapotranspiration and, potentially, rainfall patterns. It’s my opinion, though unproven, that coastal rehabilitation is crucial to restoring small water cycles, especially in places like the Iberian Peninsula.Alpha: I agree. There’s a study by Millan Millan suggesting coastal marshes cool and humidify incoming sea breezes, which could lead to rain further inland. Restoring these areas could be essential in southern Spain, where many marshes have been drained.Neal: Precisely. With partners, including Carl Hodges, a pioneer in saltwater agriculture, I’m working on scalable projects focusing on mangrove-based agroecology for tropical regions, like Mexico and Texas. But in places like the Mediterranean, a marsh-based agroecology might be more appropriate, delivering both economic and ecological benefits.In Cádiz, near Donana National Park, marsh restoration would be instrumental. Donana is a critical wetland that's been drying up, and restoring it could bring both biodiversity and water cycle resilience back to the area.Coastal ecosystems are absolutely critical, in my opinion. Once you move uphill from them, you start to see the interplay of deforestation, desertification, and drought-flood cycles. If you have forested hillsides, when it rains, there’s minimal erosion, and the landscape can capture and slow down that water. But if you deforest those hillsides for agriculture—as the Romans did in Italy—you end up with drought-flood cycles. You might get the same amount of rain initially, but the biological structures that manage that rainfall are gone. This results in massive soil erosion and destructive floods because the land can't absorb and utilize the rain, which we refer to as ineffective rainfall.When we plow, deforest, and convert land to agriculture—and then keep plowing year after year—you lose the ecosystem’s ability to retain and make use of water. Parts of Iberia, for example, have been farmed for about 1,600 years continuously. As a result, these ecosystems lose their function, and drought-flood cycles inevitably follow deforestation. I don’t know of any exceptions to that rule. This means that rainfall becomes more intermittent and less reliable, and when it does come, it can’t be captured effectively, so it becomes destructive.We see this pattern in desert cities all the time. For instance, Mecca floods every time it rains, despite the governorate spending billions on flood management systems. However, these systems simply shunt water into the sea as quickly as possible. You see the same approach in Los Angeles—the LA River used to function as a natural system, but now the flood management system diverts water into the ocean as quickly as possible, without a design to use that water for supporting life on the land.So the approach becomes, ‘Get rid of the freshwater as quickly as possible to reduce infrastructure damage.’ But in doing so, we’ve also removed the land’s ability to support life by disposing of the freshwater that comes.……….This is a reader supported, hydro-friendly, organically emergent, newsletter/podcast Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

In the windswept plateau of South Eastern Spain, where the soil had been eroding, where desertification had been threateninghad the area, and where the community had been struggling with the exodus of young people, La Junquera farm, has been pioneering regenerative methods, and spearheading the activation and restoration of the local watershed. Its been hosting educational workshops for neighboring farmers, and its ways have gradually osmosized into the surrounding area. I had the pleasure of interviewing Slyvia Quarta, an articulate and action-oriented academic-turned-farmer, who works at La Junquera farm, running a regenerative educational program there called Camp Altiplano. Her bio reads “I love having calluses on my hands, taking a hot bath, having a beer at the Topares bar, and being alone on the farm when everyone leaves.” La Junquera farm is part of a larger Alvelal multistakeholder network, that brings together hundreds of farmers, local businesses and scientists working together for the prosperity of the region. They came together in 2014, and created a 20 year strategic roadmap that works to build community and shift the extractive sector into the regenerative sector. It has regenerated much over the past decade, and in the future aims to restore an ambitious 100,000 hectares. Alvelal’s success provides a model which other large scale land restoration projects in Iberia (and there are number of these), as well as around the world, can follow. Alvelal writes on its website “We intend to mobilize local society to transmit the vision that a self-sufficient, dignified region, full of life and prosperity, is possible. A young and revitalized territory that knows and values ​​its resources, with a professionalized ecological agricultural sector and with business opportunities and restorative initiatives for society, the economy and the territory. This is why we work on the restoration of agricultural properties with degraded or eroded soils, through regenerative soil and landscape agricultural techniques. We offer training workshops and technical advice, thus guaranteeing an open and supportive transmission of knowledge. We promote marketing plans for indigenous organic products with great quality differentiated by their productive management. Above all, we want to help all those initiatives that defend the recovery of the landscape, culture and economy of our territory. Likewise, we are committed to the restoration of biological corridors to promote the conservation of biodiversity; activating and energizing local networks around landscape restoration.”Here’s a segment of the interview with Sylvia Quarta, (edited for clarity and brevity):Silvia: I'm currently at La Junquera, a large regenerative farm in southern Spain. It's a 1,000-acre farm, and we’re part of a larger landscape restoration project through Alvelal, a regenerative agricultural association that connects a vast landscape of 100,000 acres here in southern Spain, spanning different provinces: Murcia, Almería, and Granada. It started around 10 years ago, and their goal is basically to restore the landscape—not just in terms of land and nature but also through social restoration, creating jobs, improving the economy, and developing a patchwork landscape with natural areas as well as great regenerative farms and inspiring places. We mainly follow the Four Returns framework, which is part of the Commonland work focused on returning natural capital, economic capital, inspiration, and social capital.[from La Junquera’s website]Alpha: Cool, I'm excited to dive in with you to explore more about your farm and the larger network it’s part of and how that all came together to restore 100,000 acres in southeastern Spain. But first, let’s talk about you. How did you get involved in the regenerative field?Silvia: I’m from northern Italy, from a fairly urban area. I grew up half an hour away from Milan, a big city. At some point, I decided to study environmental sciences and went to the Netherlands. That changed a lot for me because I did my internship and my thesis on farming-related issues. I worked with indigenous communities in the Andes, and I experienced the whole world of agroforestry, organic agriculture, and permaculture. It really opened up for me, and I realized I wanted to do much more than just research. I ended up in a project in southern Spain where I worked as a volunteer for over a year on dryland restoration—learning about and restoring native species, maintaining a nursery of native varieties, planting in the desert, and having a forest garden.After that, I worked a bit at Wageningen University and coordinated excursions for the land and water management program in Portugal. We traveled across the country looking at issues related to large irrigation schemes and syndromic systems, giving students and ourselves a feel for the contrasts in land and water management in the desert.Eventually, I ended up here at Campo Altiplano; it’s the first ecosystem restoration community created by John D. Liu, who is the founder of the whole movement. This camp started in 2017 at La Junquera, and I came a couple of years later. So for the past five years, I’ve been managing a five-acre plot that we’ve transformed from a cereal field into a mixed regenerative agroforestry permaculture system, working with volunteers and the community.Alpha: Can you tell us a little bit about the landscape there?Silvia: You can’t hear it, but it’s crazy windy outside today! It’s quite typical because we’re on a plateau at 1,100 meters elevation. It’s Mediterranean since we’re only an hour away from the coast in the Murcia region, but being high up means we have a vast landscape with broad horizons, which can be quite monotonous. We get an average of 350 millimeters (14 inches) of rainfall per year, but in the last 12 months, we’ve had less than 100. It rained 30 millimeters last Saturday, which was basically the first rainfall we’ve had in a year. It’s been horrible winters; usually, it rains from October to April, but that hasn’t been the case in recent years. Winter can get really cold, and it can even snow, but it also gets super hot in the summer, with temperatures reaching up to 40 degrees Celsius (104 F). So there are huge temperature fluctuations throughout the year and even throughout the day.Most of the land around here is farmland—cereal land, mostly—but there are also more almond trees now. Because of our climate, it’s not easy to grow a wide variety of crops. Traditionally, it was mainly cereals, but now there are more almond trees and pistachio trees being grown. There’s a part of the valley where we’re located that is irrigated and increasingly hosting intensive vegetable production systems. Companies from other places rent out the land at very high prices and manage to have three cycles of lettuce growing in one season, which they then export to Germany, for example. The aquifers are suffering quite a lot—our spring, which is our drinking water, has gone down from 20 liters per second, about 10 years ago, to just 4 liters per second now. Nitrates are contaminating the water. It’s a beautiful landscape, but it faces many challenges; it’s highly exploited and is also depopulating quite quickly.Alpha: A lot of the soil has been washed away, right? There’s not much soil left because of the winds and how it can’t hold onto it in the landscape.Silvia: Exactly. Because of conventional farming and plowing everywhere, the soil is bare. When it rains, like now after three years of basically nothing, just 30 millimeters, a lot of soil gets washed away. That really shouldn’t happen, but everything is so dry and destroyed that it does.Alpha: And the other part is that the aquifers are being drained because that’s what the farmers are using. But that means the trees can’t get as much water, right?Silvia: Yes. It’s a vicious cycle—the water levels are dropping, which means there’s less water available for everything else. The biological flow in the river has decreased, and some parts of the river don’t exist anymore because they’ve been drained for farming.Alpha: So how did the La Junquera farm get started? Was there a vision behind it initially?Silvia: This is a family farm that has belonged to the same family since the 1800s. It was originally bought for the production of hemp and as part of grass, which is this rough grass that grows in highlands. It’s pretty sturdy, and you can weave things with it, like ropes and baskets. When hemp production declined, they turned to cereals. About 10 or 12 years ago, Alfonso, the youngest son of this family, came here to take over management. He was around 23 or 24 at the time. The family had someone managing the farm while they lived a few hours away, but he decided to come here and gradually took over the whole management.His goal was to restore diversity and biodiversity in the soil since they noticed production was declining and the farm wasn’t doing well. They were completely dependent on one crop, so they started introducing different crops. They added almond and pistachio trees, as well as aromatic herbs like lavender and sage for essential oils. A lot of effort went into water retention and biodiversity work. We’ve planted more than 40,000 trees and bushes of native species for reforestation, both in natural areas and along field edges. Basically, the vision is to create a more resilient, beautiful, diverse, and healthier farm that improves soil health and biodiversity while still producing.Alpha: And the ponds that you built, are they allowed to seep into the ground, or are they more for storing water?Silvia: No, they're pretty much all clay around here, or at least for large parts. They waterproof themselves quite easily. The idea is that they're meant to provide some water for wildlife—frogs, and whoever wants to use the water—but also to slow down the water and let it infiltrate. Usually, the ponds just handle the largest water runoff, while the swales can be used where the slopes are a bit softer and there's less runoff.Alpha: Can you irrigate the crops from the pond water?Silvia: No, that’s not really the idea. Usually, you need the most water in summer when there’s probably the least water in the pond. Most of them are seasonal ponds. We had a few that had water all year round, but not this year. Even those dried up, so the groundwater level probably went down a bit because of the drought. We did try a temporary pump to water part of the land with the pond water, but it just didn’t make much sense because, in summer, the water level was lower, plus it has high salinity because of the area's geology. In the end, yeah, it’s just not practical.Alpha: So what large-scale changes have happened as a result of this farm?Silvia: The large-scale change is what we’re trying to get into right now, which is, after all these years of working on this farm, we want to address the water issue and connect with the place around us.We’re focusing on a whole valley restoration project. As I mentioned, we have a spring on our land, which is our drinking water, and that spring is going down. It’s the beginning of a river which runs for about 80 kilometers and then ends up in a dam, and that’s it.In those 80 kilometers, it's been disappearing. So we’re focusing on the first half of the catchment of the whole river, which is 30,000 hectares. What we want to do in this 30,000 hectares is involve the whole community—farmers, the local municipality—and change the way farming happens.We’ve already started organizing training for farmers. We have a project funded together with the municipality to talk about soil literacy with people here and come up with an agreement on actions we’ll take together to protect the soil.We’re working with schools around here and want to restore the cultural connection of people to this valley and this river. Because it's been such a harsh few years, people are more interested in what's happening on this farm. So I think this is the large-scale change we’re aiming for. Plus, the farm is also offering consultancy and management for other farms in the areaAlpha: So the idea is to get a lot of these farms upstream to build up their soil so that the water can infiltrate and take a little longer to reach the river, allowing it to run into the dry season more.Silvia: Yeah, we want to restore a broken cycle. We want to create some space for biodiversity around the river, which is absolutely not respected at the moment. We want people to experiment and try out local varieties of crops that are being forgotten. Our vision is that in 20 years, this place will be much greener, with a lot more crop variety, products coming from this area, and a whole supply chain happening here. We want to create processing and added value for these products.There should be more people, especially young people, because the population around here is disappearing. All the young kids want to leave, and they know that the only way to stay here is to work in agriculture, but they don’t necessarily want to do that. So we need to make this place more alive, thriving, and self-sustaining.Alpha: So this is your larger vision—a 20-year plan that you guys are working on with all the different stakeholders. How did this begin? How did you come up with this larger vision of bringing a lot of different stakeholders together?Silvia: I think it first happened because, at different points in time, we’ve all been driving through this valley I’m talking about. There’s the main road we usually take, but there’s also this side road that goes along the river, where you see abandoned farm buildings and really nice areas. The land is farmed, but the buildings are abandoned, and all of us—people living and working here—have been thinking, “It would be so nice to have these places restored and have more people living there with more projects like this one.”I think we were all thinking that until we started voicing it and talking about it. That’s one part, the dreamy bit. Then there’s the reality check, which is that at one point along the river, there’s another farm that the same people own. Ten years ago, the river’s water used to reach this farm, and now it doesn’t.So it’s also a very real change in the landscape and the land. Alfonso and Yannick, his wife, have been living here for six or eight years. She founded the Regeneration Academy, which translates research and complex knowledge into easily accessible knowledge for farmers. They also work with students doing research on the land and train farmers. So they bring education to regenerative agriculture in a more accessible way.[from video on La Junquera’s website]They have two kids, four and two years old, and I think that’s a huge reason for doing something about it. For all of us, it’s the realization that yes, we’re working on a farm and making an impact, but it’s limited. So how do we make a larger impact?Alpha: It seems like one of the reasons is that the water on each farm is impacted by the overall actions you take in the whole watershed. So to improve the water system, you need to get a larger group of people working together—not just your own farm. Another thing is having a community of peers; it’s nice to have local people working on it together and supporting each other.So you developed this regenerative school. Was it difficult? Sometimes farmers don’t want to convert from the ways they’re farming. How hard was it to show them this other way of farming?Silvia: I think we’re not really trying to convert them. As you said, it doesn’t work if you go to someone and tell them they’re doing it wrong and should do it differently. That’s why we focused mainly on our farm first. Our goal was to restore this farm and work differently here, but we also wanted to offer an example.When we offer training, people can come here and see what we do. More and more people are interested, especially in these tough years when there hasn’t been any cereal harvest for the past three years. Our farm has other crops, and they think, “Oh, maybe these people are doing something right.” The harshness of this period has made more people realize there’s something interesting happening here.We just offer alternatives and knowledge. I think a lot of times, farmers know what they’re doing and are doing their best, but they haven’t seen anything else. If I haven’t seen something like that, it’s hard to imagine doing it differently. I know more people throughout the peninsula who organize groups and collectives of farmers to train and visit other farms, and I think that’s an essential part of this process.We want to start offering more of that here—not just on our farm, but also visiting other farms in the Alvelal network or even further away.Alpha: Are your trainings a couple of hours or multi-day? How do they look?Sylvia: It’s usually a full morning, plus lunch. Lunch is a great time for people to connect and discuss in a more relaxed way. So it’s usually full mornings or full days, but not more than that because farmers are busy and can’t really spare multiple days.Alpha: How far do they usually drive to come to your training?Silvia: Most of them are quite close—maybe half an hour to one hour away.Alpha: Did you have to promote these workshops and trainings quite a bit? How did you go about promoting them?Silvia: Yeah, we’re promoting them. The trainings we’re currently offering are funded by EIT Food, a European program focused on training farmers in regenerative agriculture, based a bit on farmer-to-farmer training. We promote them on social media, old-school style by hanging flyers at the local bar, and we send messages through WhatsApp to people we know. Word of mouth usually helps, too.Alpha: Okay, cool. I know Commonland came in at one point.Silvia: I think Commonland came in at a moment when a lot of things were happening, and there was this vision of, “Maybe we should get together and give this a bit more shape.” That’s how I think Alvelal was born—from a few meetings among people already involved in regenerative agriculture and alternative farming systems.We have 356 farms, 37,000 hectares positively influenced, 115 people who are members of this association, and 300 people supported by the Alvelal funds. They offer funds for water retention infrastructure, seeds, and other things over the past 10 years.[projects of Alvelal, the little R’s are regenerative farms, from https://landscapes.global/partnership/alvelal/ ]Alpha: And it’s not just farmers, right? It’s also local businesses that are kind of woven together.Silvia: Exactly. A big part of what Alvelal started doing was promoting the creation of regenerative businesses. It’s not just about making sure that whatever you do—whether it’s ecosystem restoration or regenerative agriculture—has an economic return for your business, but also for the region.So that’s a major focus. The cooperative was also born, mainly to sell regenerative almonds, but I think it’s expanding to more products now. There’s actually a whole network of satellite businesses that have arisen, probably inspired by the whole Alvelal network.Alpha: So that's kind of cool. You have this whole farming thing, but you also have a co-op that’s funneling your produce out into the world. So, the middleman is part of your group, making it a lot more amenable to your needs.Silvia: Yeah, what they managed to do at the beginning, which was great, is sell almonds for a better price, even though there’s no regenerative certification. You can’t certify as regenerative, but by bringing together different farmers, they managed to communicate effectively, showing that these farmers grow in a different way, that their products are worth more, and that they’re regenerating the landscape. I think that’s really interesting.It’s an example of how you can promote better consumption and offer better products, even if it’s not under a specific certification, just by gathering people and being absolutely clear and transparent about what you're doing.Alpha: So, the almonds are known to come from this area, right? It’s kind of like how champagne comes from a specific region in France, and certain cheeses are known for coming from particular places.Silvia: Exactly. I think that would be beautiful. We’re thinking of having a branding so that anything that comes from this valley follows these principles. It may not necessarily be certified, but it means it’s supporting the local community, biodiversity, and soil health. I think creating this type of network helps consumers feel more connected because they know where their products come from. That’s why people are often willing to pay more—they feel a connection.Alpha: Yeah, so this could be replicated in different regions in Spain too, right? Like maybe oil from this area?Silvia: Well, hopefully a variety of products! We don’t want to end up with just monoculture. It would be nice to have some variety from any region—like almonds from here and olives from there.Alpha: Right. And thats what this returns framework is that Commonland brought in? Those are the capitals of your local area, right?Silvia: Yes, exactly. The focus is important because many restoration or alternative agriculture projects struggle when they only look at one aspect, like biodiversity or healthier production. The idea is that things only work when you consider the whole picture. So when we talk about natural capital returns, we're discussing nature, society, finances, and inspiration. That’s the part I find most appealing—it's not just about the impact within your community but also the impact you have outside of it, which is a huge strength.The farms within Alvelal can also serve as inspiring places for visitors. Many farms are open to receiving visits. We always have people around, whether they're volunteers or participants in courses and training. I want people to come here, see what we're doing, and be inspired. I think that’s a crucial element of the whole framework; it encourages us to think beyond just our local area.Alpha: When Commonland facilitated the process, they brought together multiple stakeholders to create a 20-year plan. People expressed a desire for their kids to want to stay in this area.From that, you kind of agree on certain points, and while there might be sticking points, you at least have some common ground. Was the idea to gradually shift from more extractive industries to regenerative practices over this 20-year plan?Silvia: Yeah, talking about future generations is super important. As we’ve started looking into our vision for the Valley, we’re thinking about what essential elements we need. If people here could reflect on a couple of generations back and a couple forward, I think it would completely change how they act and make decisions.Alpha: Over the generations, there’s also been a noticeable loss of rain from the small water cycle, which is evident. We need to regenerate on a larger scale, but at least the rain that comes from that small water cycle of rapid transpiration should return over time.Silvia: Yes, people tell us that there used to be snow throughout the winter. I’ve seen snow here; it does snow in winter, but not like it used to. In the last two years, it might snow for two weeks and that’s it.There’s this place they used to call the lagoon because every year there would be water for many months after the rains. There are still people alive who remember this, so it’s not just some vague changing pattern. We want to work with this memory. Realizing that this memory exists and that people still remember how different things were is a strong way to communicate. It can help reconnect people with the reality that things are changing for the worse and that action is needed—like my mother remembers when things were really different.Alpha: Snow is a more dramatic change because it’s obvious when there’s less or more snow. With rain, you have to calculate it, but snow is visible. Alvelal includes Granada, right? And Granada has the whole Sierra Nevada, which is experiencing the same issues with disappearing snow, right?Silvia: Yes. Also in Italy and the north of Italy, people are really concerned about not having snow—not just for the water reserves but also because they can’t go skiing. The immediate concern is, “It’s December, and there’s no snow! What are we going to do?”Alpha: Yeah, the lack of snow is obvious for the tourism or ski industry. But snow is also crucial for the water supply because it works within the whole slow water paradigm. It melts slowly, providing water later in the season, especially during the dry season. If it melts too early, there’s less water available for the dry months.Silvia: Exactly. I can’t imagine how much the water cycle has changed here in the last ten years. I can tell because the springs are drying up a lot, which is massive. This area has good aquifers because it’s limestone, so it can hold a lot of water, but the changes are significant. If it rains a bit more, we get a bit more water, but it also dries up faster.Alpha: How many of the farms in the region have switched over to more regenerative methods, would you say?Silvia: Well, they say there are around 500 farms involved. It’s always hard to determine if a farm has truly switched. What does it mean to switch? If I start feeling less or make one change, am I switching? It’s a process. As we kick off this new project, our goal for next year is to engage at least three more farms in regenerative practices. The following year, we hope to add another three or four, creating a ripple effect. So we’ll have more to share next year!…..This is a reader supported publication Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

While in Spain, Nick Steiner, the water restorationist, and I were involved in discussions with folks from the Spanish hospitality sector about restoring the water cycles and bringing back the rains there. It began to dawn on us that eco-tourism could play a role in the regenerative water movement. Anna Pollock, who is from the UK, heard of our discussions, and contacted me. She has been a leader in the regenerative tourism movement and in conscious travel. The 2022 Journey Women award was given to her for her work in regenerative tourism. She has been guiding the hospitality sector to help the regenerative farming sector through their purchasing power of food, through their ability to educate guests about regeneration and organic products, and through helping farms develop home-stay programs.Here is an abridged version of my podcast interview with Anna Pollock [edited for clarity and brevity] Alpha : How did you get into the tourism industry?Anna : I've been at it a long time. I started in tourism 50 years ago. I had emigrated to Canada and I happened to arrive in British Columbia at the very moment that the government there was starting to think about whether they could do something with this thing called tourism. Their economy up until that point was entirely resource-based, and they had no chance of doing a lot in manufacturing because of their location at the time. I happened to arrive after having spent a temporary job in England with the research department of Visit England. I had tourism on my resume, and the rest is history. I essentially had an opportunity to start with a very young visitor economy, with very little government involvement at that point, and develop that over a period of about 25 years, before I left Canada to come back to the UK. I’ve been working as a strategist and as a consultant, a bit of a futurist, a bit of a thinker. I’ve always liked to be ahead of the curve, and I’ve been doing that in various places.I do a lot of international speaking, trying to encourage people to think differently, look forward to see what's happening, and adjust what they're doing accordingly. That has kept me busy for that amount of time. So that’s my background.Alpha: How did your interest in sustainability and regenerative ecology begin?Anna: The sustainability journey started probably in the late '80s because I was involved with a consulting firm that was looking at land use planning. It was the time when ecotourism was being considered. A river rafting company in British Columbia came to me and said they were fighting a major mining proposal on one of the most beautiful rivers in British Columbia. They wanted to put tourism on that river to generate jobs and livelihoods without damaging the environment or the river. They asked if I could help them make a case.That was my first foray into trying to construct an argument as to why tourism in the future might be another land use that would bring benefits without necessarily causing the damage that mining was causing. That was a long time ago now, and it did get protected. It got me really interested in ecotourism, and then we did some other sustainable planning-type projects.Like many people, I was really affected by An Inconvenient Truth. That really got me looking very seriously at what was happening in the environment. I started getting serious about it, around 2000. I did a sustainability strategy in 2008 for British Columbia.Alpha: Could you explain the difference between sustainable travel and regenerative tourism?Anna: That's a challenging one. It all depends on how these terms are understood or interpreted because to sustain simply means to carry on, endure, or maintain. If the intent is to sustain a healthy planet with healthy people and biodiversity, then there wouldn't really be any difference between that and the concept of regeneration. However, over the past 20, 30, or even 40 years, the meaning of sustainability has remained very vague. It's not necessarily defined what anyone is trying to sustain. Or what I see happening is that the underlying principle behind it is sustaining the status quo, sustaining the current economic model. It aims to minimize damage, of course, mitigate and reduce emissions, cut back on water use, waste, etc., all of these good things, but it doesn't really challenge the system itself.That’s where I believe regeneration is fundamentally different because it’s based on a completely different understanding of how the world works. The current economic model that we're all caught up in, call it what you want, is based on a set of assumptions about us living in a machine-like world that we can divide into pieces and understand by reducing it to components.The reality is not that case at all. As you would understand, being involved with rivers, we are living systems as human beings. We inhabit a living system, which is the planet. It is constantly adjusting to the forces around it and within it. When you see that and have that way of perceiving, it changes the way you act and the values you have.The fundamental difference between the two is that one is based on a particular way of looking at the world. They call it a paradigm that sees the world as a machine—objects to be identified, analyzed, defined, and then acted upon—versus seeing the world we live in as a living system, as we are a living system, and acting according to a different set of rules, as it were. That’s the real difference between regeneration and sustainability.So when I see many people tacking on the word regeneration and talking about community engagement or nature-based solutions while continuing the fundamental paradigm and the same business model, which is usually growth-oriented—more people, more travel, more destinations—I know it's not the real thing. I hope that kind of explains it.Alpha: Could you tell me a little bit about the evolution of regenerative tourism history and what paradigm shifts might have occurred in its evolution?Anna: The most important thing to realize is that the application of regenerative thinking, which has been present in the Western world, has been around since probably the last war, certainly the 50s and 60s.Regeneration in the Western world is still quite young, but it's not a new concept. If you look at a large population of the earth, indigenous peoples and people of different spiritual traditions understand regenerative thinking. They do it naturally; it’s in their DNA. It’s new in the Western world. When looking at the application of that thinking in the tourism domain, it's really very young, very new. I started studying it around 2010. Before that, I didn't feel confident enough to start writing about how that might have been applied to tourism for another nine years. I wrote a blog post titled Regeneration: The Maturation of Sustainability, suggesting it was a step forward. I'm not saying I created regenerative tourism; I simply applied the thinking or tried to apply the thinking to tourism. That was only six years ago. Regenerative thinking is now moving into many domains—obviously agriculture, regenerative economics—and tourism is responding to that. People in tourism are thinking, "We need to understand this, apply it, or use the term because it’s trendy." I wouldn't say it has evolved; I would say it has spread, and in that process, it has sometimes been misrepresented and sometimes even diluted.Alpha: I saw you had an article advocating the importance of soil to the tourism industry. Can you say a little bit about the article and the impact it may have had?Anna: My interest in soil comes from a, I am a gardener and b, the fact that food is a major part of hospitality. I'm focusing my work very much now on the hospitality component of tourism. There are several reasons for that. One is that hospitality providers are very much rooted in places, and we need to focus more and more on applications in specific places. There’s no generic regenerative solution, and it happens to be that this sector is rooted in place.Secondly, it's involved in the activity of caring for visitors and providing food. The moment you start talking about food, you begin to explore where it comes from, how nutritious it is, and what determines that. This leads to the quality of agricultural practices and brings us into regenerative agriculture. I feel very strongly that the hospitality sector has a role in helping farmers transition from industrial farming practices into regenerative ones, which ultimately comes back to the health of the soil.Essentially, I'm saying to the tourism industry, not only do you need to reduce your carbon emissions if you're focusing on that aspect, but you are also part of a bigger system in your locality. You must provide nutritious food to your guests, ideally by procuring it locally, and therefore you can develop relationships with farmers and perhaps help them make that transition more quickly. You could say the same thing about water, which we will discuss shortly. This is an important part of the whole topic. What I'm trying to do is help hospitality providers break out of their bubble, understand the bigger system they are part of, and figure out what they can do. I'm really interested in helping people understand too that tourism isn't so much an industry that operates with value chains where we're all linked in a very mechanical way; rather we are part of a living system in a place.We're part of a network, in a particular place. If we want to be healthy as a business, if we want to succeed, we need to make sure that the environment, in the biggest sense of the word, is also healthy. Therefore, we can't ignore these issues around the quality of the landscape, the quality of the food, the environment, the air, and the water. We have to start getting involved in those things too. So regenerative thinking takes a very holistic approach. It’s that change of mindset that really is at the core of all of this. Additionally, we need to shift away from simply saying, "Okay, I'm here, this beautiful scenery, we're all right by the beach, we're getting lots of visitors coming in every year, and I'm getting more and more money." That's an extractive mentality.Now, a regenerative approach will be to say, "Well, you're part of a living system. You perhaps would benefit more yourself as a business, but the community would also benefit if you were to ask, how can I contribute to the flourishing of this community and understand what's going on here?" That’s one of the reasons I got really interested in what you were doing, because it seemed that obviously water is a significant issue everywhere, but particularly in Spain. Tourism is a major industry in Spain, and a lot of your providers in the hospitality sector are now finding that the water cannot always be relied upon to be there in the quantity they’re used to providing to their guests. So, it’s natural that they should start to be thinking more about these issues than they have in the past.Alpha: What shifts in soil awareness do you see in the hospitality sector? Anna: The shift is definitely beginning to take place in parts of the world now. I certainly wouldn't take any credit for that because it has been a hard slog getting this topic, if you like, even onto the agenda. Alpha: What is agritourism?Anna: Basically, we love to put labels on tourism for different kinds of experiences, but it's where visitors or tourists go to a farm to have a farm experience. Whether it’s to be closer to the animals or to see how the food is made or how different products, like cheeses or wines, come from that location. So, it’s often a combination of the production and the consumption side of it.Agritourism providers are usually small holdings, farms, and food producers attracting visitors to come and see them. It’s growing considerably. I mean, it's very big in places like Italy, because it’s been happening for a long time. But it’s happening now all over the world. It shows the importance of hospitality in terms of making ordinary people much more aware of these environmental issues. The hospitality community can also play a role in increasing people’s awareness and maybe understanding how they have to change their own behavior or become more selective about what they buy and who they buy it from, or spending more time outside, etc. All of these different spin-off effects come from being exposed to people who are starting to really care for the land or soil.Alpha: There are techniques that have helped raise awareness around soil and regenerative farms—are any of these techniques helpful to bring regenerative water into awareness? Most people in hospitality probably don't know about this whole concept of regenerative water. How can we bring this into the conversation?Anna: Well, the term regenerative water might be difficult for some people because they might ask, "What does that mean?" But when you're talking about whether this environment is healthy and flourishing, or whether it is stable or very vulnerable, I think there is a huge rapid increase in the last two or three years of some climatic hazards that have become more frequent. People are becoming aware of the need to pay much more attention. To me, it's about beginning to understand and having the opportunity to show visitors that we are part of a living planet. We need to pay attention to how the climate is adjusting to our behavior.It's a bit of a challenging concept for the tourism industry because we fly people places. However, we also have access as hotels, restaurants, chefs, and so on to many people whom we can influence if we desire to help them better understand what some of these issues are.Alpha: Right. I would define regenerative water as restoring the water cycles to the way they have been flowing naturally. This includes replenishing groundwater so streams can flow, restoring rivers so that they're more natural and the water can overflow the banks. An aspect that a lot of people don't know about yet is that restoring the land can restore the rain. Particularly in Spain and Portugal, where they are losing rain in the warmer southern areas and eastern coastal regions, and where they grow much of the food. This impacts the whole food system. It also impacts the tourism industry because the water has to be turned off for hotels and hostels from time to time.Anna: Right. That’s one of the other reasons I was particularly interested in your project. I have read about the scientist, Millan Millan, how he had a hard time convincing the world that this water cycle was a major component of many climatic systems. We tend to focus just on carbon and emissions. Again, that’s our way of thinking; we tend to put things in boxes. So, we talk about the carbon cycle. It's only recently that people have begun to understand that trees make rain and that there’s a water cycle involved.Especially in Spain, where there has been significant deforestation or land use changes. This can now be attributed to the increase in drought. The tourism industry, paradoxically, uses far more water than the locals do. This makes that industry particularly sensitive to this topic.I feel there’s an opportunity here for the hotel sector, which is very dependent on having an ample supply of fresh water, to start to educate itself about what actions can be taken in the communities in which they are located to help reverse that trend. Forestation, planting trees for shelter or shade, either around their own buildings or in the community generally, is an action taken out of self-interest, as well as trying to help the community and the planet. We have a network in any community, so whichever area you are in, it’s about using that network to spread this word and get more people involved. The light is beginning to go on in many communities that everyone has an immediate responsibility to be involved in doing something. Hotels, chefs, and restaurants probably have more reason to get involved than others.Alpha: Yes, some ways they can engage include printing materials that highlight some of these aspects of regenerative water that people don't know about. In their restaurants, they could say, "We’re getting water from this kind of source," or "We’ve been working to replenish groundwater, and this is how we’re restoring the water cycles in this area." The water you’re drinking in the restaurant is a result of this process, or they’re sourcing it from these regenerative farms where the soil can absorb more rain.Anna: All of these gentle educational messages can be passed on. At the same time, hotels can get involved in local reforestation projects, for example. Many visitors now will say they want shade; they want to enjoy the landscape, but you're not going to enjoy it if you can't breathe. If it’s too hot, you’ll be indoors with the air conditioning running. In the long run, it just pays to get involved in these things, rather than sitting on the sidelines and saying, "That’s not my business." It is your business. You're in the business of welcoming guests and ensuring they have a happy and healthy time. If you do that, your business will prosper. If you do not, chances are in a few years’ time, you won’t turn the tap on and get what you want.Alpha: Yes, I saw in Sicily this year that they were turning tourists away because they had a water shortage.Anna: All of these things are becoming apparent now in these odd incidences. Just as we previously had the odd wild forest fire in various places, now we’re getting them every year in different parts of the world, sometimes more than once. They’re not isolated incidents anymore. In certain places like Florida, they have far too much of it. That’s just another side of the same coin. We do have enormous weather hazards, and these are going to disrupt some of the normal patterns of tourism. Just as people will avoid places where there’s an epidemic, they won’t go to places where they find out there’s no water.Alpha: Yes, hotels sometimes face both issues: during the dry season, there’s not enough water, and the taps get turned off, while in the wet season, they sometimes face flooding. Solving the flooding problem by planting more vegetation and improving soil to absorb the rain can actually help infiltrate and increase groundwater, which can then be useful.Anna: It’s ironic because when we talk about the economic impacts of tourism, I argue that instead of focusing on the volume of visitors and the amount of spending they generate, we should focus on the net benefit that percolates through the community—much like water—so that more people at the ground level actually benefit from that flow coming in. The models around water flow and the models around money flow are not that dissimilar. It’s a powerful metaphor. When you explain that when you have a forest, the water droplets bounce off each leaf, which slows the process down. The leaves, the humus on the forest floor, and the ground cover also slow the rate at which water goes into the soil. The amount of humus in the soil again slows it down and spreads it out. The same concept could apply to the economic impact of incoming tourist dollars. How do we ensure that also percolates throughout the community?Alpha: That’s a good way of putting it. There is an analogy here with the small water cycle, you want to increase that flow. There’s a kind of small water cycle of money, right? If the hotel is funneling or the agritourism is funneling money to other regenerative endeavors, that flows into that sphere. So that money flows not just that one time around; it can keep flowing in that regenerative sector, as opposed to flowing into more of the extractive sector.Anna: Exactly. And that's the main principle of regeneration: to create added benefit, to be generative. That's why it's called regenerative; it's to generate versus extract. Same with your water cycle; you're trying to generate more water where you need it and not keep extracting it or hoarding it or stockpiling it.Alpha: There is the sustainable sector which is about recycling and reuse, and the regenerative sector which is regenerating the soil and regenerating the small water cycle. We want to shift the amount of money from the extractive sector into the sustainability and regenerative sectors. The more we can shift that money, the more those sectors will take off.Anna: That’s what we're trying to do right now. It’s about getting people to think in terms of these different models. They need to be sensitive to the fact that they're living in a living system. You can't keep taking things out of a living system without getting into trouble because you run out of resources, and you can't keep putting poisons into a system without also getting into trouble.It's about living in harmony and balance with the natural world. To do that, you have to become much more aware than we've had to of where our food comes from, what its quality is, what the conditions under which it was produced are, how it is being processed, what’s being added to it, and where the waste is going. All of those different issues require us to become much more ecologically literate than we've ever had to in the past.Alpha: I think this whole agritourism industry also has a chance to educate people about the small water cycle aspect of regenerative water. When they come to their farms, they can show them about the soil and the various agroforestry techniques or permaculture techniques, but there's also a chance to actually talk to them about how the evapotranspiration adds to the water vapor blowing from the ocean to create rain. If we can educate a lot of these agritourism farms about this, maybe that's the way for this knowledge to also spread to their visitors.Anna: I think it's certainly a major channel that could be used. This water topic hasn't received the attention that climate change has had in terms of carbon, but it's all related. It's not just about the water cycle; it's about understanding natural cycles in total, that everything is interconnected and interrelated. There are these cycles going on. Bringing about that awareness and sensitivity is key.The one thing you can't do when you have visitors coming to a place is give heavy-duty lectures; they don't respond well to that. But there are many subtle ways in which these messages can be translated. If anyone's doing regenerative farming, they might not be as aware as a scientist, but they are certainly fully aware of managing and looking after their water supply. I suggest it would be a good topic. The hospitality sector is about sitting around a table eating food, which is one of the most relaxed environments in which to have these kinds of conversations almost spontaneously.The hospitality sector literally exists to bring people together to have those conversations. Hotels in your area could say to the local people, "We're going to have an evening just looking at our water situation. What could we be doing about this together?" Farmers, hoteliers, people who work in an office or live in a place, anyone using water could start conversing, convening, and having these difficult conversations in a setting that breaks down barriers. It doesn't become a shouting match.Alpha: So hotels themselves can be the conveners of these gatherings or awareness.Anna: Yes.Alpha: I think in the regenerative context, we don't normally think of hotels as initiating this, but they very well could be helping to initiate some of this awareness.Anna: That’s why I contacted you. I believe that completely. If they were shown how and why, there are many hoteliers already doing great things individually, but in a community, what I'm suggesting is that my message to the hospitality sector particularly is these are ways you could be making your contribution. Everyone is being asked now to step up and not just wait for someone else to solve the problem. You’re already in the business of caring and providing hospitality. You already connect people and convene meetings.This should come quite naturally to you. Food and water are essential to your business; you won't be successful unless you can provide that well to your guests. It’s in your interest to protect this source.Alpha: What are the ways to get this message out to the ecotourism industry or the hospitality sector?Anna: I don't know what kind of organization you have, but you start by doing a project in Spain and test it, working with a community there or several. Always start small and then it gets bigger. The same goes for the landscape restoration arena. That area started off small and now it's picking up enormously. People want to understand how to restore a landscape.I would fit what you're doing in that context as well. If you get too specific and focus just on water, it will be less well received. How do we help this place flourish? You're probably familiar with the work of ecosystem restoration. In Spain, there's an area called AlVelAl, which was overgrazed and very drought-stricken. Over about ten years, they’ve gradually restored vast areas, improving water and achieving much greater diversity of crops and yields.As a result, an area that was depopulating is now seeing people moving back in to restore the villages that were left empty. Even tour companies are bringing people in to see it. But it started small and must go from there. The environment is much more sympathetic to these initiatives now than it was five years ago. I think there are ways to start working with individuals who have a passion in an area and say, "Let's get this conversation going."You're not going to solve the problem immediately; it takes time, but it's better than waiting for someone else to come from Madrid with a checklist or a policy document.Alpha: Commonland is involved in the AlVelAl project. They recognize that land restoration has to happen at a large scale. They're saying at 100,000 hectares. At that scale you have an impact on the rain too.So basically, you're restoring the land to restore the rain. Commonland has a facilitation process they use to bring together multiple stakeholders: the local government, local investors, local business, local environmentalists, farmers, and residents. They connect these groups.So they're trying to do facilitate a collaborative effort instead of having one group fighting another. It's more like, let's connect first - we all want better land for the future for our kids. As they connect around that, they can say, "Hey, let's work together." Over a 20-year period, they can gradually shift from the extractive sector to the regenerative sector. Together the stakeholders make a plan that doesn’t demonize people in the extractive industry, but creates a strategic plan to help them transition.Anna: Yeah, that's right. I understand what you're saying about scale. You do need projects at a large scale, but even those large-scale projects started small. When you look at how they began, there were literally three or four younger individuals inheriting farms who were aware of different agricultural techniques. They had to persuade some very stubborn farmers who owned the land, their fathers, for example. I've seen fascinating videos that go back about 10 years. At some point, they either invited Commonland in, or Commonland saw the opportunity, but it usually starts with someone. The beautiful thing now is we have that story and many others of ecosystem restoration at scale. There are also a lot more stories of individual farmers doing things, which are becoming quite newsworthy and catching on. It doesn't always have to be big because that is the usual excuse: "I can't do anything because it's just the two or three of us." I just don't buy that anymore.If you have the skills to pull all those people together, great. But usually, something has to start before that anyway.Alpha: Yeah, I agree. It's like starting with your area or your land and working on regenerating that. Then you'll gradually find people in your region who are also working. From there, you can grow a network. I think the hotels and the tourism industry can also invest in this facilitation and community building to grow that network throughout the whole region. I believe that injection of investment money could help it move faster along that whole facilitation process.Anna: Oh, I agree. It’s a very exciting time to be around because all these different initiatives are starting to feed into each other and speed everything up.It's a sort of catalytic response, actually. I happen to be working with a landowner in Scotland who is developing his lodge for more guests. At the same time, he's sitting on a fair chunk of land that he wants to restore. A lot of it is quite wild right now, but he will be shaping his strategy around the potential for biodiversity, peatland restoration credits, woodland credits, and all the rest of it. He now sees all that as an integral whole, not just a series of separate activities. They will start benefiting each other.The visitors will want to see if the biosphere is improving, if there are more species of animals to observe, in addition to wanting fresh nutritious food from the new regenerative farmers in the valley that wasn't there before.Alpha: Costa Rica is an interesting example in Central America. In the 70s and 80s, they decided they wanted an eco-tourism model. They saved a lot more of the forest and vegetation than the surrounding countries in Central America.Anna: Yes, that was the decision of a few people who said, "As a policy, we will take care of this forest." It's not a perfect country, but they really made a significant commitment. They are very aware of the quality of the rainforest they're living in and the quality of the biosphere. They have every intention of protecting it. I think regeneration and what nature does is build the capability of all its parts to make their own contributions. Every cell in your body is regenerating right now, contributing to your sitting there—hopefully healthily—but you know what I mean.To me, that kind of thinking is what we need to spread.The other point I want to make about this, whether it’s water, soil, diversity, wildlife, or anything else, is that wherever we can show nature doing what it does best—getting healthy when we either get out of the way or help it—that's why I love ecosystem restoration projects. They give us healthier soil, better water quality, and more. But the one thing people need most right now is hope. Hope comes from seeing that change can happen.When you can see that change happens, you become hopeful, and then you're in a position to say, "Okay, I want to get involved in playing my part in that positive change because I can see I can do something." To me, that's the most important reason I do what I do. When I see people realizing they can be effective, we can make a change.Alpha: There’s an interesting project called Zero Food Print by Anthony Myint, where restaurants allow customers to offer an optional 1% extra, and that money is used for regenerative farm grants. It started in California and Colorado and has now expanded to East Asia.Anna: Yes, I remember reading about it a few years ago. We did a paper called "Host for Life," where we mentioned Anthony Myint’s project. At the time, people thought it was nice, but they didn’t quite see the relationship; it was a bit of a stretch. Now it's a very different environment. Alpha: A version of that project could work in Iberia. Some of the 1% money could be allocated to grants for regenerating the water systems, e.g. restore rivers, groundwater or rain.There could be educational materials for guests to read if they are interested, explaining why groundwater is important, because the trees need to have access to the groundwater in order to bring it up during the dry season to hydrate the environment. There are various aspects of education that can happen while we're educating the guests at the restaurants, restaurants that could be in hotels.Anna: Yes. Also a growing number of hotels are actually buying small farms so they can be confident that the vegetables they're serving are nutritious and of quality; they're organic and haven't had any chemicals on them, etc.So that's not common, but it is starting to happen. Or they're forming relationships with farmers in their local area. The more we can procure locally, the fewer travel miles, and the lower the social, economic, and environmental costs involved. We're starting to create livelihoods for people. And when I say livelihoods, it's not necessarily a top-paying job, as a business executive would have, but it's a very healthy livelihood where children can be raised in a healthy, happy environment, and people feel they're doing meaningful work. It's about thinking at that grassroots community level: what do we need here to help this place flourish? It starts with the most important part: how do we create a community of healthy people working together to make that place thrive?When I started out in this field, I didn't use the term regeneration. I worked in Flanders, and we just started asking the question, how can the tourism and hospitality sector help this community flourish?What does that look like? That had a ripple effect. It was done mostly in small to medium-sized communities and a couple of small towns, but it built and built. That program started very modestly, but it was recognized by one of the funding agencies in Europe, Lido, which awarded them for what they did, despite a very low budget.Alpha: Yeah, there needs to be a focus on building community, it's very intertwined with building the local regenerative system because if you're going to have a local water system, it requires community. The community takes care of the water and the flows.Anna: Yep, it's all about relationships. We talk about the word community, but we don't know how to create them. There are skill sets now. There is amazing work being done all over the world in inner cities, rural villages, housing estates, and apartment blocks—people pulling others together in community. The techniques and skills to do that well are being documented.There are so many books, websites, manuals, and coaching resources available now. That wasn't around when I started down this path five or ten years ago. Citizens' assemblies, for example, didn't exist five or ten years ago. Wherever they have been implemented, and we've had quite a few in Europe, they have had a hugely positive impact. Sometimes they come up with far better policies and plans. In fact, many times they are far more innovative and well-thought-out than the plans developed with extensive consultations or consulting efforts because people living in a place are best able to sense—not necessarily analyze—what that place is asking to happen.You couldn't implement the water initiative without community support. Because water flows. It's that simple.Alpha: Yes, there are various bioregional networks and projects growing these days, like Joe Brewer's, where they're trying to facilitate the local community to get to know each other while also rebuilding and regenerating their ecology. I think there’s sometimes a little tension in the tourism industry because different people come from various backgrounds and are often not aware of the local community. Part of this ecotourism is about cultural awareness of the community you are visiting and understanding the local norms, rather than creating a sort of crudeness when tourists come in.I feel like tourism is a very complex issue because it has a lot of negatives and a lot of positives. And we're trying to shift it so that there are more positives and fewer negatives. It's not black and white.Anna: Absolutely. That's the biggest challenge. It's one of the most complex phenomena on the planet.Alpha: Tourism shifts money from different places to other places. What we can do is shift tourism money so that more of it goes into regeneration of ecology and local economy.Anna: Yeah. And that means a lot more smaller businesses. Even in Europe, 98% of tourism businesses even today are small family-owned businesses. People don't realize that. They are enjoying a livelihood. They run a restaurant and they may be trying to get a high return per cover or deal with the peaks and flows, the people coming all year round, as opposed to just six months a year. All of these different issues. But most of them don't want to get so successful that they want to become the next Starbucks.They want to serve their community. They want to pass a healthy business on down to their children, those that want to inherit it. It's kind of like a farmer. A farmer is not often making lots of money. It's tough, really tough to be a farmer. Some might argue it's really tough to be a small restaurant owner as well. But what I'm saying is they're not driven to expand and multiply. They're driven to make a contribution in their community, make a healthy living. There's nothing wrong with that. It's when we start assuming that everything has to get bigger just to be successful that I think is the problem.Alpha: The hospitality sector can support small farms is by funneling guests to visit these farms. Often in the hospitality sector, there’s suggestions for guests to visit the local tourist sites or local adventures. There could be also suggestions to visit regenerative farms. Anna: Your first step would be to get to know who in your community is really trying to do the right thing by the soil. You mentioned soil at the beginning. It's trying to grow healthy food on healthy land. Just find out who they are to start with and open up conversations. Can I buy some of my produce from you? Or how might I be able to help you? It's just having those relationships and seeing the connection to start with. You don't need to take a course on this. You just need to be a human being.Alpha: Yeah. It's about getting people together. It's getting to know them and then connecting them to the tourists and the guests.Anna: That's what hospitality is. It goes back to my basic point. Hospitality is a human connection. It's not just about your service, your food, and the bed.Alpha: There could be available at hotels a menu of different local community projects that could be supported, e.g. soil projects or river restoration or groundwater replenishment projects. Some guests want to help an area flourish ecologically. They could be an options of say investing $1,000 into a groundwater replenishment project in that local community.Anna: One of the best examples of a regenerative resort, which went into being a resort with the intention of being regenerative from the beginning is in Mexico - Playa Viva. It was a glamping operation initially, but then they got a little bit more sophisticated. Then they had a project of rescuing sea turtles. Then they started a garden to grow their own food. That has just multiplied and they engaged all the people from the local villages involved in the resort. They’ve gone from that to having multiple activities and multiple little businesses that were run by the locals, all around that resort. And now it's going up into the watershed and affecting, in the nicest possible way, other communities around them. It has had this wonderful, rippling expansion effect.You've got visitors coming and saying, oh, I was so excited to sit down in the morning and spend time with Maria, who's now making jams from the fruit that's growing in the garden. I've invested in her little project, and she's keeping me informed of how it's going. It makes holidays so much more meaningingful. So everyone benefits. Alpha: That's a really nice story. In Costa Rica, the sea turtles are having problems surviving. They're affected by the degradation of the corals. The corals are being affected by the runoff from the industrial agriculture chemicals. What the community realized is that you actually have to work with the local farms that have been converting to more modern pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, to get them to go back to what they were originally doing, the organic processes, because that would lessen the runoff and lessen the coral damage, which would increase the sea turtle population again.The hospitality sector has a natural interest in restoring ecosystems, which might incentivize them to actually help the regenerative agriculture movement.Anna: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. My point is that simple actions, actually, of telling stories, and you can have a part of your hotel, or put on a little notice board in different places. The story could be of this particular person, could be a person working in the garden or a business that they have, or it could be a story about some project down on the lagoon or whatever. But just little ones bring that place to life, literally, as well as metaphorically. They're expressing what that place means to that individual.I really recommend tieing into a story about a person and their relationship with the water, with the land, with whatever it is, what they're doing, or it could be conservation. In a hotel, if you could do that about people doing things in and around you, it subtly lets visitors know a little bit more about the human pulse in this place. And they start to open their eyes and look when they're out; they might look at it differently. If a fraction of the hotels in the world did even a few of these things, you would begin to see a difference in those communities.Alpha: Yeah, I like the story aspect, kind of like spreading those stories. And then also, at Playa Viva, you said in Mexico, there's a chance to invest even in local projects. You're actually adding, you're helping grow that community and the ecology, so that's the regenerative part. It's not just minimizing the damage you're doing, but you're actively trying to contribute. Anna: Yeah. The only obstacle is lack of imagination. When people hear all of these great stories about regeneration, they all had to start somewhere. Mostly, the thing that's lacking is just imagination that, I could be doing that. Stories do infect others. My theory of change, if you want, is simply the power of infection.…..The is a reader supported publication, podcast and paradigm dileniator Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Nick Steiner’s delight in restoring the water to our lands emerges as I talk to him. He works in watershed management, his service is called PermaNick , helping landowners grow regenerative landscapes that slow and absorb more of the rain. He is a passionate advocate and speaker about the larger vision of restoring our water cycles. His home is in Canary Islands, where they only have a couple of inches of rain a year, and yet he has found a way to guide the rainfall so he can harvest it for his own use and also to hydrate the land. He’s working with Water Stories to birth the larger educational movement of training the next generation of water practitioners. There are many landowners seeking to have their land hydrated, and their is much more work than there are practitioners now. We thus need to train a lot of people to do this work, and that is what Water Stories does. If you are interested in signing up for the Water Stories educational courses you can choose to use this link here (I became an affiliate because I believe in their work) Nick has a captivating essence about him, which makes one want to become enthusiastic and do the work of digging a hole to get a tree to have more water, to have your driveway guide the water into the land. So I hope some of you reading this get inspired and start looking at how to do the work on a piece of land. There is something that grounds all this water theory - when you start going out in the rain observing how the water flows, and working the land to guide the flow of water. I had been planning on putting on a water workshop by myself before talking to him. After our interview, we got excited about putting on a workshop together. So here it is.In the workshop you will learn about the theory and practice of restoring water cycles. You will also get a chance to get to connect with others who come to the workshop, as we build a community around this work. I debated whether to charge for the workshop, and decided to make it free, with the hope that some of you will sign up for paid subscriptions to this newsletter, so it will be easier for me continue offering more workshops in the future. The workshop will be on Sun Jul 7th noon-2pm EST . At that time you can open this link on Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87354624137?pwd=5Av53IbHhI9LWVmBAvyE1gQY66u5ka.1….Here is a transcript of part of our interview, edited for brevity, clarity, and understanding:Nick Steiner InterviewAlpha: Today, I'm excited to have Nick Steiner on the podcast. Welcome, Nick. Nick: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Super excited to be here. Alpha: How did you get into this water work?Nick: So it started also pretty much 10 years ago when I when I first got got into permaculture and then got more into this whole regenerative world where I was just experimenting on really small scale with water. Then on slightly bigger water projects. I did lots of different courses that I could find, read all the books I could find. And at some point, a friend of mine, Oliver Gauthier of the Regenerative Skills podcast, he told me that he had just spoken with Zach Weiss and that he's planning on launching a course about water cycle restoration called Water Stories. I thought that's spot on what I want to be doing. I did this course in its founding round thing around two years ago. That was just completely life changing because before I was working on small projects and working indirectly with others, but I didn't quite feel ready to do this work full time. After doing the Water Stories course, I started saying, OK, now I feel kind of well-prepared to actually take on landscape projects. I started working with landowners, small projects, and bigger ones, some larger farms on the size of a few hundred hectares. That was really the kickoff point to get really serious about working with water.Now I'm also now part of the Water Stories team, the goal is to educate and have hundreds or thousands of people to work in water cycle restoration. The water cycles are so critical, we need to get them right. If its only in theory, we're not going to get far. We need the people on the ground to actually build these landscapes. And that's kind of the mission that we're on at Water StoriesAlpha : Can you say a little bit about how the Water Stories course works? Do you have a bunch of cohorts online or in person? What were some of the things you learned in that course? How long did it take? Nick: It was actually a really interesting approach because so many online courses are just videos and you just watch lots of videos and then you click a button that says, okay, I know how to do this now, but you don't really. Specifically with working with water and landscapes, you need to get your hands dirty. And that's what I loved about the course there, where it was more like you have some theory in a video format with Zach explaining concepts about water cycles, but also about all the different things you need for the kind of work. We had to complete a lot of tasks. At the beginning, it's more like, okay, we need to observe different landscapes, go out in a rainstorm, see what happens when it rains, where does the water flow? Where does it accumulate? What kind of plants are growing? We had to build small models. So build like a tiny little dam with clay and see at which consistency does the clay behave in a certain way with how well it holds water? Then we built large things.Then the final project of the course was actually working for a client. So doing a full project where you build a water retention feature. That was always supported by cohorts.We had regular calls with them where we could ask all our questions. And that way, it wasn't just watching videos, but it was also not the problem of having to be at a specific site at a specific point. And in that way, it was just getting my hands dirty, watching some videos, and then working with clients.Alpha : Was Zach your main mentor, or did you have other mentors too?Nick: I've also had the great pleasure through Climate Farmers to meet Mark Sheppard in person. I also learnt a lot from him. Also Darren Doherty, you know, they're from Regrarians. So many people I got to learn from. But I would say Zach definitely had the biggest influence since I also spent most time with him. We have many weekly calls. When I have projects, I can just always ask and get Zach’s feedback on things. Alpha: How did he design his course? Nick: Zach learned from many different people, his water heroes, as he called them. He tried to modelled the approach of working more with landscapes and reading more into them. There’s a lot of these different elements you would do on a site. You can do a Permaculture Design Course (PDC) first to learn about water. After doing just a PDC though I've never talked to anyone who felt ready yet to build proper water features, except maybe a swale. So you can do the Water Stories course after.Alpha: So I guess you learn a lot of different techniques to slow water, like terraces and ponds. When you work with a piece of land, how do you decide which features you want to do use in relation to water? Nick: The biggest part is observing the land, and ideally observing it when it rains or directly after a rainfall. Sometimes when you walk after rainfall, you see these spots that are super wet, and you see other spots that are dry, and the landscape kind of tells you like, hey, this is a good spot to hold water. Or sometimes you realize there's an area that's super dry, where it would be great to hydrate it a bit more.I also really love working with digital mapping software and analysis software for landscapes. I'm doing terrain analysis. For a farm, I get the rough outline, and then I can download kind of 3D data of how it looks. And then there's different algorithms that you can run to get an idea of when it rains, this is where the water will flow. This is the catchment size. This is where you could put potential water features. This is great to get an idea, but then in the landscape, those perfect spots, hardly ever will will they work, you know? So when you're actually out on the land, we do some test slices.We're digging down to see soil composition. Then in the perfect spot, sometimes there's no clay in spot, but you have this other spot that maybe isn't the perfect location, but there's so much clay there that it would be really easy to hold water. You know, it's so important to be out there and getting a feeling for the land. It depends on the people and what they want to achieve. So for example, if someone wants to build an agroforestry system it needs a completely different design water-wise than someone who just wants to work with pasture and have animals on there.We also have some clients where the main consideration is fire safety. So they're worried about wildfires and they want to have as much hydration as possible to build a bit of a resilience against these wildfires. Alpha: In the Water Stories course, you are actually supposed to get a client. How does that work? Because I would assume some students don't have that much business background or maybe it's a little intimidating to actually get an actual client. How did that work out for you? Nick: Yeah, it was actually quite smooth. Parts of the course is about the advocacy and speaking about water. There is a part of the course where we had to give a presentation about water cycles. It entailed organizing a little workshop for your local community. I didn't just give only one because I was really passionate about water. I gave many presentations and then people started reaching out. Also I wrote about water on LinkedIn. I'm just so passionate about water, so I'm speaking a lot about water on there, and then people started writing me. [Nick got a water design job with the Red Cross from his Linkedin writings]Almost all the students of the course who I spoke to, who gave workshops or gave presentations, had at least one person who attended the workshop who was like, Hey, I would like to work with you.You also don't need to have your first project as a massive one with, with big excavators. When I first got started, it was also just, you know, something really tiny. I said to people - If you have land and want work done, just pay what you can, you know? So I didn't say like, this is my day rate. It was more like, hey I'll come out there. We experiment together. We see what happens. That's how many people get started, who feel a bit kind of overwhelmed by having to ask people, to pay them. Alpha: I think that also makes sense when you're first starting out to be more donation based, so what they pay, because you don't know your rates and they don't know how good you are.What's the difference between Water Stories Advanced course and the Essentials course? Nick: The advanced is really the full package where you have the dedicated video materials, and also you have professional development calls with Zach and others of the team. So you can go really deep into more of the materials. You can ask your questions, you get direct feedback, and it's more of a cohort where it just happens. It just happens once a year. We just started one now. Then in the Essentials, it's self-paced. You get the videos, and you can do it at your own time. It's great for people who are busy. You have a community you are connected to. That's where lots of people ask their questions, where people get projects. Some people say I have land, does anyone want to practice on my land? Alpha: So you're building a whole network through this through this education. How did you transition to having your own PermaNick water management company. Nick: I didn't set out with the goal of having a business to do this. It was more like I was just doing it for my own on land when I was volunteering, I learned a lot through, through that, but more and more people started reaching out and said - Hey, I'm facing this problem related to water, could you help me? So I was like, yep, of course I can do that. And at the beginning I was just so in this volunteering mindset that I was just doing everything for free in the first few years.Then at some point I realized that, oh, actually I can support people with this and I'm passionate about it. So I might as well turn this into a business. Then I started getting so many requests. And I mean, all of your listeners will know, water extremes are getting more frequent, it feels like every day in the news, there's either a drought somewhere or a flood or a fire. And it's so important to be out there doing this work.I also realized that there's lots of people who can design on paper. So who can put out beautiful PDF documents, you know, like all these beautiful little farms, but we need more people to actually implement it. And specifically on the water side, I mean, everyone can kind of plant a tree, but designing a system where the tree then also survives, it's a slightly more difficult situation.I'm doing this in my free time all the time. So I'm doing the exact same things, working with water. And the only difference is sometimes I get paid for it and sometimes I don't. I can't really think of a better life.Alpha: Let's say you're working with someone with floods in the area. What do you do with those problems? Nick: The great thing about this water management approach is that floods and droughts can often be solved in the same manner. So the general pattern really stays the same. So basically we need to see, okay, where do we want water to go and where are the spots where we maybe don't want water to go and where we wanted to go to a different space. And for me, the best approach, what I would also tell everyone is go out there when it rains.And it's really obvious specifically in those areas where people have problems with too much water, specifically roads, you often see it, they have a low spot. And so what happens when it rains, the water flows to that spot. And when it's not like an asphalt road, but more like a dirt road, all the water sits there. That spot becomes muddy and you have your cars getting stuck. So we need to get into the mindset of thinking, okay, where do we want the water to go? Can we get it off the road before it hits that low spot or how can we direct it? Then also often on the farming side, we have these areas that just have too much water. So there it can sometimes be working strategically with new roads.So I love working with terraces and roads because often you need access on a farm and an access road can be a perfect tool to bring water from A to B. And when normally you would have too much water in one spot and not enough in another, if you place a road strategically and it's just inclined, just going 1%, or depending on the soil type 2%, 3%. Now, when it rains, that water won't continue flowing down into that low spot where it was causing flooding or problems, but we can actually direct it and bring it off to the site, depending on the site.Sometimes you have houses or even full villages that are built in the floodplains of rivers. That's just the normal kind of pattern in nature that rivers flood every now and then. The town or your house in that floodplain makes it much more difficult. But we can still work with a lot of infiltration. If everything is asphalt, everything is just impossible for water to get into, it will just continue flowing down until it gets to a spot where it's either a low spot or it can't continue, and that's where you get the flooding damage. So quite often, we need to start way further up and see instead of going down the road, we could infiltrate it, and we can prevent it from causing problems. It's really difficult to give like a blanket statement of what to do with a flood-prone area. But the general pattern is always the same. It's always where do we want water to go? Where don't we want water to go? How can we infiltrate it? How can we plant lots of trees, lots of different plants that turn the soil into a nice sponge that can use this water instead of it causing problems? One practical example is here where I live, fully off grid. There’s only solar energy and rainwater, I don't even have a well, which is quite challenging. Last year, throughout the whole year, we only got 80 millimeters of rain, that's less than three inches, which is really not much when you're only using rainwater. There’s a valley. The road/trail going up is at the lowest spot. So every time it rains, it turns into a bit of a river, which is a huge issue. The neighbors told me that in one year, we had a massive rain event here with with crazy rains, and some of the cars got washed away, and the road just completely disappeared. The main problem on my property is that I don't have enough water. So I built a really tiny, you could say, a speed bump. So not 90 degrees to the road, but slightly angled. And so I connected that to a bit of a basin, so to say. And now what happens is when it rains, water flows on the road, it hits that speed bump, and then goes to the side into this basin. And I connected that with a few pipes to go into the garden, where I build a network of infiltration channels, and an infiltration basin. I connected a pump with a float switch, when this whole channel and everything is full, the float switch, it just kind of goes up automatically, and the pump then pumps the water to a different spot on the property. So by building this tiny little speed bump and connecting it in a smart way, I increased my catchment from one hectare to 18 hectares. You know, it's a concrete sausage of three meter length, you know, it's nothing, and it suddenly 18 times my catchment.On the farms where we work, we can build a little bit of a terrace road, and bring water from one valley into the next onto the ridges, depending on what we want to achieve. It's crazy how much you can achieve. The roads don't get problems anymore with cars getting stuck, because we avoid having these low spots, where it gets muddy. I love it when you build these landscapes, and you look at it, and it makes so much sense. You're just thinking, oh, why didn't I think of that earlier? But you know, it often takes quite a bit of thinking to get to these simple solutions. Yeah, it's interesting with this speed bumps, it's like stacking functions. It slows the cars down, but it also has this other thing where it's redirecting water.Alpha: This reminds me of Brad Lancaster's work in Tucson, Arizona, where he's taking the water rushing down the street and guiding it into the trees that are on the sidewalk. Nick: He's been a huge inspiration for me.I think when I first got into this, his book, “Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands”, wow, I read them kind of cover to cover on a daily basis almost. Yeah, I love his work. It's so powerful to get started.Tenerife, where I'm living, is part of Spain, but an island in the Atlantic. I am also working in Portugal and Spain. The issues we are seeing is very long dry seasons, and they're getting longer and more extreme. There’s a big lack of water during the summer, usually, which could be the best growing season. But if there's no water for plants to grow, you know, they kind of go dormant and they can't really do much. And then in winter, what often happens now is that the rain events get really extreme. Many people report that in the past, you had a rain event here, a rain event there. Now what we're seeing is a very long dry period, and then these crazy rainstorms where it just all comes down within a day or two. And many of the landscapes are just not able to handle these events anymore. We've taken the vegetation away, and then what we're seeing is just crazy erosion everywhere. And then further down in the water catchment areas, we see flooding problems. I got together with Oliver Noemi, another student of the course with Zach Weiss, we're working on the Iberian Peninsula, supporting landowners there. Then the other issue is wildfires. Native vegetation has been cut down for agriculture or for other uses. Unfortunately, many people have just planted huge eucalyptus monocultures. They are kind of like matchboxes, there's so much oil in them. We're developing strategies to hydrate landscapes, and to build a bit of fire protection into their landscapes.Alpha: Zach Weiss's mentor, Sepp Holzer was saying that when we drain the landscape of water, then you're going to have a lot more wildfires. It seems like a simple equation, but it seems like people don't, when they try to prevent wildfires, think about hydrating whole landscape and the whole continent. Nick: Yeah, I mean, if anyone has ever tried to start a campfire with wet wood, you know the power of water when it comes to when it comes to vegetation. And yeah, it's so overlooked, when you have really well hydrated landscapes, they are much harder to burn. Of course, when you have these massive wildfires, they still dry out a lot. And it's not 100% guarantee. But then you can work with different strategies of having kind of like a fire belt. So having an area where you don't have any vegetation so that the fire can't jump from one space to the other. There's also different management strategies where you can keep kind of the lower layers of the forest a bit cleaner so that if a fire starts at the bottom, it can't quickly climb into the crown of frozen. There's all these strategies, but I couldn't find anything that's more powerful than just having so much moisture in the soil, so well hydrated soils that the trees are just much harder to catch, catch a fire. Alpha: If the aquifer water reaches a level of the tree roots so they can bring it up during the dry season, that's also extremely helpful. Nick: Yeah, these trees are pretty much pumps and specifically if you have trees and a nice fungal network in the soil, that's where the magic really starts. Some trees with tap roots that go really deep that get water from far down in the soil and then through the fungal network, they share it with other plants and everything is really well hydrated. We're also seeing that if you do some great work to bring water into the soil high up in the landscape, quite often lower down, springs start popping up, you know, so suddenly you have a natural spring on your property and yeah, who wouldn't want that? It's so cost-effective to just get your water right. You know, like just having a passive irrigation system by, by having a landscape that can bring water to plants, it makes a ton of sense, and you save all that money from having to repair things.One client that we're working with, has their house has now burned down twice in 20 years. So now they're like, okay, we need to work on, on the water side of things. And that for me is, is just one element, you also look at the cooling effect, like when you have the water there and you can sit in the shade of a tree, I mean, that's already amazing. That prevents a lot more of the land heating up. And then when you look on a really big scale and the, the effects of there the biotic pump, the general effect of vegetation for the whole global climate, that's where it gets super interesting. I think this is the beauty - it makes sense on a tiny scale for every person, and it also makes sense for the global climate. Alpha: Could you say a bit about how, if you own a piece of land, what can you do to, to improve the water cycle on your piece of land? Nick: One of the first steps that I would look at is go out when it rains and see where water is leaving the property. Quite often what we're observing is you have these either small or sometimes very large erosion gullies, basically these channels where water just cuts through the soil over the years, and when it rains, everything just flows there. It cuts through and then it leaves the property. Quite often you have these in relation to roads because roads were just randomly cut into the landscape and then cause even more of the erosion. So that can be a great first step to seeing that, okay, where's water leaving the property and can we somehow keep the water on the property longer? Sometimes that can be really simple, it just requires a tiny little earthen mound, just 10 centimeters, 15 centimeters can make a difference on a small property. Sometimes we can also build this much bigger, you can redo your road network and build ponds and all these kinds of things. Where do we want water and where don't we want water? How can I get water from, from A to B? Quite often it can be super simple, like just digging a tiny little trench with a shovel can make a huge difference. But you only see this if you're out there in a rainstorm, you know, so that's why I always recommend people to, to get a good coat or get an umbrella and just go out there and observe. You can also get into the whole side of gray water, so gray water from the kitchen or from the bathroom, just reusing that water can be super powerful. And that's also what I did here. One of the first things when I moved here was building a shower in the garden. From that shower, I built a bit of a mulch basin. That's kind of like a shallow pool with some wood mulch and leaves and stuff in it. I planted some trees and stuff in it. One of the trees grew almost five meters in one and a half years. I mean, it's crazy. Many people plant trees on little mounds. Then when it rains, all the water just runs away. But if you reverse that and you build a little bit of a hole, and you put some mulch into it. When you put your trees into that, the water stays in there. When it rains, it naturally irrigates the trees. Then when you have multiple of these, you can connect them.I think Brad Lancaster's books are by far the best starting point - “Rainwater harvesting for dry lands.” I'm also trying to put out a lot of like free stuff on my social media. On Instagram, and LinkedIn, lots of videos with, with instructions what people can do. I have a lot of stuff and then it really depends , some people want it more in a farming context, some in a another context, but I'm always happy when people reach out and say - Hey, this is what I need a solution for. I'm always happy to, to send, to send more links and more resources for people to find solutions. Alpha: I think we need to kind of build this grassroots movement of people doing stuff on their own land, or hiring people to do the work. There are people that wanting to hire someone to do water work on their land. I have a friend doing water work who says there's more work than he can handle like to, because there's so many people want water stuff on the land. So we need to be training more people to do this work. That’s part of the vision of Water Stories, right? To train a vast array of people to be able to do this work? Nick: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I mean, I'm observing the same. Now I have so much work. It's really difficult to plan because, you know, when we're building, we're building a larger pond or project, it takes a few weeks, but there's only so many weeks in the year we can do that. So I really need to plan. And now there's so many running projects and we definitely need more people. I can't think of anything that is a more future-proof career. Unfortunately I don't see any future where suddenly these extreme weather events are getting less. I can't really imagine a future where we don't have less, where we have less drought, less flooding, less fires. I would love to see that world, but to make that world happen, we need, as you said, thousands of people doing this kind of work. And there's so much to be done. Also for me coming from first this carbon background in agriculture, the best thing about water work is how fast you see results. You know, when you're working with carbon, it can take, you know, it can take so long, it can take years, decades for results to happen. But when you're working with water, all you need is one rain event and you can see, you can see a difference. And suddenly an area is green that was degraded before. I can't think of anything more powerful than working with water. You see the results quickly. You can bring so much life back to landscapes. So yeah, I would just advise everyone to get into it. It's just such a beautiful work. And especially places that have had big natural disasters, like huge fires or huge floods, there's actually a lot of need for this kind of work to restore the water cycle in those areas. If we have landscapes that can handle massive rain events, infiltrate into the soil, use it to grow, not just any vegetation, but also use it to grow food and then have that water available longer throughout the dry season. That just makes so much sense to me. Alpha: Do you have any final words you might want to share? Nick: For all the listeners and readers of this podcast, I think I would really love for everyone to just go out when it rains and see if they can do anything to improve how water behaves on the landscape where they are. ……This is a reader-supported publication. Paid subscriptions helps to support this regenerative water work, and get more projects happening. If you would like to sign up for the Water Stories course, I became an affiliate as I really believe in what they are doing, and you can choose to use this link. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

I asked a friend of mine what her favorite podcast was and she said Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food. I suspect it might be quite a lot of people’s favorite podcast. The groundbreaking podcast interviews a lot of the key players in the regenerative food and agriculture space - the investors, the farmers, the growers, the herders, the locals, the educators, the policy makers, the bankers, the conservationists, the food industry people, the restaurant folk, the distributors, the biologists, the ecologists, the atmospheric scientists, the hippies, the filmmakers, the regenerative water-ists, the techies, the economists, the writers, the corporate executives, the tree planters, the foundations, the startup incubators, the cryptogeeks, and the fund managers. It tells the rich tapestry of vibrant stories that intertwine to emerge this innovative space that has important implications for earth’s future.Koen van Seijen, the host of the podcast, reached out to me a year and a half ago because he was planning to explore the water cycle space with a series of podcasts, and wanted to understand more about water. He had been reading my then newer Substack newsletter, was very encouraging of my efforts, and has been very kind and helpful since then. He interviewed me for his podcast, as part of their water cycle series. I am now very happy to get a chance to interview him in return now for the Climate Water Project podcast. We discuss both investing in regenerative water and in regenerative agriculture, so I morphed his podcast name, to get the title of this essay Investing in water and regenerative agriculture.Below is about half our our conversation from the podcast, edited for brevity and clarity, with a little context added where needed.Alpha: Welcome today to Koen, who runs the podcast Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and FoodKoen: Thank you so much. Thank you for switching, having me on the other side of the mic. It's always nice to get to join other podcasts and other platforms. Alpha: Yes, you actually found me and interviewed me first on your podcast. Koen: And it was by far the most listened-to episode of last year. We went sort of viral on LinkedIn, and as much as a podcast can go viral, which is not too much, but you definitely hit a nerve with the water cycle piece, which was part of a much larger water cycle series we did. It was a lot of fun and it was a really nice conversation. Alpha: Did you get started first in investing or the whole regenerative space? Koen: Definitely the investing and entrepreneur side. I was always interested in business, and how business worked. I got very interested in renewable energy. I was definitely worried about the effects of climate change and climate weirding. I was always interested in food, but not necessarily from a solution perspective, more like, if we eat a bit better, and we pick our groceries slightly differently, then we'll be fine. But I never knew of the potential of the food sector to be part of the solution until I stumbled upon holistic grazing and discovered the potential of soil and soil carbon 13 years ago. Until then, I never paid any attention to soil. Alpha: And you started off working at an investment group Toniic, is that right? Koen: Yeah, 10 years ago, I joined Toniic, which is a group of active impact investors. They are all family offices, high net wealth individuals, and a number of foundations. They are making investments according to their values - meaning they would like to sleep at night while knowing how their money is managed. It is surprisingly difficult to invest with values. About 10 years ago I joined them, not as a member but as a staff member, because I definitely don't have the wealth to be a member of Toniic. I saw a lot of interest mostly in the energy transition, not so much in food and agriculture. Food and agriculture is such an important sector in terms of the transition and what is needed. Not only in terms of emissions, but also all the other goals we want to achieve. But back then I saw little activity. And that was surprising because I had started to see fund managers and other people talking about regenerative agriculture and food. But I didn't really see any investor action there, which led to me start recording conversations with people about putting money to work, which led to the birth of my podcast. Alpha: Can you explain what's the difference between investing and impact investing? Koen: Yes, sure. I mean, all investing is impact investing. The issue is that you most likely have a negative impact. Traditional investment world looks at risk and return. You only look at the bottom line, and you try to make an estimate of the risk, which is of course super difficult. People started to realize that a lot of their investments, which happens if you have a bank account or a pension fund etc, at work somewhere, it's probably doing things you're not really happy about. It might be funding an oil pipeline, or a weapon factory. And if you don't want that, you have to start screening, you have to start saying no to certain things, you have to actively de-list some things, like, okay, I don't want to be part of the fossil fuel economy, I don't want to be part of certain agriculture companies etc. Alpha: You have a background in storytelling too. Could you tell a story or two about an impact investor, and how they came to be doing this? Koen: I know people that come from, let's say an entrepreneurial family, maybe their great-grandfather or grandmother started a company, maybe that company was sold at some point or they started diversifying, meaning investing in real estate etc. These people grew up in wealth, knowing that they would steward that wealth at some point. They have a lot of pressure on their shoulders to not mess up, to not make any bad investments and yet also to invest with their values. Some just don't want anything to do with that life, and they go to work somewhere else completely outside the family company, because they don't want that pressure of stewarding the wealth. Some really embrace it and start wrestling with the beast, to start divesting from things they're not happy about.There is also another sort of category. These are people with first generation wealth, people who in their lifetime really quickly became rich. They maybe had an awakening moment of : I want to have a positive impact in this world. A big lever to do that is the money they manage, or the money people manage for them. How do they start getting out of stuff they're not happy about, and instead put money into regeneration, into renewable energy, into education, into places where they can have a positive impact? It is a super difficult journey because the financial sector usually optimizes for one thing and one thing only. And that's the financial return. Alpha: Can you explain who is looking for these impact investors? Koen: It could be farmers that have reached a certain scale, and want outside capital to help and/or to grow faster. Then there are funds - impact investing funds, pension funds etc that collect investments from investors. Bundled it could be 50 million, 100 million or way way more. They make investments in technology companies, maybe farmland, maybe other places. The returns will come back to the fund if they did their job well. There are also some regenerative brands coming up now, it could be technology companies that are working and measuring, or technology for fencing and grazing, that look for investors.We, in the regenerative space, should learn more about money as a tool and use it, because there's a lot of money out there, wanting to do good. I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm not saying it's easy to get to, but we can use it, we can see it as a tool, just as we see water and fire as tools. Many things are a tool for great destruction, and also for great creation. I think we need to learn how to at least talk about it, how to handle it, because the extractive side of things is really good at money, using money as a tool, and we're just not as good yet, and we miss out. There's a lot of money out there that should be doing more interesting things e.g with the soil. Alpha: When you started your podcast, who were some of the people you interviewed at first?Koen: The founders of Sustainable Land Management, which is a fund/funds that invests in organic in the US, or grazing in Australia. We interviewed Land Life Company, which was doing a lot of reforestation projects. We interviewed a wine company in Italy. It was very sporadic and not very structured at the beginning, which is seven and seven half years ago; it was whoever we thought was interesting and could get in front of our mic. Alpha: With land funds and reforestation funds, are they investing in individual farms and individual pieces of land, or did they try to more systematically invest? Koen: Until now, mainly what they do is partner with successful regenerative farmers. Let's say the land of the neighbors comes up for sale. What some of the successful land funds are doing, because usually land is very expensive, and most farmers don't have the resources to buy their neighbor’s. These funds step in to buy the land and then have some kind of agreement with the farmer to manage it, and operate it for/with them. Then they share the profit or the farmer pays a fixed rent/lease etc.I think it's absolutely fundamental we should think beyond a piece of land, even if it's a massive farm. We should start thinking at a watershed scale level and what does that mean for investing. I have not seen anybody doing that.Alpha: Investing at the farm level is good for the water because richer soil absorbs more water, and trees help with the water cycle. But, if we're thinking of the watershed that's a very interesting question, because then you are looking at how the waters from many pieces of land are feeding into the rivers, how the rivers overflow, and how the aquifers fill up. Koen: Yeah, because if you think from an investor perspective, you don't want to invest in a farm where all the neighbors are, let's say, not focusing on soil health, because it makes your investment more risky. If you could invest in a region or an area or a watershed that is progressing and regenerating as a whole, it just makes so much more sense for your individual investment as well. So the question is how do you do that, because you cannot buy a whole watershed, or I hope you can't because that would mean concentration of wealth and ownership, but how do you enable a whole watershed with funding or investment is a huge question. I don't have an answer just to be clear. I would love people if they have an answer to get in touch because I want to interview them. How do you restore the water cycle with funding? How do you help farms to regenerate faster - it’s an investment question and it's a practical question. We can finance solar panels, because we've calculated exactly what they do. There's a whole industry around financing these things. I think we have to start thinking in those terms if we want to finance trees at a large scale, if we want to finance regenerative farming at a large scale. Alpha: You might want the people in a region to self organize first, maybe for the farmers to form a collective, maybe in conjunction with the town. Then approach impact investors. Koen: Absolutely, because then you're much stronger. An individual farmer, he or she is going to be a very difficult investment one on one, but if it's a collective or a group, the risk gets lower because the risk is shared among people. When the size gets bigger it is good, because every investment has lots of costs for research and to do due diligence. The costs are pretty much the same if you do a 1 million, 10 million or 100 million investment. You get access to whole different sizes of investors and investments. It is interestingly that it is almost easier to raise 100 million sometimes than one million, which sounds completely crazy if you think about it. Alpha: In India there's something called the Water Cup where different villages compete to see who can best capture the water in the monsoon season and save it for the dry season. They reforest the areas, which has then sometimes helped bring back rain. It’s an investment because they have a prize for the villages. So at that level, you can invest in possibly bringing back rain, if you have a region that's large enough. Koen: I know this example and it almost sounds like magic, so I think what we need to do is repeat that story or those stories as many times as possible, just to get it into the ears of people, that we can bring back rain, just the simple concept that you can restore water cycles to an extent, that rain comes again regularly and abundantly, and not too much. That's knowledge that we know, we've seen those examples, or we might have talked to the people that visited those places. But if you're in a financial center in London, or in Delhi, or in Hong Kong, this may sound complete voodoo to you, it doesn't sound like it's possible to bring back the rain. We have to repeat repeat in all different ways, through great storytelling videos and podcasts, through case studies to show people this is possible. We have to make sure that people with control over wealth, at least know that we can bring back rain and rivers, because if we don't know that we just delete that proposal. There's a role there to play for everyone to keep repeating that this is possible at scale, because most people I meet have no idea. Alpha: I started out in the permaculture eco-restoration space where it’s a little more common to know about the small water cycle, and the idea that the forest evapotranspiration adds to the ocean moisture to create rain. Then I got interested in the science of it and explored what the atmospheric scientists and hydrologists were saying. I realized there were many scientists working on this. They called the small water cycle something different, they called it precipitation recycling. They were studying how forests and soil affect rain. There's lots of papers published on this. I just wrote an article about Rong Fu, a UCLA atmospheric scientists who was studying how the forest causes the onset of the rainy season to happen earlier in the Amazon, and in the Congo rainforests. Other atmospheric scientists studying precipitation recycling are Francina Dominguez, Millan Millan, Anastasia Makarieva (those three I interviewed in podcasts), and also Diego Miralles, Antonio Nobre, Eneas Salati, Paul Dirmeyer, Adam Schlosser, Kaye Brubaker, Hubert Savenije, Ruud Van der Ent, Roni Avissar, Nobelist Syukuro Manabe, Axel Kleidon, Martin Claussen, Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, Jules Charney, and many more. The climate scientists who are working on this often don’t realize there are eco and regenerative agriculture people interested in the topic of the small water cycle, and vice versa. The two camps need to talk with each other. And they need to work with marketers to spread this story. Koen: That's why it's so important what you're doing. Like, how do you first of all find all those papers, then read the papers, because it's not an easy feat, and then start translating or retelling the story in a much more accessible way. This is not common knowledge at all. This is what we need before we can get major banks to finance it. It’s like solar 30 years ago, which was also just a space technology, and not bankable at all. There were just weird hippies putting it on their houses more or less. Now it's a sector, with issues, but also with an amazing track record. It’s bankable, it's investable, and we got there because of a lot of in-between steps and a lot of work keeping track of things. I would urge anybody if you're working on the watershed level, please do good base-lining, and record as many data points as you can possibly imagine, because somebody's going to ask it for it. Okay, let's go back five or 10 years. We can learn from solar, we can learn from renewables. How do you make this investable? How do you make billions literally flow into the space to restore at scale? What are the incentives and what are the dangers? How do we prevent a lot of farmland turning into solar panels which is now an issue? How do we make sure the incentives are right. We could get a nice 4-6% return with regeneration. Those returns might be possible. Then we unlock a lot of interest. But it's step by step. It’s first getting the narrative out there, because that narrative is just not there in any major city, decision making place, or with politicians. Have you ever heard any of them talk about small water cycle? I did not yet. I hope to find somebody soon.Alpha: Water security is such a big issue in so many places. It's maybe the big issue in some places. Our food systems depend so much on the rain. Koen: Yeah we really need the rain. We can have water rights, but what if the water isn't there? For some agricultural regions it's literally about survival. Alpha: Soil feels like it suddenly exploded into the consciousness in the last decade and a half. There's some lessons that can be learned from the soil movement, for the regenerative water movement. Can you talk about what's happened in the soil sector, and who's investing in the soil movement?Koen: It's fascinating, because, 13 years ago I started following grazing first, and then went down the rabbit hole of soil. If you talked to investors then, and mentioned soil, they weren't really interested, to say the least. That has really changed over the last few years, I would say. What led to that, I think, is that very smart people started to connect a lot of dots and saw that many things, like inequality and health, ended up connecting to soil. Floods, and climate change, many of these threats, if you follow them deep enough, get to soil. Many people have come through the journey. Movies definitely help, like Kiss the ground, Common ground, and Biggest little farm. And the whole food space became more relevant.What can we take from the soil movement for the water cycle movement? Documentaries definitely. I've seen examples in Brazil, where friends of ours actually, wrote the story lines for some big telenovelas, reaching hundreds of millions of people, where the story lines is about sustainability, planting water, and agroforestry. Done in a very dramatic way of course, because it is a telenovela. Those are strategies to reach people outside our bubble. We need to be lucky to catch a wave that’s rising. At the moment there are fires, floods, droughts and people start searching for it. I think one of the reasons our conversation went semi-viral last summer was because at that moment Europe was on fire. The water cycle podcast series we did last year, which were 10 episodes, it’s the one we get by far the most comments about from people. This series pushed me down a rabbit hole and I'm still trying to climb out of it. We definitely want to repeat that because there are so many other stories to tell. Alpha: Kiss the ground was a beautiful movie about the importance of soil. Now they give grants to people who improve their soil. Kiss the ground got extra money from restaurants and then that extra money they could invest in farms to improve their soil quality. The restaurants would buy their food from those farms.Koen: I think another model like that is Zero Footprint started by Anthony Myint. They add a small fee to restaurants and use that money to to invest in compost on the farms, that is actually supplied from the restaurants. They are now moving to make that much more systemic and on a much larger scale. We just released an interview with him. Alpha: Maybe there's a similar thing you could do for water. Add a little charge on the restaurant bill if you want to improve the watershed in that area where the farm is producing food.Koen: That could also reduce potential flooding risk for your house.Alpha: You interviewed Tim Coates about flood insurance.Koen: He was one of the people that got bitten by the water cycle bug as well. When we restore soil at scale we reduce the risk of flooding downstream. He said we're going to reduce your risk of flooding by working with farmers in the watershed. The crucial piece is to restore their soils so they can absorb a lot more water. He said that's the key, don't talk about nutrients yet, don't talk about climate, don't talk about carbon, all of that is nice, but its about benefits. He said if we can prove that we can reduce the floods, we can actually finance a lot of regeneration. Alpha: So who puts up the money to do that work? Koen: It depends. It could be the insurance companies. You need to look at who's getting hurt and who's picking up the bill and then make a case to them that the bill could be lower if they invest in prevention. For example, data centers, where if the distribution centers are flooded, you can't work for a week.Look where's the pain, where can you reduce that, and if you take a small percentage of that reduction and you can finance regeneration, then off you go. Of course it's more complicated than that, you need measurement, maybe a few parties to be involved. Maybe it's local governments, as well, that have to pay out.Alpha: Going back to your story of your podcast, how did it blossom into something bigger? Koen: I wish I had a plan or a grand explanation for that but we just kept going. After a few years, we made the decision to structure it more, and started doing it every month, then twice a month, then every week, and it became a small media company. But before it was just hanging out with interesting people doing interesting things, and trying to share that story with people that have resources to make them go faster, and make as many introductions between people with resources, people looking for resources to invest, and people with knowledge. We're now at 300 episodes and I could never have imagined doing that. Alpha: What impact do you think your podcast has had on the whole regnerative ag and food space? Koen: We get quite a few emails of people that are using us, the podcast to get up to speed, to see what's happening, to see where there are big blind spots e.g. nobody's working on XYZ or water cycles. We help with the general knowledge, with sharing in the space, and to speed up connections. Alpha: Media and journalism is an important part of the whole regenerative ag and food movement. That also needs to be funded. How did you get your podcast funded? Koen: I mean, we're very lucky. In terms of business model, we didn't have one for a while, to be honest. We just made them on the side. I was editing them myself the first 40 episodes. And which is horribly painful. I don't know how you like listening to your own voice. I don't. It's not interesting to me at all. And then we hired a freelance editor and we started to professionalize a bit and we opened a Patreon account first, and then Gumroad. Basically, we allow people to support us monthly or yearly. We can send an invoice. We are perfect for companies where we can expense it as literature or as research. We're super lucky with a big group of people supporting us monthly or yearly, which covers some of our time, mostly editing, hosting, all the fixed costs we have of running it. Then we have a few foundations or family offices, which are investment funds of a family, that basically support a specific series e.g. the Water Cycles series was supported by the Nest family office in Belgium. They don't have any say in what we interview or not, but they can get their name there if they want to. That's another nice income stream. We do two series, three series per year, maybe. Let's say we do about 75 episodes and then maybe 20 or 30 are supported this way. Then we have a video course where we summarize what we've learned over the last 250 episodes when we made that course. Now we are at 300 episosdes. Let's say we summarize in 80 minutes, pretty much in video, what we've learned, what are the main topics and themes and frameworks, what we think is important, which is of course biased and personal, but we try to help people that are new to this space, to quickly get up to speed and not have to listen to 300 episodes, or read all the reports and books and things. That course is pay what you think it's worth, an idea inspired by Charles Eisenstein. And people do pay, even though you can put zero, and please put zero if you don't have the means, this is not meant to make money or to extract money, but if you have the means and you learned a lot from it, then apparently, or not apparently, people do pay for that. And that's another nice income stream. So if you put those three together - monthly supporters, sometimes supported series and a video course - that gets you to a small media company size. Alpha: And so when you got that money coming in, you were able to hire more people and grow more and do more episodes?Koen: Yeah. We've done a series actually with another voice, Emma Chow. And so we're trying to expand how to make it beyond me asking the questions, how to do more on video. We did a few filmed interviews on the land with farmers, which is way more costly, but also very interesting. The money allows us to experiment and to do more, there's so many stories to tell. I'm constantly feeling I am running behind if I look at the production list of conversations we want to record. Alpha: Let's say you're a regenerative farmer, and you needed some investment money for your farm, who should you go see? Koen: Maybe Sustainable Land Management. They would buy, or they might help buy land next door to expand. Could be Mad Agriculture in the US, it really depends. It could be some banks that provide flexible capital. We just interviewed Agroforestry Partners. If you want to transition to agroforestry, they can provide the financing for that. Alpha: I think its good to have transition finance model because your farm may lose money for a while while you're transitioning to agroforestry.Koen: Yeah, if a chestnut takes six, seven years and then stays there for 50, that shouldn't be scary, that should just be a finance question. Okay, what do you need to not have an income for five or six years if that's the case? If you structure it like that, okay, that's something you can calculate. Just as we see with solar panels, they cost a lot of operational cost to install, but then they last for 30, 40, 50 years. Alpha: Thank you very much, I really appreciate you coming on this podcast.Koen: Thank you so much for the amazing work, I deeply enjoyed the conversation and also the Substack articles that you write.……..Here are the lists of soil building funds, Investing in regenerative agriculture and food made. Here and here………………………………… Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

There is a stone in stone bridges - called a keystone - which if we removed, causes the whole bridge to collapse. Keystone species are species which when removed from ecosystems cause things to fall apart. Sea otters are a keystone species. When they leave an area, kelp forests get decimated. That’s because the sea otters are no longer keeping in check the population of sea urchins, which will multiply to eat the whole kelp forest. Restoration of the kelp forest can transpire by bringing back sea otters. Beavers are a keystone species that have played an outsize role in the development of the landscapes and ecosystems of North America and Europe. The removal of them from our continents led to the Great Drying ( a term coined by the geomorphologist and beaver researcher Ellen Wohl) that extended from 1600 to 1900. When I connected with Leila Philip, author of Beaverland - How one weird rodent made America, she bubbled with enthusiasm talking about the importance of beavers to our ecosystems. She writes in her book “When the glaciers of the last ice age melted.. the modern ancestors of today’s beavers wet at it, felling trees and building dams throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. In North America, beaver dams, ponds, and waterworks established hydraulic systems that created much of the rich biodiversity of the continent. That was the primordial Beaverland - North America before European colonizatio, when as many as four hundred million beavers filled the continent….. The great boreal forests that sprang up, threaded with beaver made waterways, would have looked something like what I see now- half water-world- streams spreading out through the forest as great fans of water, overspilling banks, then receding in rhythm with the seasons. Unlike the streams and rivers we know today, mostly degraded so that their currents carve channels through the earth, picking up speed and causing more erosion as they cut deeper into the groun, these messy, slower-moving streams and rivers from the time of Beaverland contracted and expanded like tides, they were arteries and veins of water pulsing life into the land”Paddling in the waters, gnawing trees, placing sticks in the river, this furry creature was unaware that it was altering the living systems on our continents. The beaver did not set out to rewrite our ecosystem, they were just working to create a home for themselves. But local interactions can have large consequences. One of the fundamental insights that have come out of complexity science in recent years is that as you shift of a few rules, make a few tweaks, the whole system can behave in radically different ways. The beaver is that tweak that changes our ecosystems.Leila Philips writes “Scientists call beavers ‘ecosystem engineers’ meaning they create new habitats, new ecosystems when they build their ponds. The dead trees that now ring the marshy edge of the swamp bring nuthatches, woodpeckers, and other species of birds that feed on the insects in the rotten wood. Great blue herons stalk the shadows and red-winged blackbirds heraid in the trees. In the highest points osprey nest. Meanwhile, the life forms in the water itself increase exponentially. Wetlands are a soup of life, each teaspoonful containing millions of organisms. Water from beaver-altered streams and wetlands has been measured to contain fifteen times more plankton and other microbial life than wetlands without beavers. Zooplankton in particular love the nutrients provided by the beaver poop.”The importance of bringing back keystone species has been increasingly utilized by the ecorestoration and rewilding movements. In our time of multiple water crises, we would do well to integrate beavers into our water strategy for North America and Europe. Leila Philip writes “we could use beavers to help again to help our water problems.. if we were smart enough - if we were humble and open enough.” The beavers help rehydrate the land, and they help mitigate floods. In the Chesapeake Bay beavers build, for free, stormwater management ponds that that would otherwise cost one to two million dollars, ponds that help extract the pollutants out of the water. Beavers also help stop wildfire. The researchers Emily Fairfax and Andrew Whittle have shown the land is much less affected by wildfires where beavers make dams compared to beaverless areas. [Fairfax 2020]. Here is some of the conversation between Leila Philip and I, edited for clarity and brevity. (If you want to know about the inner life of beavers, that’s in audio form only - go to 57:36 min mark in the podcast)BEAVERLANDLeila Philip: Writing Beaverland was like many book projects, a kind of fever dream that just wasn't over till it was over. I would spend six years on Beaverland because I just became so fascinated by beavers and all I was learning, and I had so much fun writing it. I teach writing at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. I give this writing exercise to my students and say, what keeps you up at night? What are the stories you urgently feel you need to tell? It's a way of kind of helping them connect with what's important to them. I always do the assignments with my students and I kept finding that I was saying the environment, back in 2012. I was desperately worried about climate change. So I thought, well, I have to really kind of think about this and I really shifted all my teaching into environmental studies and helped my college found a program in it. I started writing a column for the Boston Globe. My beat was environment politics and culture. I met my beavers by accident. I met these beavers and that was it. I was taking a walk with the woods with my dog, as I did twice a day, as a break from writing at my desk, and I was walking in the woods, and I heard this bam, and I didn't know what it was. I literally thought maybe a gun had gone off, and I looked to where my dog was looking and there was this small brown head swimming through the water. It was crazy because just a few days before that had been a brown swampy area with no water. Suddenly it was full of water. There was this small head swimming back and forth and bam, the beaver slammed her tail again. I was just hooked. I mean, the tenacity of this animal. She was telling me to get lost. And I would go down every day and watch this growing pond and this beaver. I swear she was watching me just as much as I was watching her and it just became the anchor of my days. It was incredible the transformation of this wetland. You know, now that I understand the science, it really still makes my hair stand on end to think about what was happening. I live in Woodstock, Connecticut - a pretty much environmentally devastated part of the country early on. But now here's this beaver that is basically restoring the wetland here. Pretty soon wildlife was coming back. By the end, the gorgeous pond spread almost a half mile long. Here in the northeast in our woodland areas, if there are some woods around, beavers can build a dam in two or three days, and start the process of ponding. Two beavers had within a week, felled a tree and built up a pretty good size dam in a pinch point where the stream went through a narrow area. They had built it along a existing stone wall. I now understand that the swampy area I thought was just a kind of nothing burger is actually a historic beaver meadow. HistoryThere actually would have been beavers there going back hundreds of years, if not thousands throughout the Holocene, because that small stream is part of a river network. Beavers will move into a stream network, build a dam, swell it into a pond, and then build more dams. After a certain period of time they'll move on and then the dam will break down, the pond will release its water, and around it will grow up shrubs. Eventually it grows back into a forest. It turns out that this is incredibly important for the forest ecology, plant ecology, as well as the ecology of the river system. The subtitle of my book is How one weird road made America. It's not an exaggeration to say they made America. They jump-started our first economies. They jump-started transatlantic trade. Beaver pelt had a markup of something like 900% if you could get it to London. You can imagine how quickly people were greedy for this. By 1900 the beaver were pretty much wiped out throughout North America. But what was even more incredible to me to learn was the way beavers literally shaped the river systems, the geography and the watersheds of North America. That just blew my mind that we actually trapped them out. Geologists call 1600 to 1900 the Great Drying. It was the first environmental devastation on North America that was perpetuated by Euro Americans by colonization. That was the first big hit to the river system that would really impact the water web and the water cycle here. Then would come timbering and other industries and infrastructure, but the first big hit was the fur trade.RestorationIt's also really exciting that they are now also one of our greatest conservation comeback stories. We now have beavers back, and they're being harnessed throughout the country as part of nature based restoration programs. That, to me, is such an exciting, wonderful story that needs to be told. [Diagram from Colorado Riparian Association]Everywhere there's a beaver out in the watershed doing its beaver work, the river is being restored. We'd be a lot better off the more we can support beavers, create habitat for them, coexist with them. We've had really bad flooding in the East last summer. What was interesting was areas of my dirt road were completely flooded where there were not beavers, but the places where there were beavers, beavers that the town wanted to trap but they hadn't gotten to it yet, those places held the water. That's because those wetlands were sponges; they were managing the water. What's maybe even more significant in terms of ecology and river health is underneath that visible basin is a sponge of water that's holding at least three times as much water as the basin of water you can see. The math of how much water is being held in the river system by beaver ponds gets big really fast. Beavers never build one dam and one pond. They'll build a series - almost like a series of terraced rice fields along a creek or a stream. Imagine a string and then beads along it. Each of those beads is a visible basin of water that’s ready to rehydrate the stream system if you get a drought. It's ready to soak up water if you've got a scalding rain event. It's drought protection. It's wildfire protection. It's flood mitigation. These sponges also serve as big, coffee filters. As the water is slowed down in this sponge, it can sink down into the aquifer. And as it sinks down, it's cleanses pollutants like nitrogen and phosphorus, things that we really need to get out of the water system. It also cleanses sediment. Out in places like California, they're restocking beavers up into the watershed, because when wildfires go through these beaver wetlands, the wetlands do an incredible job cleansing the water of ash.There's a really robust rewilding program of beavers going on in Europe and in the UK. It's really fun to watch. The EU had said that the restoration of riparian borders around rivers was an important priority because they're having so much problem with flooding. Pretty quickly people realized having beavers in the equation was going to be important. In North America, the estimate is that from 60 to 400 million beavers once filled the continent. Voyages National Park, in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, has got the highest density of beavers left in the United States. The beavers have been allowed to rebound without human pressure and now the entire park is covered with beaver lodges. In Canada, beavers are in a lot of the big lakes there.Rivers and biologyΑ paradigm shift, as I understand it, is happening in river science. Up until now, river scientists have focused on the physics of how water moves through a river, they hadn't thought as much about the biology of the river. Beavers are a part of that biology. They're a big part of what slows the water down. I was just out in Oregon last week looking at a site on the Mackenzie River, where the Forest Service has literally put 4,000 logs into a valley area to try to give the valley back to the river. Once that water is slowed down enough, beavers can move in and further help with that slowing process. When the rivers are moving so fast the beavers can't thrive there yet. We saw one beaver lodge where they had started the restoration. The upticks in a matter of months of endangered Chinook salmon are just incredible in a matter of months. The restoration efforts that come with a change in thinking are very exciting.Alpha: I think that's a really big deal because when we first learn about rivers, we are just taught that it's the rain coming down and it's carving out the soil and the landscape, then the river bends and it goes to the sea. But really, the beavers, hundreds of millions of them, they're in all the river systems, they're changing the river shape, the ponds and the wetlands, the flows in the flood plain. It's not a small thing. This is an integral part of the whole North American landscape that the beavers have changed. We can't just think of it as just water moving through the landscape. We have to couple the beaver with the river. That equation is how we understand the whole water system. Leila Philip: Yeah, in Beaverland, I really set out to show how beavers are central to the health of the river network, and that we need to think about it as a vast circulatory system that pulses water through the continent. Beavers create this rhythm of ponds and wetlands and beaver meadows. And it's not just these structures that we see. There’s a lot of that's happening under the ground where we can't see it. Water goes underground and then comes back up. These wetlands and ponds allows the water also to seep down underground and go into the aquifers. This allows the streams to keep running. Tree roots will bring up that water. The waters may be hidden, but because it can be brought up, it can help retard fires.In the hyporheic zone, is this kind of shadow river that runs underneath the river system underneath every creek or stream, where there are all kinds of microorganisms and geochemical processes. There's another slower flow that's going through the soil. It can be it can extend as as deep as 30 feet underneath the river depending on the structure of the soil is. I'm interested in the different organisms that depend on that. I think we are at a new frontier of understanding here. In the same way how we recently increased our understanding of mycorrhizae fungal networks, I think we're going to understand that there is a lot more going on in terms of the microorganisms and the connectivity of soil and water. We can reconnect these rivers, we can give the land back to the river.A light bulb moment for me was tromping around with Dr. Berkstead, that wonderful geomorphologist in the White Mountains. I kept saying “Where's the river?” and she said “Look down, it's under your feet.” I would see water moving through the grass, like a flowing meadow. She said “That's the river system.” Indigenous stories and nature based restorationIn many ways we would be well to go back to some of the teachings in North America, that have been on this continent a long time. The Great Beaver story is an example of that, which is why I wanted to open the book with that. I weave through a lot of indigenous ecological knowledge - the Great Beaver story is about the dangers of hoarding resources, basically. There are a lot of Algonquian stories about the dangers of hoarding resources. The Algonquian peoples lived up and down the Atlantic Seaboard. There are Great Beaver stories throughout North America. They are different Great Beaver stories in the arid high plains where the Black Feet were. They all revered the beaver as a teacher and a protector. If you take beavers out of the ecology, everything starts to fall apart. It’s not just what the beaver can do for us, but what we need to do for the beaver. Alpha : Nature-based restoration is a movement now. What role do beavers play in the movement? Leila Philip: I think state by state it varies. Out west, California is using them for watershed resiliency. California has a statewide beaver working group. And interestingly, they trans-located or restocked beavers back into the watershed for the first time in 75 years. California is a great example of a state which mismanaged beavers for many years, but then did a dramatic U-turn in 2023. From the top down - Governor Newsom. There were many people who have been working very hard throughout the state. Indigenous tribes and communities had been trying to get beavers back for a while, but until the state said, okay, this is our priority, there were a lot of impediments. Alpha : I interviewed Brock Dolman on this show and he played a role in that. Leila Philips : Yes. And Kate Lundquist [a colleague of Brock Dolman]. And the Maidu Summit Consortium and the Tulay tribes. Seven beavers went back into Maidu Historic, Maidu Mountain Lands, and they're doing well. And this summer beavers are going into the Tulay tribe lands and their other sites. They've done the prep work for them. Beavers are going back - as part of wildfire mitigation, watershed resiliency, water cleansing, and slowing the water down. There is money for coexistence strategies. There's $2 million in the state budget. If you or I had beavers flooding our town roads, we could go to the state and say, help us with some funding, so we can keep the beavers for biodiversity and all the benefits. We're going to put pond levelers in or flow devices to lessen the flooding, so that we can keep the beavers here and we don't have to trap them out, which had been the default. Oregon has a similar $1.5 million for coexistence strategies. They're changing the legislation, they removed them from the predator list. Washington has a similar kind of bill in the legislation now called the dams act, supported by 80 organizations and tribes. Money for non-lethal responses to beavers. Here in the East, state by state, there's a lot of coexistence work going on. The Beaver Institute in Northampton, Massachusetts has national working groups. They have a goal of a beaver help hotline so that from anywhere in the country, if you have a beaver problem, you can call this hotline and say help, beavers are flooding my road. Interestingly, quite a number of fur trappers are engaged in this. They're using their knowledge base to help in non-lethal ways.Dams, evolution, biodiversityAlpha: Why do beavers build dams? Leila Philip: I think nobody really knows why they started, which is kind of a fun evolutionary, biology question. They live off aquatic vegetation. It's a myth that they need to keep cutting down trees to eat. They do survive at times of the year on the underlying bark, the cambium, but they don't get much protein from that. They basically like to eat shrubby things along the shore, aspen, willows and aquatic vegetation. They eat a lot of aquatic vegetation. It varies region to region where they live out west. They'll eat a lot of cottonwood here. They'll eat wild blueberry, water lily tubers, cat tails and then all kinds of duckweed.They're pretty awkward on land, so they need water to survive to get away from predators. They are very vulnerable to being a coyote snack or a wolf snack on land. I have three wildlife cameras up on the beavers I'm watching here and I've been pretty shocked to see who is stalking them at night. Bears and bobcat. A lot of animals would like to eat beaver. So the beavers slowed down the water, and created these ponds and beaver lodges to avoid predators. This is the reason they proliferated to hundreds of millions in the North American continent.Wherever there are beaver wetlands, there's a huge explosion of salmon. They're being used for salmon restoration programs out in the Northwest, led by indigenous tribes. In the Mackenzie River they saw an uptick right away in endangered Chinook egg spawning, and saw a big appearance for the first time in years of bullhead trout. Beavers are used, not just for hydrology, but for biodiversity and to bring back different kinds of species that are on different lists, amphibians, fish, and different birds here. Beavers are a keystone species. Beavers are also important for the plant ecology because there are certain types of trees that need disruption in order to germinate, and the forest needs disruption to have more variety and heterogeneity. Beavers will come in and create a pond which kills an area of the forest. But then when it grows back, different types of trees grow. You don’t get monoculture.Title and subtitleAlpha: How did you come about the title of your book - Beaverland? Leila Philip: The title came from Herb Sabansky, that fur trapper that I went out with in the swamps here. I was practically up to my waist in water, while he was standing on a beaver lodge and he just looked around and said, with so much joy in his voice - “This is Beaverland.” I was, I don't know what he's talking about, but that's kind of cool. I wrote it down. Then later I thought, North America was Beaverland. In many ways, it still could be Beaverland. That's got to be the title of the book. There's a funny kind of story about the subtitle, How one weird road made America , because I was pretty committed to that subtitle. Alpha: It's a catchy subtitle. Leila Philip: Well, some people are like, what are you talking about? You can't call Beavers weird. That's so disrespectful. And I said, you know, we could use a little humor around here. And once you read the book, you'll get it. I wanted this to be a story that could have some humor that didn't avoid the darkness, because, you know, we really devastated the environment here. The indigenous peoples here really suffered in colonization. But at the same time, you know, beavers show us a way forward that really can be out.The Black Feet understood grass ecology, they understood the hydrology. They relied upon the bison which relied upon the grass and they understood that beavers were critical to the river system, which the grass needed, which the bison needed. So it would be foolish to hunt beavers. These stories of the Great Beaver have a lot of profound understanding of ecology and science. These are some of the oldest stories of the continent. Alpha : I don't think we give an important enough role to the beaver since they influenced so much of the geography and vegetation of the continent. Leila Philip: It raises an interesting question about why, because here in the United States, we like symbols like the bison and the eagle, because I think they fit this American vision of big and strong and empire building. But beavers don't really fit that. Once I had learned everything I'd learned about beavers, I thought, you know, they are much more important than eagles. And just as important as bison. But nobody really wants to own them. So that's partly why the subtitle of the book is How one weird rodent made America because I was just going to say, no, you have to face the fact that it was all about beavers. And they're 36 inches tall, they have four ever growing orange teeth and a big tail, and they're a rodent. That's your history. And it's a good history. Plus they’re cooperative.There's this hilarious story about beavers, if I may, where in winter, there was this outfit where they had a camera in a beaver lodge. Some muskrat showed up and beavers don't particularly like muskrats. They live in the same pond without strife, but they are not particularly fond of them. The muskrat wanted to move into the beaver lodge and the beavers were kind of trying to get it to go away. But muskrat was like, here I am, it's cold out there. It had its straw with it and everything. And so the beavers built a wall and the muskrat just stayed there all winter. I just thought that's really classic beaver. You know, just find a way, and work it out. That doesn't fit a lot of our American psychology. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Beavers and the small water cycleThose of you who have been following this newsletter for a while know that the small water cycle, aka precipitation-cycling, the water cycle from land to air to land, has been one of the central themes that’s threaded through a lot of these essays. As I was writing this essay, I started thinking about the extra trillions of gallons of freshwater the beavers once helped create on our continents. Some of that water evapotanspired to create more rain downwind on the continent. When we removed beavers from our ecosystem this led to a reduction of the small water cycle. The Great Drying also caused the land to heat up, which in turn affected the circulation of the atmosphere. How the circulation gets affected is complex, because wind is complex. I’m still figuring out this part out. The heating up of the land causes air to rise, which creates a low pressure system, that then draws in winds. I think different climate models will simulate somewhat different wind patterns that result from land cover changes. And I think different atmospheric scientists have different opinions on this. Those wind patterns then affect moisture flow and rain patterns. In certain geographies and climates the heating of the land will cause winds to be drawn in from the ocean, and thus it will lead to more ocean based rain e.g. the heating of the Tibetan plateau causes the drawing in of ocean monsoons earlier [Duan 2020]. So the drying of our continents could mean more extreme hydrological events - with less small, regular rain coming from the small water cycle, and more big rains coming from the ocean. Counteracting this, bringing back beavers might thus increase small and medium rain in North America, while decreasing larger rains [This is a phenomena it would be interesting run a climate simulation on, if some scientist wants to try.]……I really enjoyed this sojourn into the world of the beaver with Leila Philip. Her website is Leilaphilip.com . Here’s to the beaver!Here are two of my previous articles about slow water , “Slowing our waters - an interview with Erica Gies”, “Beavers, biology, and slow water: Brock Dolman”, and “Slow water”. Beavers can play a key role in the slow water movement that Erica Gies and Brock Dolman suggest.If you would like to support this newsletter, you can share this newsletter, and/or become a paid subscriber.ReferencesDuan, A., Hu, D., Hu, W., & Zhang, P. (2020). Precursor effect of the Tibetan Plateau heating anomaly on the seasonal march of the East Asian summer monsoon precipitation. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 125, e2020JD032948. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JD032948Fairfax, Emily, and Andrew Whittle. "Smokey the Beaver: beaver‐dammed riparian corridors stay green during wildfire throughout the western United States." Ecological Applications 30, no. 8 (2020): e02225 Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Maladaptation. That is the word Stephen Robert Miller used to frame the essence of the issue - the problem that sometimes besets modern infrastructural approaches to water shortages, drought, floods, tsunamis, and cyclones. I looked up the definition of the word in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary - “a poor or inadequate adaptation”. The dictionary gives current examples of how the word has used been used in the literature, and to my surprise, this was the use -“Experts call this phenomenon maladaptation. — Stephen Robert Miller, Discover Magazine, 16 Dec. 2022”Miller’s usage of the word has achieved a minor fame - the sentence plucked from his article “When Climate Adaptation Backfires” in Discover Magazine.The subtitle of the article is “In the scramble to combat climate change, so-called solutions can cause more harm. An IPCC 2022 report warns of these maladaptations.” The article continues “Around the world, people are building levees, shoring up dams, digging canals and constructing infrastructure to confront the impacts of climate change. Most of these investments will likely save countless lives and protect property, but some will inadvertently add to the problems they are trying to address. Experts call this phenomenon maladaptation. It generally refers to a protection effort against the impacts of climate change that backfires and increases vulnerabilities. For years, maladaptation was given short shrift as research and policy prioritized mitigating climate change by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions….. One of the most insidious aspects of maladaptation is the false sense of security it gives.”Stephen Miller grew up in the desert of Arizona, with its 12 inches of yearly rain, desert scrub, expansive horizons, and searing heat, and there became interested in the question of water. He worked as a freelance journalist, writing about the Arizonan water situation - the high water usage of farms, the draining of the groundwater, the American Indian water response - for magazines like National Geographic and Mother Jones. These articles eventually led to his book Over the Seawall. In the book he also expanded his scope, and looked, in addition, at the water situation in Japan and Bangladesh. He wrote about the history of Arizona: “In settling the Phoenix valley, Anglo farmers set the tone for a century of unbridled growth. They expanded until the local Gila and Salt rivers could no longer sustain them. Then they built dams to power pumps that pulled groundwater from great depths. When that wasn’t enough, they turned their sights to the Colorado River. They hashed out rules for sharing its water, and, finally, they carved a grand canal—the largest public works project of its time—to the heart of the desert. With this final infrastructural triumph, Arizonans celebrated their control over nature, but really, they had kicked the can on facing the precarity of their existence. We now stand where the can landed, and the stakes have never been higher.”For many years it was debated about whether to pursue the crazy plan to divert water from the Colorado River to Phoenix and Tucson three hundred plus miles away, pumping uphill nearly 500 billion gallons of water a year. And then it got built. It ostensibly seemed to solve the water crisis. But the burden had shifted, semi-unconsciously, to the Colorado River. With the center of the crisis not so directly in the state’s face, Arizona continued its population push. Data centers moved there, with their heavy usage of water (with it going to get a lot worse with the advent of AI), lured by cheap tax breaks and cheap land. Multiple state aided businesses drew in more people. Agriculture continued their intensive water use, with its acres and acres of cotton and hay production. Lessening snowpack and global warming has decreased the Colorado river by 10 trillion gallons since 2000. Scientists predict the river could shrink by as much as 31% by 2050. Lake Mead, the reservoir along the river, has a bathtub ring, where its waters have drained. There are seven states overdrawing water. Many call the situation a slow moving disaster. There is a significant risk that the seven states, which are already currently scrambling, could have critically low levels of water before 2030. Huge political water right fights loom ahead. The federal government have been asking states to significantly reduce water consumption to avoid a catastrophic collapse of the river.All the diverted water means the river dwindles significantly on its way to the Gulf of California, so that river banks downstream no longer overflow in wet season - which means the land next to the river is less lush, and initiates less precipitation recycling that blows back inland into the US. The last 100 miles of the river before it reaches the Gulf of California, now just a thin thread of its former self, was once 10 miles wide, with beavers, jaguars, and coyotes wandering the flourishing riparian landscape.The rush of people to Arizona whilst the Colorado River crisis worsened, was as one writer put it “it’s giving a case of whisky to an alcoholic by bringing water into Arizona”. To Stephen Miller, the building of the aqueduct is emblematic of humans not thinking things through thoroughly. He says “Maladaptive infrastructure has taken high frequency, low consequence disasters and turned them into low frequency, high consequence disasters…. We have a history of doing insane things, or building things that at one point seemed impossible. You can think of it as testament to our engineering and technological prowess, but its also a testament to our short-sightedness.” Erica Gies, a fellow writer, and friend of Stephen Miller, (previously interviewed in this newsletter/podcast), referred to the reservoir effect, which is the effect that as reservoirs and aqueducts are built in a location, humans will continually move that location, increasing their water usage to a point which again threatens water scarcity.When I asked Stephen how he came to understand the problem in Arizona, he said he first had to see examples of maladaptation in Japan and Bangladesh. In Arizona he was too close to the situation to really fully grasp the issue with the normative culture.He travelled to Japan where he interviewed the people there. His findings about the water situation appear in his book “Over the Seawall”. To deal with the earthquake-generated tsunamis in Japan, seawalls and levees have been built - to ostensibly block them. However, tsunamis, which have had extreme sizes in centuries past, will sometimes get so big they will still go over the seawall. The problem arises when people feel a false sense of security because a sea wall has been built, and are thus less likely to run when there is a tsunami warning. They then get caught as the waters pours over the seawall. Places with new sea walls have larger death tolls. The walls were maladaptations. People would say “The infrastructure is blocking our view of the risk.” He journeyed to Bangladesh, a country with 140 million people living in a place the size of Ohio, and gathered stories. The Bangladesh government had built levees to deal the constantly overflowing of the river, and the flooding of villages and farms. As a result sediment could not flow to the farmlands, and would instead build up in the river beds, with the result that the rivers were soon five feet above the adjacent land. Despite the levees, when particularly large rains would happen, the rivers would still overflow anyways. (The geophysicist Donald Turcotte found that rivers have a power law scale of flooding, and so no matter how big your levee there is still a statistical chance it will breach [Turcotte 1994]). The levees were a maladaptation. The waters would be stuck after flowing over the levees, unable to recede to the sea, and keep the land flooded. To deal with this problem the local people began to cut holes in the levees to let the water run back out. The government initially sent in the military to stop this, but then researchers lobbied government to study the situation. The scientists found that the holes in levees were actually a good solution - they allowed high river flow states to spread the sediment and its nutrients onto the land, and simultaneously naturally dredge the river. Excess waters could then flow back out afterwards. The researchers called this tidal river management. Others called it indigenous ways.Ours is a history of terraforming earth, of creating a world for which we want to live in, of contouring its resources to the way we want it. We build our structures, our dams, our levees, our sea walls, our aqueducts, and our chemical water treatment plants. And so we can go on living in this world, guiding and manipulating the water. But water is complex, multidimensional, expressing its own rhythms and rhymes, moving in surges and ways that do not always correspond to what we expect. And as Erica Gies’s book title proclaims ‘Water always wins’. Stephen Miller has some ideas for how we could work with water better. He suggests we should be removing the tax incentives that encourage people to move to Arizonan desert, and to shift agricultural incentives away from water-intensive cotton and hay to more water-frugal and native crops. And he shares Oxford climate researcher Lisa Schipper’s view (in his Discover article) - “Avoiding maladaptation requires a holistic approach and a long list of malleable strategies that allow us to alter course as needed.”…The title picture is a photo of the Arizona aqueduct as it snakes its way across the Arizonan desert.Stephen Robert Miller’s website is https://stephenrobertmiller.com/ . ..This is a reader supported publication. Your contributions are very helpful.ReferencesTurcotte, Donald L. "Fractal theory and the estimation of extreme floods." Journal of research of the national institute of standards and technology 99, no. 4 (1994): 377 Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Growing up, Erica Gies swam outdoors, and grew to love the wildness of water. As a journalist for the the New York Times, working on the renewable energy beat, she wrote two articles about the nexus of energy issues and water, that pivoted her focus, and got her hooked on writing about the topic of water.She began investigating the perils of the our current infrastructural approaches to water, looking at how ‘grey infrastructures’ often exacerbate the problems, like floods and droughts, that they are trying to solve. She also started exploring the benefits of ‘green infrastructure’, nature-based solutions for water. Levees, a form of grey infrastructure built to stop floods, can also have the unintended consequence of faster rivers, more flooding downstream of the levee, and bigger floods when the levees finally do break. Restoring our floodplains is a nature-based solution that provides better protection against floods, and also has positive ripple effects for the whole water cycle. These nature based solutions are beginning to be implemented in places like Seattle, where the utility company has been buying back land from homeowners properties which have flooded, and turning that land back into floodplains, and in places like just outside of Sacramento, where the Yolo bypass has been turned into a part time farmland, and a part time floodplain, that the rivers can overflow into when big rains hit California.Dams are a form of grey infrastructure that are not necessarily as good at providing water for society as we may think. It also has unintended consequences. Erica Gies cites a research study which shows that while dams provide more water for 20% of the worlds population, they also lead to less water for 24% of the world’s population. She talks about the Reservoir Effect, which is the phenomena where as more water is provided for a location, more people and businesses move there, which then creates more water needs there. That keeps those areas in perpetual worry around water scarcity issues. The transport of water from dams can also be very energy intensive - California spends a fifth of its state’s energy moving and cleansing water. Relocalizing our society is a more natural solution to water scarcity issues. For instance, instead of piping in so much water to Central Valley, California, which currently produces a significant amount of food for the whole USA, we can have places like the Midwest, which naturally has a lot more water, produce more of its own food. We can also work to restore some of the natural hydration that Central Valley originally had.Erica Gies speaks of some of the underlying causes of wildfires not discussed as much by the media. One cause is that logging means less moisture is held in the land, which means less evapotranspiration to cool the land, which means hotter lands and more wildfires. A second cause is that the draining 87% of the world’s wetlands means there is less water to stop fires. It also means less water is funnelled into aquifers, which means less groundwater can be brought up by trees in the dry season to hydrate the landscape. A third cause is that the clearing our forests of undergrowth and dead wood can sometimes conterintuitively lead to more wildfire. This is because the undergrowth, the dead logs, and the rich soil, hold a lot of moisture that protect the forest against fires - this according to a study Erica Gies cites. (I heard recently a leading atmospheric scientist discuss how wildfires are happening at a much higher rate than their climate models would predict. This may be because they are not including some of the above causes into their climate models.) Restoring our wetlands, replenishing our aquifers, lessening logging, regrowing polyculture forests rather than monoculture forests, and bringing back beavers, are some of the nature-based solutions to preventing wildfire.With her talent to cogently elucidate, Erica Gies has been writing about water for magazines and newspapers like Scientific American, National Geographic, Nature, and the Guardian. In 2022 her book “Water always wins” came out, which looks at water problems and solutions in places like Chennai, Mekong, California, Iowa, Kenya, Peru and China. It’s a panoramic book that gives us a sense of the state of water on planet earth, and what we can do to move forward in a healthy way. The book has been garnering many accolades, including the Rachel Carson award from the Sierra Club. Here’s what the Times Literary Supplement wrote about her book : “Our desire to control and insupportably consume water has caused irregular weather patterns, shortages and humanitarian disasters on a global level. How can we change our approach to water before it causes further harm, as with Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy and Ida, or with the devastating Syrian drought, which lasted from 2006 to 2010 and was abetted by agricultural and irrigation projects? This question underpins Gies’s comprehensive research as she journeys across the globe in search of “water detectives”: those who uncover what the element did, how it acted and what it “wanted” before it had to navigate our man-made management systems, which circumvent its established routes. Along the way we meet pioneering researchers, academics, activists and leaders who look beyond the “shifting baselines” of their generation, at past topographies, for clues regarding water’s old habits and routes. We learn why certain areas flood repeatedly, and how our tendency to speed water off the land deprives us of “urgently needed rainfall”. Blueprints of marshlands, creeks and rivers from more than 2,000 years ago, it turns out, offer safer, more sustainable methods of irrigation – what the author calls “Slow Water Techniques”.Here’s an excerpt from ‘Water Always Wins’: “our curiosity about water’s true nature is not idle, nor an indulgent wish to return to the past. Water seems malleable, cooperative, willing to flow where we direct it. But as our development expands and as the climate changes, water is increasingly swamping our cities or dropping to unreachable depths below our farms, generally making life—ours and other species’— precarious. Signs of water’s persistence abound if we train ourselves to notice them. Supposedly vanquished waterways pop up stubbornly, in inconvenient ways. In Toronto, tilted houses on Shaw Street near the Christie Pits neighborhood were long a local novelty, but most people didn’t know that the ghost of Garrison Creek was pulling them out of plumb. Worldwide, seasonal creeks emerging in basements are evidence that those houses encroach on buried streams. In my partner’s mom’s neighborhood in suburban Boston, all the houses come with sump pumps because the development was built on the local “Great Swamp.” And in the wreckage of disasters like Superstorm Sandy or Hurricane Harvey, we see that homes built atop wetlands are the first to flood.       When our attempts to control water fail, we are reminded that water has its own agenda, a life of its own. Water finds its own path through a landscape, molding it and being directed in turn. It has relationships with rocks and soil, plants and animals, from microbes to mammals like beavers and humans. Today, water is revealing its true nature increasingly often, as climate change brings more frequent and severe droughts and floods. To reduce the impacts of these phenomena, water detectives—Pomerantz and other ghost-stream enthusiasts, restoration ecologists, hydrogeologists, biologists, anthropologists, urban planners, landscape architects, and engineers— are now asking a critical question: What does water want?”[In Chinese, Erica Gies’s book was translated with the title “Slow Water”, which is what she was going to originally title her book.]To heal our water cycle, Erica Gies proposes the creation of a slow water movement, which advocates for the slowing of the flow of water through our landscapes. In this way we can hydrate our landscapes better, rivers will run year round more, groundwater can replenish, the small water cycle (precipitation recycling cycle) will be healthier, and more water from the wet season can still be in the ecosystem into the dry season. It would help with floods, droughts, fires, and heat waves. She sees the slow water movement as being decentralized, local unique, and socially just. I love this idea. I’ve also added the suggestion that we can also have local slow water circles, where people gather to read books and watch videos about slow water, and then go out and do slow water projects in their neighborhood.She talks about some of the things individuals can do to help slow water - implementing rain gardens, converting your lawn to native plants, putting in green roofs, creating rain infiltration points, creating bioswales, and turning driveway to be more permeable. People can also participate in local planning processes, and local water restoration groups. The slow water movement is about empowering individuals and communities, as well as governments, to help restore earth’s water cycles.Here is Erica Gies website slowwater.world where you can find out more.….This is a reader supported publication. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

From restoring peoples health to restoring the earth health, Didi Pershouse, brings her sweetness and wisdom to help heal humans and Gaia. She is the author of “Understanding soil health and watershed function”, and teaches ecological knowledge through her Land and Leadership Initiative. In conjunction with Walter Jehne, she has facilitated numerous water projects around the world.Recently, Didi Pershouse and I got together online to have a conversation and to get to know each other. She asked if she could record our conversation for possible use for a future podcast of hers. I said sure, and asked if I could share the recording here too on my Climate Water Project newsletter/podcast. So here it is. This is more of a dialog, rather than the normal interview.We got excited discussing good metaphors that illuminate aspects of water. She is famous for her flour and bread metaphor to understand the soil carbon sponge. Flour is analogous to dirt. Bread is analogous to soil. Flour can turn into bread with the help of yeast microorganisms. Dirt can turn into soil, through the help of microorganisms and fungi. Flour does not hold onto water as well as bread does. Dirt does not retain water as well as bread does.I loved Didi’s soil bread analogy when I heard of it a while back, and decided to try it out. I put outside, on the porch, a dish with flour and a dish with bread. I soaked both with water, and watched as the flour dried up within a few hours, and observed with intrigue, as the bread stayed moist for three more days.When the dirt turns to soil in our landscapes, it helps to retain the rain for longer, hydrating our ecosystems. Water can stay in the soil for weeks or months. Each extra one percent of carbon in our soil, helps to hold 20,000 gallons more water per acre foot. Retaining that water can mean the difference between floods happening or not to towns downslope. Storing the water in the soil can mean the difference between wildfires spreading or not. We also discussed a metaphor I came up with of the museum, which explains how water flows through our landscapes. Imagine a line of people entering into a museum, and then after a period of visiting, exiting the museum. If people stay in the museum for only a few minutes there will not be as many people in the museum as if they stay for a few hours. In both cases though, we still have the same rate of people entering and leaving. If water stays in the landscape for only a short while, the landscape will not be as hydrated as when water is slowed in the landscape.After we talked about a number of other things, Didi Pershouse looped back to this metaphor, and added that we can sometimes have rushes of people into the museum. If people’s stay in the museum is short, then that will lead to a rush of people leaving the museum a short while later. If people stay and enjoy the art for a few hours, the flow of people leaving the museum will be a steadier stream. If water is not slowed in the landscape, big storms will lead to large runoff events. If the water is slowed, then the water will be more distributed over a long period of time in the landscape before it flows out. There can be multiple basement levels in the museum, which allow people to wander around for a long time. When they come up to the ground level of the museum, it helps keep that level be full of people. In a similar way if we can keep our aquifers filled, the landscape can stay hydrated into the dry season. Our current practices of depleting our aquifers, leads to dryer landscapes in dry season; a phenomena which leads to more wildfires.I’m a fan of Didi Pershouse after meeting her, and maybe you will be too after listening to this podcast. Didi’s website is landandleadership.org . On it you can find the various metrics local communities can use to measure how well they are doing ecologically, a metric she discusses in this podcast.……..This is a reader supported publication and podcast Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Awhile back I was pondering what to do about the California wildfires, when I came across a Zach Weiss video showing how we could hydrate the environment and bring back the small water cycle. This video, along with Charles Eisenstein’s water chapter in his book “Climate”, got me into the water field. I am very happy to present here an interview with Zach. ………….Zach Weiss is a sculptor and tender of the land. He reads the landscape like a tracker, understanding how water moves across it; looking at movement of the soils, the cuts in the land and the erosion; noticing where water has pooled and evaporated and the patterns of vegetation growth.He studies the landscape to figure out where to make the interventions. The healthier it is the more it is about tending. The more degraded it is, whether from over-farming, from certain types of development, or from mining, the more it is about sculpting. He studies where to place the terraces that will slow the rain and help it infiltrate downwards. Where to dig the drainage ponds that collect the wet season’s water from the sky and slowly filter it downwards, filling the aquifers and providing drinking water and agricultural water. Where to dig the year round ponds so they can birth an ecosystem. What to grow around the edges of the pond to interact with the wildlife, to filter any inflowing pollution. He studies to understand the interconnectedness of the layers of soil, vegetation, rivers, springs, aquifers, wildlife, and human-made grey infrastructure.He worked a piece of land in Australia for a worm farmer, two weeks of work sculpting the land so it caught the rains when they came in the wet season. Then the worst drought on record hit the region. Vegetation dried up in the farms around him. Farmers in the region went belly up, and many had to sell their cows. But the worm farmer’s land was different. The soil stayed hydrated and cool enough from the previous season’s rains, keeping the lands cool and allowing the worms to flourish.In California, Zach Weiss and his team prepared a property by terracing the land, increasing the greenery, and carving out water bodies. When wildfires hit the region, the property was then hydrated enough to dampen the wildfires that spread to  the property. When big storms deluged the area, causing landslides to pummel through the fire-weakened land, the water body earthworks they had built caught the landslides so it didn’t destroy the house.In Mozambique, wells are overused and usually only last 5-20 years., The women often have to stand around waiting to get a little amount of muddy water at the bottom of the well. Zach and his team are improving the situation in one area by creating water bodies that catch the rainfall in the wet season and  infiltrate it downward so it can then regularly refill the aquifers and the wells.In areas where there are floods, torrents of water can turn cracks into ravines, rip out vegetation, and cause landslides. Here the key is to slow the water. Zach Weiss recites Rajendra Singh’s maxim “Where water runs, make it walk; where it walks, make it crawl; where it crawls, make it go into ground”. Weiss’s team can create various types of water bodies that not only store water but create small channels that weave the water back and forth. They can use check dams, leaky weirs, and beaver dam analogues to dissipate the force of the downward flowing water and spread it around.……..The problems that  face our individual parcels of land are part of a much larger systemic issue. Zach Weiss explains that our society is siphoning off water from our continents. Tile drainage. Urban sewer systems. Channelized rivers. We’ve drained our wetlands, ponds, bogs and marshes. We’ve drained our aquifers. Roads rush rainwaters along rather than infiltrating them into the land. Soil has been degraded by synthetic fertilizers and pesticides so it can no longer retain as much rainwater. “The biggest root cause of the wildfires that we are facing in the west right now is tied to the draining of the waters in the landscape,” he emphasizes.Less water on our land decreases evapotranspirational cooling, which decreases small water cycles and local rainfall, and increases local air and land temperatures. With less water on our land, groundwater levels fall. Trees, unable to reach it, become dehydrated and unable to dampen wildfires. With less water and less healthy soil, the fungi population crashes. With little fungi to help break down dead plant matter and turn it back into soil, dead plants sit as dry, highly inflammable kindling, baking in the heat. Wildfires lead to less vegetation. Intense fires can create a waxy substance on the soil that makes it difficult for rainwater to infiltrate. Fires dry up the soil, causing it to harden, and heat up more easily. The air then heats up, and we get less rain since hotter air is less able to condense the water vapor. Amidst the longer droughts, our ever more chaotic atmospheric conditions can also lead to bigger storms. The rain from the large storms are less able absorb into the harder ground, so the velocity builds up, and wipes out more topsoil and vegetation.“The biggest root cause of the wildfires that we are facing in the west right now is tied to the draining of the waters in the landscape”Drought and heatwaves lead to fires, which lead to floods, which then lead to more droughts and heatwaves. This is what Zach Weiss calls the Watershed Death Spiral. His team have made a potent animated video illustrating this.We can see this take effect in the Fertile Crescent, a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East, spanning modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan. Once lush and full of rivers, it birthed many of our early civilizations. But over time, civilizations chopped down forests and drained wetlands. Thousands of years later, Syria is the end of this watershed death spiral, Weiss says. Now Australia (drought 2001-2009, fires 2008-2009, floods 2010-2011, drought 2017-2019, fire 2019 , floods 2020-2022), and California (drought 2012-2016, fires 2015, flood 2017, fires 2018-2021, flood 2022-2023) are in a dire situation, he emphasizes. They are in danger of following Syria’s path and flipping from a semi-arid to a desert biome. Other areas are beginning to get worse - Oregon, Washington, Canada, Greece, Brazil are just some examples of places encountering more fires recently. Lahaina, Maui which burned in August 2023, was once full of wetlands, and the whole region around it has drained its aquifers so that tree roots cannot bring up water that dampens wildfires.When I reflect on California, the land shows many signs of desertification. The countryside was once full of beavers slowing and spreading the water to create lush landscapes that dampened wildfires. Most of these animal water engineers are now gone. Water stressed forests are vulnerable to vast beetle infestations that kill huge amounts of trees. The Central California valley, the largest agricultural center in the US, which was once a quarter wetlands, is now dry and thirsty. Dust storms break across it. If you drive down the interstate 5, you see signs from farmers pleading for water. Owen’s river was once running abundantly in eastern California. Los Angeles was once dotted with vernal pools and wetlands that were drained. Beverly Hills was once a network of streams. LA county once had a lush verdant river that has since has become channelized and concretized. Artesian wells dug just a few feet deep used to spurt water into the air. Now overlaid with freeways, parking lots and buildings, Los Angeles is thought of by many as a desert, its watery past forgotten.The Australian government has yet to figure out  how to extract itself from its human-made hydrological mess. Weiss opines that the government makes it more difficult for people to improve the situation. They have made it illegal to have leaky weirs, despite  their ability to slow the water and hydrate the environment. They tax people for creating water bodies which can rehydrate the landscape, instead of rewarding them. They pay people money to get rid of the willows, not understanding that willows, with their ability to store water in their bodies, can retard fires, and with their thick fast growing roots can lessen landslides. They look to create more grey infrastructure to deal with floods rather than more decentralized nature based solutions.Having drained their land masses of water, California and Australia have been hit again and again with, to use a boxing metaphor, drought uppercuts, wildfire hook-shots, and flood body-blows in the twenty-first century. With each blow they lose more soil, and more vegetation.These problems are also beginning to spread to North American bio-regions that naturally have more rain as people continue draining their lands. We are seeing more huge wildfires in Oregon, Washington State, Canada, and now even Hawaii. In Europe and South America, the draining of the lands has led to more intense and prevalent burns recently. To be sure global warming is one factor for these wildfires, but not enough attention is given to the human-made degraded water cycle as a key causal factor.  There are solutions though.We humans can become a keystone species that restores the water cycle. We can work with the land to rehydrate it. We can work with the soil, vegetation and geomorphology to store the seasonal rains and infiltrate water back into the land. We can grow forests to re-establish the small water cycles: soils once again become sponge-like so that rainwater infiltrates down to the groundwater; trees remain hydrated and evapo-transpirate abundant water vapor and microorganisms into the atmosphere, where they form rain nuclei that return the water to the land. We can recharge our aquifers so people can have ample clean drinking water, trees can hydrate the landscape, and the land can support more biodiversity.We can bring back year round rivers. We can work with our urban systems to create greywater systems, rainwater catchment, stormwater recycling. Weiss suggests we create a Department of Transportation and Water Infiltration. The Watershed Death Spiral can be reversed. Weiss and his team have created wonderful animations of what this would look like, in what they call the Revived Water Cycle and Full Water Cycle.It will take many people to revive our water cycles. Sepp Holzer, the legendary permaculturist, told Zach Weiss that he was his best student. But he said it was not enough:  “One of you is not enough, we need hundreds, we need thousands, millions would be better, of people working with water, working with nature around the world.”So Weiss took on apprentices. But he realized this process could not train enough people, so he created a platform called Water Stories to build a community and to train large numbers of people to slow water, recharge aquifers, build earthworks, create water bodies, build urban water systems for homes, revive rivers, create natural clean drinking water, restore the small water cycle, etc. There are courses to train people on three tracks: Professional, Steward and Advocate. On the Professional track, you learn how to consult and work professionally to restore landscapes on clients’ properties. Demand for water landscape work outstrips supply, so there  is plenty of work once you become trained. On the Steward track, you learn how to steward a piece of land, the one you live or take care of, back to water cycle health. You learn to hydrate the environment, how to slow water, and how to recharge landscapes to create drinking water and water for usage. On the Advocate track, you learn how to speak and spread the word about restoring the water cycles. (You can listen to Zach Weiss discuss the Water Stories course 54 minutes into podcast)After a natural disaster is a time when practitioners can come in and intervene:for example after the Australia fires, people were ready for ponds and water bodies to be built. That’s when we can organize people to mulch and remediate the soil, to help them recover from the fire. That’s the time to move. By training more people, there will be more practitioners on the ground to mobilize to do the vast amount of work that is required.Recently launched, the water course has surprised Weiss by how well it has taken off. Students are restoring landscapes, building greywater systems, creating rain gardens, and preparing lands against natural disasters. They are guided to host talks and workshops in their area to spread the word. One girl in successive talks had 2, then 8 then 28 people coming.There is both a self-taught course you can do at your own pace, and there is a group course that you take over six months with a cohort. Here is the link to the self-taught course, the group course and the Water Stories platform.  What the world needs now is a large decentralized movement of water practitioners who can do the work in our backyards, in our towns, in our bioregions and in our countries to reverse continental water drainage; restore plentiful clean water; lessen floods, fires, droughts and heat waves. We can and must halt the watershed death spiral.…….. Link to course and Water Stories……………Time stamps for podcast: 7:27 Working on an Australian property. Reading landscapes. Creating earthworks 18:27 Putting ponds and water bodies in properties 24:27 How to deal with erosion and large stormwaters 26:32 What we can do in our urban environments 30:12 Drinking water situation in Africa 37 Indias water situation 40:12 Wildfire and hydration 47:32 Watershed death spiral 54:07 On the Water Stories course. ….This is a reader supported publication Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Displaying pictures of plants, soil and earthworks being drawn on a see-through whiteboard, accompanied with clear and articulate explanations, Andrew Millison’s water and permaculture videos have reached millions of viewers on Youtube, making Andrew one of the most well known permaculture teachers in the world today.Beginning in the desert like conditions of Arizona, Andrew learnt the ways of water wizardry with permaculture teachers like water pioneer Brad Lancaster, before heading to the more lush Oregon. There, a student organized to get him on the faculty at Oregon State University, whereby he soon found himself a Senior Instructor, teaching various permaculture courses, including a permaculture MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) that was taken by many.Andrew’s artfully made permaculture videos were put by the university online. To his surprise, one of his videos, on permaculture principles, got a hundred thousand views (later the video would even reach 700,000 views). He could see this modality was a way to reach a larger scale audience - ‘this was a real leverage, people were commenting from all over the world’. So he pivoted to focusing more on videos.In 2017, he flew out to India for the International Permaculture conference, and afterwards embarked on a two month pilgrimage to look at water systems there. He studied the craft of videography, then flew back out in 2019-2020, to shed light on what he calls the world’s biggest permaculture project, filming a series of videos titled “India’s Water Revolution”. The videos have now gotten millions of hits on Youtube, and inspired people from other countries to replicate the Indian watershed restoration projects. I remember stumbling across these videos awhile back, and being blown away by the scale and success of what was happening in India. …Unlike in the US with its winter rains, the monsoon comes in the summer in India. In the state of Mahrastra, as the month of June approaches, the hot air becomes pregnant with humidity. Wild and powerful winds, blowing in from the oceans southeast, will then, over the course of the next few months, dump its rains on the lands. To Indians the rains mean creativity and a source of new beginnings. They have gods to the rain. They play in the rain. Rain infuses into their politics and their education system.India is a land of 1.4 billion people where two thirds of them live rurally. In Maharastra, heavily dependent on agriculture, the rains are a measure of success for the community and for the economy. When the droughts hit Maharastra, the effects were devastating. Fights broke out at community wells, farmers committed suicide, and villagers, unable to support themselves, moved to the big cities. The Paani Foundation, an organization that included the Bollywood star Aamir Khan, set out to see what they could do about the water crisis. They discovered that one village, Hiware Bazar, had succeeded during these times, continuing to produce bountiful food and vegetation within a thriving watershed. The village, covering an area of about two thousand plus acres, has forested slopes, ponds, and contour trenches which caught the rain during monsoon season to store it for the dry season. There was measurably more rain falling on their village than on neighboring villages.In other parts of Maharashtra, overgrazing of the land, and misguided attempts by villagers to cut down trees - because they thought it robbed the fields of fertilizer - had left the land unable to absorb the monsoon rains. The Paani Foundation decided to spread the ways of Hiware Bazar to other villages in Maharastra. Explaining earthworks, a way of terraforming the land, was key. The villages were taught to dig Continous Contour Trenches, which are similar to the swales of permaculture. They learnt to build check dams with rocks, which would slow and redirect the monsoon rains as it flowed down the landscape. Some of the rainwater would be funneled to ponds with liners that stored the water so that it could be used during dry season. Rainwater would also be funneled to ponds without liners so that it would seep down to fill the aquifers. The water table would rise to give the villagers more well water. Summer monsoon water was transferred across time, aided by villager built earthworks and rising aquifers, to provide for the village in the rain-scarce months.Replanting trees and growing soil in these villages would also be key to slowing, sinking, and spreading the stormwaters so that it could hydrate the landscape.The Paani Foundation organized a Water Cup competition between the villages to see who could improve their watershed the most, and over 8000 villages participated. The results were astonishing. Landscapes were transformed, crops flourished, and the drain of people to the big cities was lessened. In the Pemgiri area in Maharashtra, where there are many villages, each with a size of about 2000 acres each, those areas that had trees and greenery, had noticeably more rain, than those areas which remained denuded. Rajendra Singh, who comes by the cool moniker, Water Man of India, has said that in areas with mountains or plateaus to partially block the wind, an area of 600-2000 acres is enough to create more rain. In flat areas one needs about 60 square kilometers to start generating rain.After four years of success with the Water Cup, the Paani Foundation has now organized a Farmers Cup, where villages are taught how to grow rich soil and healthy plants. Its a friendly competition to see who can grow the best organically. This is a story of a communal water methodology in a village - Hiware Bazar, that became a state-wide movement - in Maharashtra, that became known around the world - through Andrew Millison’s videos. Maybe it can become a world-wide movement. Maybe some of you can help. Time stamps for podcast: 1:10 Learning about water Arizona. Curb cut idea of Brad Lancaster6:15 Teaching permaculture and water at Oregon State University. The launch of his videos.16:50 India and water 30:25 How revegetation and restoring watersheds has increased the rain in those watersheds in India 47:00 water situation in Africa49:20 water situation in USA53:57 dampening extreme weather through restoration of the land. Shock absorbers do lessen extreme flooding and drought.56:10 On integrating climate movement and permaculture……………………..This is a reader supported publication Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Growing up in, and having worked in the Holistic Management ecorestoration movement that his dad Alan Savory began, Rodger Savory, an ecologist, land manager, and ranch owner, was searching for the biggest and most significant problem he could find. The problem he decided to try and solve, was that of halting the exponential spread of deserts by returning the deserts back to grasslands.In Zambia and Zimbabwe, where the shade could be 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and where the wet and dry season intersected with the land in a way that increased the risk of desertification, he began experimenting on his ranch lands. He could see early on that the cow manure had an effect on growth. Why exactly, though was not entirely clear.He had herds of cattle move across the land, ‘like caterpillars crawling across the desert’, laying out a carpet of manure. The experiments would take a week or so, and then he had to frustratingly wait a year to see what the results were. If the cattle moved too slow or too fast the results were not as good. If the density of cattle per area was not optimal, it affected how much growth happened. He did many different experiments, and went down many dead ends. At one point he noticed that when the layer of dung contained sheep and goat pellets were, the grass grew more. Why was that, he wondered, which ingredient in the pellet was responsible? He chased this idea for a couple of years, before a large four inch rain came and washed away all the pellets. He experimented with having sheep and goat in addition to the cattle. After awhile he realized that what was in the sheep or goat or cow manure didn’t matter so much as the role that the layer of manure provided in covering the ground to create the right conditions for growth underneath.Microbes are key to the development of the soil. Reproducing in 10 minutes, they can grow to large numbers exponentially fast. But only in the right conditions. The microbes need to have access to nutritious liquid - something which can be provided by the animal urine. The microbes also need to be shielded from the ultraviolet rays from the sun, otherwise they get fried - a fact that he only figured out many years into the experiments when a woman civil engineer doggedly quizzed him on to explain what was happening. The role of the layer of manure above the microbes is to both protect the urine from drying out, and to guard against the ultraviolet rays.Fungi, it became clearer as the experiments progressed, was also key to the whole equation. Rodger noticed that when the mycelia tapped on the seeds, the seeds would open and start to grow. The mycelia also spread out in a network to build the soil. The layer of dung and urine provided the cool, wet, dark conditions that mycelia thrive in.The cattle were fed forage that contained fungi spores, grass seeds, and tree seeds. Elements that were then pooped out in the dung. In order for the seeds to grow, though, the layer of cow dung could not be too deep. Gardeners know if mulch is too thick, seeds won’t sprout through. Rodger puzzled how to get the layer of cow dung to be more uniform at the right thickness, given that cows don’t poop uniformly. After awhile he figured chickens were the solution. They released chickens into the field after the cattle, and their pecking and wandering spread the cow manure to a more consistent and correct depth.The land was then left to be on its own. The seeds would start sprouting and growing grass, which lead to the building of nutrients and soil. When the sparse deserts rains came, they could then get absorbed into the land to help grow life, rather than become runoff that raced off the land.The use of cows fed forage with fungi, grass seeds and tree seeds laying dung followed by chickens to spread it out was the methodology that they figured out and understood over the course of 25 years. They called this the biological carpet approach.The fastest a piece of land has regenerated is six weeks. In Zimbabwe, they timed the laying of biological carpet just right, with the rains coming right after, so the grass grew quickly.After succeeding with this method in Africa, Rodger and his team reproduced similar results at 9000 feet in the high alpine deserts of Colorado. This was followed by successful experiments in Canada and Australia. In Australia cattle came onto the land for a day and a half, left their poop, and then over the next few months the land regenerated. Here is a before and after picture in Australia:An intriguing phenomena they noticed as grasslands grew back is that in the mornings there would be a mist hanging above the grass. This happened even if it had not been raining for months. The water would be released by the land, add to the water vapor in the air, form a mist, and then go back down to hydrate the vegetation and soil. Its a different way of hydrating than is commonly recognized. Rodger calls this the micro-water cycle - as distinct from the small water cycle which is where the water travels high up into the sky to create clouds, before it returns as rain. The microwater cycle does not create rain, while the small water cycle does. Over time as the biological carpet is able to store my rain, it will also be able to evapotranspire more to help create more rain in the area. Rodger’s land would have more rain, while his neighbors would have less. The neighbors complained he was lucky, he told them that they too could get this same effect. And it seems they are now starting to get this chain of causality. This was a similar effect that Judith Schwartz noted went she went down to Mexico. The Mexican farmer she interviewed, who had regenerated his lands, had more rain than his neighbors. The pieces of land in both Rodger’s case and the Mexicans were quite large so they could generate enough water vapor, and affect land heat fluxes to affect rain patterns. Trees on the land that slowed winds, and bioaerosols released by the vegetation probably also helped increase the rain.Rodger says “The biological carpet is just to jump start the lifecycle. Once the lifecycle is able to get started, get out of its say……… Life begets life. More life begets more life”. And it can be added - life begets water, water begets more life, with a nod to a similar Millan Millan quote.Modern civilization has degraded land and destroyed the life on it, lessening its ability to self-organize, self-regulate, reproduce and regenerate. Deserts are an extreme aspect of that degradation, they are limited in their ability to turn rain and sunlight into the long photosynthetic carbon chains of life. Deserts though, do not have to be a permanent equilibrium dead end that the complex system of the earth evolves to and is stuck at. The biological carpet provides a way to jump start the positive feedback loop of life creating more life again.Rodger has set his eyes on California for his next project. The idea is to regreen the desert in the Imperial Valley in southeast California. Rodger says pollen and other evidence point to Imperial Valley and other desertified areas in south eastern California as being more green and vegetated historically, with past civilizational mishaps weakening the landscape ecology.The idea is to start in the Imperial Valley with a 5000-6000 acres of land to show proof of concept, then approach the California government to help them obtain 150,000 acres of land to regreen.Currently the Imperial Valley gets about 3 inches of rain yearly, and it all rushes off the land because there is nothing to absorb it. With a biological carpet there, when the infrequent rains come, more of that rain can be absorbed to grow grasslands first, and trees later. The extreme desert temperature oscillations from very hot to very cold, will be dampened by the biological carpet and growing soil. This will lead to less hot daytime winds. With more humidity in the environment, the winds will also be less dry. The recent scourge of wildfires in Calfornia have been fanned by the hot, dry Chinook winds that blow in from southeastern Calfornia. With less hot, and less dry winds there should be a decrease in wildfires.As grass and trees grow, rains can return, as there is more water vapor evapotranspiring to combine with the air moisture to create rain. Rain can moisture hop, via the small water cycle, around California to increase its water supply. Winds blowing up from the Baja California can carry the extra water vapor from Imperial Valley into the continental US, to places like Kansas and Texas. Rodger is looking to initiate this project in the Imperial Valley, with 5000-6000 acres and several thousand cattle. If he can show this works he will then approach Californian government for more land. You can read more about his project at fixdeserts.com . You can subscribe to his project on the website. Subscription helps when they show proof of interest in the project to the California government. If you have the connections, you can pass the idea onto potential investors.…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..A while back I interviewed climate scientist Millan Millan who figured out that the rains were being lost in Spain because the now degraded land could not bring down the water vapor that was blowing from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea. Then I interviewed Ties Van Der Hoeven, who was working with Millan Millan about his regreening the Sinai desert project, which would help bring down the water vapor that was blowing from the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea. That extra water brought down could then moisture hop into Africa and the Middle East. Both these cases are continental divides, places that divided two large bodies of water, a key factor in why they are so important, as the water vapor would otherwise be blown back out to sea. If the water could be brought down when it travelled between those two bodies then that set in motion a long chain of hydrological effects. Ties considered these places to be acupoints - regreening them would have lots of climatic ripple effects on neighboring lands. After that interview I wondered if there were other continental divides that could be key climatic acupoints. After perusing the globe for awhile, I realized that there were ocean winds blowing from the Pacific over southern California, and into the Gulf of California, and also vice versa. If more of that water vapor could be brought down onto the desertified lands in south-eastern California, instead of being lost back out to sea, then when that water evapotranspired it could be blown further inland by winds that would take it to the Colorado River. (Scientific research has found that air moisture is transported from California to the mid-west. The droughts in the US mid-West in 2012 were in part due to the droughts in California, as there was a decrease in moisture hopping.) Regreening areas in southeast California could thus be a potential solution to deal the water shortages in the western US states, as they depend on the amount of rainfall the Colorado River gets. (I hope to find some climate scientist to model the magnitude this effect.) I was then very excited to stumble on the work of Rodger Savory (on Hart Hagan’s youtube channel) , and hear of his plans to regreen deserts in south-eastern California, and to restore rain in California and states beyond. I was delighted when he agreed to come on and do this podcast.…………………………………………………………………………………………………….This is a reader supported publication. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

When I first got into the water field, I keep hearing about this guy Brock Dolman, and the water work he was doing. So it with great pleasure that I now get the chance to interview him. Brock began with a background in conservation biology, and then began thinking of himself as a conservation hydrologist. He helped found the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) in California, which hosts the Water Institute. He has done great work in bringing back the beaver, transitioning California to use more greywater, helping California with its water plans, and infusing many memorable phrases into the water field. His language use is lapidary, poetic, and creative. (You might want to rewind and relisten to many segments of this podcast because his language use allows for a high density of information.)Here’s some highlights from the podcast that I transcribed below (with some little grammar tweaks) On slow water [beginning 5:40min mark]“Is it true you coined the phrase slow it sink it spread it?”“Its true. I coined that phrase. My riff on it is “Slow it, spread it, sink it, store it, share it”. Its sort of of like Carlo Petrini’s slow food movement. I thought about this idea that I call the slow water movement. Because we’ve been having this fast water movement. We’ve been living in the drain age, where the dominant land use paradigm of North America for hundred of years since settler colonies is - kill the beaver, genocide the native people, drain the wetlands, ditch the land, and dehydrate it for settlement patterns. We have a drain age paradigm, where we have been draining, paving, piping, polluting, plundering, and making it go away as fast as possible and as dirty as possible. We want to slow it, spread it, sink it, store it, and share it, and keep it around as clean and as long as possible…. The idea of the ‘slow it, spread it, sink it’ mantra comes out of my work for decades in storm water management and the clean water act at the Federal level, the Porter-Cologne act in California, the recognition of non-point source pollution being a really big deal. It comes out of low impact development, stormwater management, bioswales, porous pavement, roof water catchment and groundwater recharge, and those retrofitting land use to be a rehydrative sponge rather dehydrate system. Thats where I really synthesized nugget of the idea to slow it, sink it, spread it.When I began working in urban stormwater management and low impact development, I brought the perceptual design method worldview of permaculture. Permaculture is a method of how to create regenerative and socially just systems that are based on natural patterns and processes. So when I was looking at stormwater management, and green infrastructure versus grey infrastructure, we used those tools - the principles of protracted observation, stacking functions, relative location and onsite resources, and planned redundancies. These are permaculture design principles. They apply to everything we do. ‘Slow it spread it sink it’ became a sticky meme that encapsulates an ethos, a deep level of work that the world is doing in the realms of stormwater management and low impact development.”On beavers [20:50min]“In the early 2000s nobody was really talking abut beavers in California, they were considered mostly nonnative and mostly a nuisance, and people just wanted to kill them. In 2012 the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center created the bring back the beaver campaign. We co-published a series of peer reviewed papers on the historic ecology of beaver in California - in the Sierra Nevada, the coastal zone, and in the Bay Area, asserting that they were more widely distributed than was thought, and that they were native to much of the state. We articulated the benefits of the beaver. You’ve got a semi-aquatic mammal with big teeth and just enough smarts to slow it, sink it, spread it, store it, and share it. They are farmers that irrigate the riparian because they are vegetarian. They eat the bark of trees, cattails, willows, sedges and grasses. They are engineers that build dams. They are masons that seal the dams. They are farmers that irrigate food forests of riparian habitat. They recharge groundwater. And they make wetted areas things less flammable. Smoky the beaver is helping save smoky the bear. Their wetlands are famous for sequestering carbon. The biodiversity in the wetlands is a bio filter that produces cleaner water with increased water quantity. The wetlands increase groundwater recharge, help with carbon sequestration, with flood attenuation, with fire resiliency, all the while making habitat for endangered species and increasing biodiversity. So why not bring back the beaver?I am happy to say in California last summer, Governor Newsom put in a budget line to create brand new beaver restoration program. It has funding for five permanent staff. Those five staff and are working on beaver management plan. How can we coexist with beaver instead of killing them….. We are launching a historic campaign to bring back the beaver in California.There are a lot of ranchers in Idaho, Wyoming, Eastern Oregon, Utah, and Nevada who said ‘Twenty, thirty years ago we killed beavers. Right now, if we didn’t have beavers, we would be out of business.” ….. The beavers rehydrate the valley bottoms, and the water laterally spreads out, so the pastures for the cattle are getting sub-surface irrigated. The ranchers have both more water for the cows to drink and more forage that is irrigated longer. So they have more cattle food…. We often say beavers and bovines are buddies.”On biology and life [40:01min]“The keystone processes of earth, fire, air, water and life is gaming all of those. Energy flows, matter cycles, and life webs. Life is creating the conditions for its own fecundity.”“Equal inputs of carbon dioxide and water, are the dominant inputs to photosynthesis, so if you are not playing on the carbon cycle side and the water cycle side you are not creating conditions conducive to life, which is carbon based and mostly water. … Photosynthesis is the keystone coupler.”On a Slow Water movementBrock proposed the idea of a Slow Water movement in early 2000s and an article came out about it, which you can read here. (Erica Gies, author of “Water always wins”, has also been independently proposing this movement. Brock calls this convergent evolution.)[58min] Brock talks about the template and training program they developed to help people organize and restore their watersheds. The project is called Basin of relations. You can find the guidebook here [59:45min] Discussion of the slow water movement idea. [1:02:26] On watersheds: “I think of watersheds as living lifeboats from ridge to river, from summit to sea , from stem to stern. We have to rethink and retrofit these living lifeboats at every scale of land use, from forestry to rangeland to agriculture, to urbanization to surbanization, land use. How do we rethink and retrofit for rehydration? The tools in the toolbox is different at different size scales… The opportunity for a slow water movement is before us. If we are really looking at watersheds like lifeboats, the opportunity to organize together is like battening down the hatches for the coming storm of the present and future moment. These lifeboats are going to be tested. These lifeboats will fare better if we all pull together in the same direction, in a collaborative and convivial way, which is really about the community part of the relations in our basins, versus the competitive part where its about commodity and competition against.” [1:03:39] I share my idea of slow water circles[1:05:40] Discussion of slow water methods and slow water organizing in India, Zimbawe, Peru, Israel, Yemen, and the Arabian peninsula.………………………………A key role in getting greywater laws passed in California was when Elizabeth Dougherty, a citizen who regularly pestered and petitioned the government about greywater, connected the government and Stanford engineers with Brock Dolman, who taught them about greywater. You can listen to her story about this in a previous podcast in this newsletter.…This is a reader supported publication Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

I’m excited in this edition to present a podcast I recorded with Anastasis Makarieva about her work in developing the biotic pump theory, a theory that has gotten a lot of attention in recent years for articulating how forests can bring the rain. The theory describes how forest-evapotranspired water vapor condenses to create a pressure drop that sucks in moisture winds from the ocean.Anastasia Makarieva was working towards her PhD in atmospheric physics in St Petersburg University, when she met physicist Victor Gorshkov. He was doing ground breaking research into how biology modulated the climate and environment to create conditions that support life better. She chose him to become her mentor, and together over the next two and a half decades they would develop a number of theories that furthered this paradigm.In the West in the 1970s, James Lovelock, had been proposing that the earth has a self-regulating feedback loop that helps life create and maintain its own conditions for life. When Lovelock was asked by NASA to look for life on other planets, he came up with the perceptive observation that you could tell of the existence of life by whether the atmosphere was in equilibrium or or not. On earth, gases like oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen are in nonequilibrium. Geology alone could not create the concentrations of those gases. Microbes, plants, and animals are required. Lovelock proposed that life created the atmospheric composition percentages that was more favorable for life. Lovelock called his idea of a living, self-regulating earth, Gaia.In the East, Victor Gorshkov, who had not heard of Lovelock’s work, was independently working along similar lines. He was working on a systems view of life and earth where climatology, evolutionary biology and genetics were not separate fields. Life evolved climate, and climate evolved life.As Makarieva joined forces with Gorshkov, one of the questions they focused on was the curious nonequilibrium state of water on earth. On other planets, water reached a stationary equilibrium state. For example, on Venus as the planet got hotter, more water evaporated into the air. More water in the air, meant more heating, because water is a greenhouse gas. More heating meant more water evaporating, and so Venus gave rise to a runaway feedback loop until the planet go so hot, that all the water escaped to space. On Mars, it is so cold, that all the water exists in a steady state of ice, never melting. But on earth the water is nonstationary - water vapor will rise, condense, fall as rain, and then rise again. Makarieva and Gorshkov proposed life was helping keep water in this nonequilibrium state on earth. They wrote “Environmental parameters that are favourable for life on Earth are physically unstable. The liquid state of terrestrial hydrosphere, a major prerequisite for functioning of the contemporary living systems, is unstable with respect to spontaneous transition to either complete glaciation of the planetary surface or complete evaporation of the oceans. Without the stabilising biotic impact the environment and climate of Earth would rapidly degrade to a state prohibiting human existence.”Makarieva and Gorshkov wondered if life was helping to bring rain onto the continents. They asked “if organisms can evolve ways to pump oxygen to their body with lungs, is it not also possible that the ecosystem can evolve ways to pump water to where its needed?” They looked at the precipitation data around the globe. Where there were no forests around, rain drops exponentially as it moves inland. Where forests were around, for example, in the bioregions that contain the Amazon rainforests, the Congo rainforests, and the boreal forests of Russia, the amount of rain does not drop as it moves inland. Makarieva and Gorshkov figured the forests were attracting the rain.The Biotic PumpThe mechanism they proposed for how forests attracted rain involved the high amount of water vapor evapotranspired by the forests. After rising into the atmosphere, water vapor condenses, leaving a partial vacuum (other gases are still present) where it once was. Water vapor takes up 2000 times the room liquid water does. The pressure drop created sucks in water moisture containing wind from the ocean.Pressure drops can be quite powerful. Here’s an experiment you can do at home to demonstrate this. Fill a bottle with boiling water, then pour the water all out. Stick a straw in it with a sealant for the bottle. Hot water vapor is trapped in the bottle. Turn the bottle over, with the straw sticking into a bowl of water. The hot water vapor inside the bottle cools, which lowers the pressure inside the bottle. The water in the bowl then gets sucked up through the straw into the upside down bottle. Here is a Youtube video illustrating this phenomena: Another experiment to demonstrate the power of water vapor pressure dropping was done by BBC show Earth Lab in a TV segment they did on Newcommen steam engines (the thermodynamic work cycle of the atmospheric circulation loop as the ocean wind blows into land and then back out again may have a lot of similarity to the thermodynamic work cycle of a Newcommen steam engine). In these steam engines when the water vapor condenses it creates a partial vacuum. The show filled a steel oil drum with steam, and then cooled the steam. The oil drum imploded dramatically (scaring the hosts). Below is a picture of the before and after of the oil drum. There were many injuries in the early days of steam engine development.Atmospheric CirculationsIn an atmospheric circulation loop, water vapor evaporates from the ocean, blows inland, rises up to create clouds, and then flows back out to sea. The conventional meteorology story for what drives this atmospheric circulation is that the land is hotter than the ocean so air will rise, creating a place of lower pressure which then sucks the winds in. Here for example is a diagram from introductory teaching materials.Makarieva and Gorshkov agreed with the basics of this story, but said there was a lot more to it - that it was also important to take into the partial vacuum force created by the condensing water vapor. The pressure drop induced was key in understanding the atmospheric circulation.The biotic pump theory was published in a number of refereed journals. It sometimes was referred to by name as condensation induced atmospheric dynamics. Some of the later papers were published in collaboration with scientists from other universities - Andre Nobre, Ba-Lian Li, Douglas Sheil, Andrei Nefiokov, and Peter Bunyard.As the biotic-pump/condensation-induced-atmospheric-dynamics theory became more well known, some critics argued that the latent heat released by the water vapor condensing would be an even larger effect than the pressure drop from the water vapor condensing. The biotic pump may happen, but it’s a small effect compared to the laten heat effect, they said.Latent heat is the heat given off when water vapor turns to liquid. When thunderstorms begin, you can see a cumulus cloud get taller and taller. Introductory meteorology courses teaches that this is because there is so much water moisture releasing heat when they condense that the air currents start rising up, and the cloud gets taller. A thunderstorm cloud can rise as high as 6km. So latent heat is a significant effect. (The pressure drop might also play a role here in the cloud rise, something that conventional meteorology doesn’t mention.)Makarieva and Gorshkov agree that the latent heat effect is bigger than the pressure drop in isolated systems, but they argue that when you take into account the whole atmospheric loop, then the pressure drop becomes more important than the latent heat. This is because the more heat that is added to air, the longer it will take for the air to cool down so it can sink again on. So latent heat increases the speed on the upward part of the atmospheric loop, but it decreases the speed on the downpart of the atmospheric loop. The latent heat is thus not very efficient at driving the whole atmospheric cycle.I’ve been playing around with a number of ways to try and give an intuitive picture for the biotic pump and condensation induced atmospheric dynamics, to give an idea of the feasability of its physics, and also to shed light how it compares to the latent heat and land heating arguments of conventional meteorology.Here is a toy model that I think captures a lot of the relevant physics. Imagine a big pipe that forms a rectangular loop that rises up in the air vertically for a kilometer. The pipe is filled with bouncing balls. As you go up the number of balls gets less dense because of gravity. Initially there is no net circulatory movement of the balls. Then we take out a bunch of balls on the upper end of one of the sides of the loop. We then reinsert these balls at the bottom of that side. Because there are more balls below it, balls from below will stream upwards, thus initiating a movement of the balls around the whole loop. (See drawing below.) This is analogous to the act of water vapor condensing into a cloud and causing air atoms below to rise to fill it. The reinserting of the balls is analogous to rain falling down to be available to evapotranspire back up.In general when a vacuum is created, there will be balls coming in to replace it from all directions. But since there are more balls bouncing around below, then there will be more pressure from below. By analogy, imagine piling books on top of each other up into the atmosphere. A ten thousand book pile will reach up to a kilometer. The books at the bottom will have a higher pressure, as the books above it are pushing down on it. This is what is called hydrostatic equilibrium. Now imagine that there is a spring also placed between each book. The compression of the spring gives an indication of the pressure. Now lets say we suddenly remove five hundred books from the top of the kilometer high pile. This creates a state called hydrostatic nonequilibrium, and the rest of the books push upwards and rise. In a similar way, when we remove balls from the right hand side of the Biotic Rectangle, it creates hydrostatic nonequilibrium, and many bouncing balls from below (including the balls that are reinserted) move upwards. Now imagine if instead of taking the balls out where the dotted box says, we gave the balls in the dotted box more energy. This would be analogous to the latent heat release of the water vapor as it condenses into clouds. The balls there would then have a net movement up, and it would also drive some circulatory motion. However if we give the balls a lot of energy, they will not find it so easy to go down on the left land leg, and so the extra energy does not necessarily speed up the atmospheric motion through the whole loop. This is analogous to the Makarieva and Gorshkov argument for why latent heat is not so important for driving the atmospheric circulation.In science, toy models can be very useful in demonstrating concepts and for calculating key behaviors. The Lotka Voltera model was as a simple of predator prey relationships that allowed some basic calculations of nonintuitive effects that occured in the wild. The radiative model of earth heating models the earth and its atmosphere as a one dimensional system, but it can give good approximations to the temperature on earth. The Biotic Rectangle may be a useful toy model to do some simple calculations on. Instead of bouncing balls, lets imagine the rectangular pipe filled with an ideal gas made up of one type of molecule. At the top section of the pipe we can allow the taking out of heat from the system. This is analogous to the air radiating heat into space when it is in the top leg of the atmospheric loop. The gas cannot condense into a liquid. It is initially stationary.What happens if we heat up the rectangle at position A? Will this cause the gas to start circulating, and if so at what velocity will the gas circulate the pipe given a certain amount of heat Q? If the gas does circulate, this is analagous to the standard meteorological argument given for why air circulates. We can ask what happens if we heat up the rectangle at point C. This is analogous to heat increasing (from latent heat release) as water vapor condenses into clouds. If we take out gas in the box D to leave a temporary vacuum, will this cause the gas to circulate, and if so, how fast? We can also ask ask if we put back the gas we take out at D into either box C or box E, how much will this affect the circulation? Putting it back in at box C is analogous to saying the rain that falls evapotranspires back up in the small water cycle. Putting it back in at E, is taking into account that there is input of water vapor from the ocean.I think we can do some calculations based on this to determine the relative importance of standard meteorological factors compared to the biotic pump factor in generating atmospheric circulation. Feel free to pass this to amateur or professional physicists and atmospheric scientists to try their hand at calculating out this toy model. (There is share button at end of this article). And feel free to try it out yourself. Or if you want to collaborate on this problem with me, reach out. Either way, lets look together at the answers we get. And compare to the methods Makarieva and Gorshkov use.What this model does is simplify the actual physical situation. In the atmospheric sciences, there is a fundamental set of equations that are called Primitive Equations used to model the movement of air in the atmosphere. The set includes the thermodynamics and the fluid dynamics (air for intensive purposes behaves like a liquid) equations that describe the movement of the air. These equations are used a lot to calculate many meteorological phenomena. However the problem is they don’t take into account that water can shift phases, that it will shift from vapor to liquid, and from liquid to vapor. They don’t take into account the temperature and pressures of these phase shifts. Those effects have to be tacked on, in not as elegant ways, with approximations of when to apply the Clausius-Clayperon equation (the equation that determines the temperature and pressure of phase changes), and by approximating ways to input when vegetation and soil evapotranspires water into the air. In this Biotic Rectangle model we remove some of the complexities of these phase changes, and just simply say we take out the gas at a certain sink point, and put it back in at a certain source point. Then the model more closely resembles something that can be analysed by the Primitive Equations. Except for the vacuum created when we take out some of the gas. That part we have to figure out if we can model with normal reversible thermodynamics, or if we need to use more nonlinear equations like those for shock waves.This model can be varied, as toy models can be, to make it simulate different aspects of reality. You can add more upward pipes to the rectangle to simulate that air can rise in multiple places on the land. You can add friction to the lower pipe to simulate how trees slow the flow of wind.The Timing of the Forest EvapotranspirationI asked Makarieva about whether lakes are also key to bringing in the rain, since they also evapotranspire. She replied that forests are more important, because they can control when they evapotranspire. If trees begin evapotranspiring as the humidity levels are rising (during the transition from dry to wet season), then the water vapor released helps push the humidity over the saturation point. The water vapor condensing then creates a pressure drop that sucks in the sea breeze. Its the timing that matters. Imagine someone sitting on a swing. To make them go higher you want to push them at certain points in the swing. You want to push when the humidity is rising to a point where it can more easily go over the saturation point with some help from evapotranspiration. Forests may have evolved, or maybe learned when to push on the swing. Lakes on the other hand cannot control when they push on the swing.In the Amazon, scientists looked at the isotopes of water in the rain at the onset of wet season, and found that it contained isotopes that come from the forest. It may be thats forests help initate the wet season.I asked Makarieva about the climate simulations of Francina Dominguez (who we had previously interviewed here) who showed that forests slow the wind, thus helping to create rain. I thought maybe they were making different arguments. One was saying forests create wind, the other saying forests are slowing wind. Makarieva clarified that Dominguez’s theory is compatible with the biotic pump theory, as the condensation attracts the wind, and then the forests can slow the wind down when it arrives so it can create rain. Large scale atmospheric circulations, extreme weather and hurricanesThe biotic pump effect also applies to large scale atmospheric circulatory systems like the Hadley Cell, the Ferrel Cell and the Walker cell (see this previous article in this newsletter) because they involve water condensation. These cells affect extreme weather events all over the world. The biotic pump affect applies to how hurricanes are generated. According to Makarieva and Gorshov calculations using the biotic pump give more more accurate values for wind velocity for hurricanes and for large scale circulations cells than do calculations made using standard meteorology. This is important because it can help us quantify how deforestration and afforestration affects extreme weather events. More on this in upcoming newsletter editions.…………………….I recorded this podcast several months ago, but because I wanted to understand the biotic pump effect more before I wrote about it, I have since spent a lot of time reading the research papers, trying to understand the math and physics, learning all the technical terms, and also giving myself an accelerated course in standard atmospheric science. I also spent a bit of time playing around with and developing intuitive models to capture the essense of the mathematics. ……………………..This is a reader supported publication, and you are welcome, if you feel called, to financially support the research, recording and writing of this newsletter/podcast. This helps me spend more time working on this.AppendixMakarieva and Gorshkov in their paper Biotic pump of atmospheric moisture as driver of the hydrological cycle on land wrote “vaporation and transpiration cause an elevated moisture content in the vertical column of air over a forest, which, in turn, produces elevated condensation well above the canopy owing to the adiabatic ascent of moist air. The loss of gas out of the air column from condensation decreases air pressure well above the canopy, causing an increased vertical pressure gradient that results in an ascending air.” And “The non-equilibrium vertical distribution of atmospheric water vapor associated with the observed vertical lapse rate of air temperature produces an upward directed force, termed evaporative force, which causes the ascending motion of air masses, as well as the horizontal air motions from areas with low evaporation to areas with high evaporation.” [ref 1] Makarieva and Gorschkov wrote in their paper The Biotic Pump: Condensation, atmospheric dynamics and climate that given a state where water moisture in air is above saturation - “such a hypothetical static distribution of vertically isothermal moist air is unstable. Any random upward displacement of an air volume leads to adiabatic cooling of the rising air. Air temperature drops such that the equilibrium partial pressure of water vapour dictated by the Boltzmann distribution becomes oversaturated at all heights where the moist saturated air ascends. This causes the water vapour to condense. Its partial pressure decreases down to the saturated pressure. Condensation diminishes the total air pressure and disturbs the hydrostatic distribution of moist air. The vertical gradient of air pressure becomes greater than the weight of a unit air volume. There appears an upward directed force acting on a unit air volume. A static equilibrium of moist air in the gravitational field is not possible. The air begins to ascend along the non-equilibrium pressure gradient produced by condensation. Condensation is sustained by continuous evaporation of water vapour from the hydrosphere. The upward-directed force that acts on moist air and causes it to rise adiabatically is termed the evaporative-condensational force (Makarieva and Gorshkov, 2007, 2009a).Importantly, the evaporative-condensational force causes air to ascend adiabatically,i.e., with no exchange of heat, over a large area with linear size exceeding the verticalscale height h even if the atmosphere is initially vertically isothermal. This is not abuoyancy-related force traditionally invoked to explain convective instability.In a vertically isothermal atmosphere, a small air parcel with linear dimensionssmaller than h may occasionally ascend due to the Archimedes force − if temperaturefluctuations make the parcel warmer than the surrounding air. But, as the air parcel cools while ascending, its positive buoyancy disappears and the motion extinguishesMoreover, the mixing of such parcels with surrounding air destroys the adiabaticcharacter of their motion. Most condensed water vapour leaves the atmosphere as precipitation. A minor part is maintained in the atmosphere by the rising air flow. This imposes a drag force on rising air and reduces its vertical velocity. In Section 6, we discuss the significance of this gravitational drag for condensation-induced air motions. Unlike the flow of water vapour, which condenses while rising, the flow of dry air components, which conserve their mass, cannot be unidirectional (vertical), because the dry air does not disappear as it ascends. For this reason, regions of horizontal air flow will appear. Condensation of water vapour in the ascending air produces both vertical and horizontal pressure gradients. The presence of water vapour in the atmosphere contacting with a liquid hydrosphere leads to the formation of three-dimensional circulation patterns. To this point in time, these complex condensation-induced air motions have not received consideration frommeteorologists.” [ref 2] References* A. M. Makarieva, V. G. Gorshkov. Biotic pump of atmospheric moisture as driver of the hydrological cycle on land. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions, 2006, 3 (4), pp.2621-2673. https://hal.science/hal-00298762* Makarieva A.M., Gorshkov V.G. (2010) The Biotic Pump: Condensation, atmospheric dynamics and climate. International Journal of Water, 5(4), 365-385. doi: 10.1504/IJW.2010.038729 Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

How do we get the word out to a larger audience about regenerative water? I remember many years ago hearing the Dalai Llama telling a popular band, that they have a much wider audience to spread the word about meditation than he did. Music is a vehicle of diffusion.I’ve been intrigued about getting the tale of water into song. A year and a bit ago, I played around singing some water songs with my friend Rachel.This year, my friend Teisho, who had been hearing me talk about recording some water songs for awhile, took the initiative, and said lets record a rap song about water together. So here it is :)……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Help us spread the word.This is a reader supported publication.You can also find our water rap song on the Climate Water Project channel on Spotify and Apple podcasts.………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Here are the lyrics:water that's why we arrivedwater that's why we survivedwater that's why we all thrivewater that's why we're aliveChorus - so let's dig a swale, guide the water trailslow it like a snail, prolong tha time scalecharging aquifers, sink it in no failthis is the water tale, this is the water taleyou might think: what do they you want from me,we need to understand how geomorphologylinks biology and climatologycause it's a cycle, break the chronologybreaks the small water cycle, man it's archetypalalmost genocidal, so listen my disciplewhen it rains inland, the water hits the groundis drunk by plants, but doesn't stay aroundthrough a process called evapotranspiration, the wind brings this inland circulationto the next little green patch of vegetation, then precipitation, then wetland filtrationthen soil rehydration, biomass formationmicrobe nation, biome salvation, dead plants on the ground start gestationstart accumulation, dark soil cultivationthat's carbon captivation, that's plant activationwildfire modulation, this needs preservation,stop the degradation, start regenerationthis planet needs savin, so get your educationChorus - so let's dig a swale, guide the water trailslow it like a snail, prolong the time scalecharging aquifers, sink it in no failthis is the water tale, this is the water taleso let's dig a swale, guide the water trailslow it like a snail, prolong the time scalecharging aquifers, sink it in no failthis is the water tale, this is the water taleplants regulate the earth's heat, in a photosynthetic beatturning water from liquid to non-visible vapor, it's neatbalancing the energy balance sheet, you already know, nature never sleepsthermodynamic cycle drives the heat shift drumbeatwater gushin, water hushing, water flushin, rushin rushing (el agua fluyendo)water gushin, water hushing, water flushin, rushin rushingwater gushin, water hushing, water flushin, rushin rushing (el agua fluyendo)water gushin, water hushing, water flushin, rushin rushingChorus - so let's dig a swale, guide the water trailslow it like a snail, prolong tha time scalecharging aquifers, sink it in no failthis is the water tale, this is the water taleso let's dig a swale, guide the water trailslow it like a snail, prolong tha time scalecharging aquifers, sink it in no failthis is the water tale, this is the water talethe more forest we steal, the less water we gotthe more life we kill, the less rain will dropthe more surface we seal, the more seeping is stoppedthis is gettin' real, it's about to feel hotlike this the continental water amount is decreasinglike this the torrential slaugther allowed is unceasinglike this the monumental carbon count we are releasingkeeps on increasing, so keep on this weavingof forests, of wind, of the water ways, bioregional ecosystem power playsfrom tha adria to cascadia, from sahel to saharafrom Great Lakes to the great plains, we'll all do it togetherChorus - so let's dig a swale, guide the water trailslow it like a snail, prolong tha time scalecharging aquifers, sink it in no failthis is the water tale, this is the water taleso let's dig a swale, guide the water trailslow it like a snail, prolong tha time scalecharging aquifers, sink it in no failthis is the water tale, this is the water tale Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

I am excited to have Charles Eisenstein on this podcast. He is an author and eloquent speaker who speaks on how modern society approaches ecology and each other, and what shifts we must make to connect more deeply to the world again. He is the author of “The Ascent of Humanity”, “Sacred Economics”, “The more beautiful world that we know is possible”, and the book “Climate”. In “Climate” he outlines the importance of water to climate.Here are some quotes from his book: “While most of the discourse around climate change focuses on temperature, water is the climatic factor that most directly impacts life. Life flourishes throughout the hot equatorial zone because of the presence of abundant rainfall, while deserts, because they receive little precipitation, are comparatively barren whatever their temperature.”“..the water cycle and the carbon cycle are closely entwined. We cannot speak of one without speaking of the other. The shift of emphasis I am about to offer is nothing as simplistic as “Water is more directly impactful, so we should forget about carbon.” What we will see is that by putting water first, the carbon problem and the warming problem will be solved as well.”“The paradigm shift [is] …… a shift from a geomechanical view to a Gaian view, a living systems view. Whether we are looking through the lens of carbon or water, from the living systems perspective we see that climate health depends on the health of local ecosystems everywhere.”In this podcast, we discuss the paradigm of a living earth, and the roles water plays in this living earth. He speaks about the shifts humanity can make to heal its relationship to the environment and climate at a systems level, and also at a heart-based consciousness level. He discusses the role of trees and water, wetlands in slowing water, biodiversity, systems approach to nature, including other species wants in our deliberations, ceremonial approaches to water, intelligence and information embedded in the ecosystem, shifting our food and agricultural systems, local bioregional approaches to water, and economic shifts we can make to help the environment.His website is https://charleseisenstein.org/ . Here is his chapter about water in the book “Climate”.……………………………………………………………………………………I met Charles many years ago when we were working to grow the gift economy. My efforts to build local gift economy communities are outlined in his book “Sacred Economics”…….. Its awesome to connect with again, this time around water.…………………………………………………………………………………….Help spread the word about this newsletter/podcast if you would like…This is a reader supported publication……………………………………………………………………………………You can also listen to the podcast with Charles Eisenstein on the “Climate Water Project” channel on Spotify and Apple podcasts. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Having been admiring their regreening project from afar for awhile, I was honored when I got the chance to interview Ties Van De Hoeven for this podcast, and learn about the whole array of techniques they would use for such a vast restoration undertaking. (The timestamps are available at end of this post). I wrote an essay about the project :Regreening the SinaiThe Sinai is a vast, wedge-shaped, tract of desert in northwest Egypt, sandwiched between the Mediterraen Sea and the Red Sea. A third the size of Florida, it is a land of bleached yellow sand, vast rolling dunes, and ochre cliffs. Vipers and lizards roam. The rugged landscape is made of granite and metamorphic rocks, limestone and sandstone chiseled by the wind. Vegetation is sparse. Scattered sparingly through the landscape are red-berried hawthorn trees, purple flowered thornbushes, fury green mirr higher in the landscape, and the prickly zilla lining the dry, ancient riverbeds that once carried water through the lush landscape. Less than 2 inches of rain fall down from the sky in a year. Half of that usually comes in one convective storm that brings with it mudslides and landslides crashing through the landscape.This is the land that Ties Van der Hoeven and his team is working ambitiously to regreen. It started as a smaller project when Ties was invited to use his dredging skills to help rehabilitate Lake Bardawil, located in the northern Sinai, adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea. The project then morphed into a larger enterprise to regreen the Sinai, and bring rain back to the region. It is a lake-restoration dredging project that became a land-restoration ecology project that became a regional climate restoration project. “Weathermakers”, Ties calls his team.[my interview with Ties van der Hoeven in video form]Early on, Ties Van der Hoeven connected with John Liu, a videographer turned eco-ringleader, who had documented the ecorestoration of the vast Loess Plain desert in China, and founded the network of Ecosystem Restoration Camps. John connected Ties with what he refers to as his team of Jedis, a team which includes people like John Todd, the ecologist who pioneered the use of emergent communities of microbes and plants to heal ecosystems, and Millan Millan, a hydroclimatologist who helped us understand how vegetation creates rain.Working together, the code for how to regenerate the desert began to emerge. It involved jumpstarting things just enough that nature could then take over. It entailed understanding how to get numerous feedback loops going - that between soil and microbes, between fish and plants, between carbon decomposers and carbon composers, between ecology and geomorphology, and between vegetation and climate. It involved setting in motion nutrient pathways and ecosystem self-regulation. Human technology would be used not to further separate man and nature, but instead to catalyse ecorestoration.Lake Bardawil is a 19 mile long saline lagoon, separated by a three meter sand-bar from the Mediterranean, and shaped like a triangle with a fish tail. The lake contains a memory of what happened long ago. Stored in its sediment, preserved by salt, and layered over by sand, were the complex carbon chains of long dead vegetation and animals that once dotted the lush Sinai. The lake, once twenty to forty meters deep, was now just 1.3 meters deep on average.This lake history holds the seeds of regenesis. Ties’s team first step is to reawaken the slumbered sediment. Geomorphology will activate ecology. Opening inlets and creating tidal gullies will allow the water from the Mediterranean, cooler and less salty, to come in to stir up the sediment, so that the sediment can once again enter into the carbon cycle arena. Here microbes, algae, diatoms will feed on it, pooping out nutrient material. Some of the sediment will escape through the inlet and attract fish towards the lake. Tides will bring some of the lake waters onto the mudflats where microbes can break down the sediment into soil. Saltmarshes will enlarge, and attract more birds. Over time food webs will grow in the lake - seagrass, bacterioplankton, zooplankton, miobenthos, mussels, crabs, bass and mullet - more biomass and more material that can become soil. The next stage in the project is to regenerate the land, to figure out how to grow vegetation on the sandy land with little or no rain. “Water begets water, soil is the womb, vegetation is the midwife” is the aphorism that Millan Millan expounds. Soil is the womb that absorbs water and grows the vegetation. Vegetation is the midwife that facilitates in the rain. When there is enough water in a system, it will attract more water. A decent proportion of the two and a half billon cubic meters of lake sediment from Lake Bardawil will be dredged up to use as soil in the Sinai peninsula. The plan is transform the salty sediment into nutrient-rich soil. The sediment will be laid out in shade-covered fields, where a serial progession of halophytes (salt tolerant plants) - grasses, potatoes, and then salt-friendly trees, will grow in them to help transform the sediment. They will also use a multitude of transparent geodesic domes, each containing a variety of tanks. In them, they will set up aquaponic systems, where microbial communities will grow, and where fish will eat plants, and plants will feed off the fish poop in a feedback loop that creates more nutrients. These nutrients are then used to enrich the sediment. The fish are delivered to enrich the local economy. And each day the saltwater in the tanks will evaporate, and then condense on the geodesic roof to form indoor rain which irrigates the soil.The nutrient rich soil and plants will be transported up to key places in the Sinai landscape where winds bring more water vapor. Fog nets will initally be set up to help with irrigation. As the plants and trees grow, multiply, and spread, there will be a point when the nascent ecosystem evolves to cross a critical point, a meteorological threshhold. Then something rather extraordinary will happen.From the wild sky, precious rain will begin to appear more frequently.The is because the relationship between vegetation and weather is reciprocal. It is not a one way causal relationship. Rain grows vegetation. And vegetation can also grow rain. Not only does climate affect biology. But biology affects climate. The hydroclimatologist Millan Millan figured out this causal logic while researching why rain loss was happening in Spain. Chopping down Spanish vegetation was decreasing the evapotranspiration, and that evapotranspiration was both needed to add to the ocean water vapor to create sufficient humidity for rain, and needed to cool the atmosphere so that the dew point for water vapor condensation was lower. [ref 1] In the Sinai, a continental divide like Spain, thermals rising from the desert create a low pressure system which sucks in the air from the Mediterranean Sea. The winds gain velocity, sweep across the dunes, ascend over southern Mount Catharina, and then rush out into the Red Sea. The water vapor the wind carries, usually has nary a chance to drop onto the hot, parched land.As Millan Millan studied the meteorological situation in the Sinai he concluded that when the vegetation became abundant enough, they would evapotranspire enough water vapor to add to the sea wind moisture, to be able to create rain. The cooling effect of the evaporotranspiration would also help slow the water vapor molecules, increasing their chances of nucleating into rain. Tree create turbulent friction in atmosphere that can decrease wind speed enough for water vapor molecules to find each other. The formation of the rain would help the winds to slow down, and the winds would even turn downward and flow back to where it came from. The rain would infiltrate into the soil, and then be ready to evapotranspire back up to help create the small water cycle.Once this biology-rain feedback loop is activated, other parts of the ecological engine can then rev into motion. Birds will spread seed across the landscape. Animals will eat food with seeds that they then poop everywhere. With enough soil and rain now in place, these seeds can grow and multiply. To emphasize this sometimes undervalued part of the regenerative cycle, perhaps we can add another clause to Millan Millan’s aphorism. “Water begets water, soil is the womb, vegetation is the midwife, animals are the matchmaker.” Or maybe it could be “Water begets water, soil is the womb, vegetation is the midwife, animals are the seed spreader.”The desert is probably not the only equilibrium state of the Sinai, a thriving ecosystem may also be one of its equilibrium states [2]. After all, the Sinai and Sahara was lush and fertile 10,000 to 7,000 years ago. A wobble in the earth orbit may have affected the climate then. In addition, human intervention may have hastened the destruction of the land. Forests were clear cut for the ancient civilization, which could have set off feedback loops of destruction. Its possible cutting riparian trees led to flooding, which led to less topsoil, which led to less vegetation, which led to less rain, which led to vegetation dying out. Ancient civilizations may have set off ever-increasing flood-drought cycles. (Increasing man-made flood-drought cycles are also happening now). As Ties and his team explored more the ripple effects of their regreening effort, they realized it would not just shift the weather patterns in the Sinai but also in neighboring regions. As the vegetated land slows and stops the wind, less water vapor is blown out to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. That water vapor is instead redirected to Northern Africa, Israel and Lebanon, creating rains there. Having less water blown into the Indian Ocean could lead to less cyclones and monsoons there. Quite possibly, if the Sinai had been regreened already, the 2022 Pakistani floods would have been much smaller, because the atmospheric rivers that originated in the Indian Ocean and then blew into Pakistan, would have been slighter in scale.There are certain terrestrial acupoints where if we regreen it will have an outsize impact on the climate. Continental divides are one of those places. Across this land, water blows from sea to another. If the wind does not stop to rain over the land, because it has been degraded, then all that water vapor is instead transferred to the sea which influences hurricanes and storms around the world. If the land is regreened it will help the winds to pause over the land and rain, increasing small water cycles and moisture hopping. The wind will shift and change rain patterns in neighboring countries. Changing the land cover in Spain not only affected the weather in Spain, but also changed the weather in the rest of Europe. Changing the landcover in the Sinai not only will affect the weather in the Sinai, but will create more rain in neighboring countries. (This has led me to ponder if there are other continental divide weather acupoints elsewhere in the world. See below after this essay for my idea)The Sinai is a source of pride for the Egyptians, an ancient land where much of history was written. Perhaps too in the future, we will remember it as a place where parts of an important chapter of Earth history will be written, the chapter where humankind learns and implements the codes for vast large scale land and climate regeneration.…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Continental Divide Acupoint: Bringing back water to the Western USIdea for discussion: Winds blow from the Pacific Ocean across Southern California and Northern Baja into the Gulf of Mexico. Those winds are carrying a lot of water vapor, and there is a lot of it that does not rain out on the land. If we regreen large desertified areas in that region we can cause a lot of water that is now escaping into the ocean to instead descend onto the land. One example of such a region is the vast tract of desert in Imperial Valley, California. Rodger Savory is proposing to regreen this desert by growing fungi, soil, and plants under a layer of cow dung. It seems to me that the desert regreening effort can slow the winds enough and change the water cycle. Winds will bring potentially lost water vapor up into Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and into the Midwest. The Colorado River will then receive increased precipitation, which will then give the West Coast of the US a lot more water supply, helping with the water scarcity issues…….. [What do you think of this idea? You are welcome to comment below]……..This podcast interview with Ties van der Hoeven is also available on the Climate Water Project channel on Spotify and Apple podcasts.………. [1] Millán M. Millán, Extreme hydrometeorological events and climate change predictions in Europe, Journal of Hydrology, Volume 518, Part B, 2014, Pages 206-224 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2013.12.041[2] Giorgio Parisi, who won the Nobel Prize in 2021, showed that a climate could have two different stable climates, and that random fluctuations could cause it to oscillate between them. This means the Sinai could possibly have two stable climate attractor states, one of desert, and one of vegetation. (to read the paper in the link go to sci-hub.st and type in the doi number. Also this link might work on your computer)……..Please share this post if you feel moved…… This is a reader supported publication. A reading of back issues can be useful to a deeper understanding of more recent posts. “Regreening the Sinai” podcast Time Stamps12:15 Lake Bardawil15:25 John Todd, eco-machines, aquatic food webs, purifying water, geodesic domes20:15 upgrading lake sediments to soil, growing plants, fog nets31:00 bringing excess glacier water36:45 bringing up the soil up the land37:25 birds spreading seeds and regreening the land44:30 restoring the water cycle, bringing back the rain, shifting the winds Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Not enough credence is given to a networked, community-based approach to floods and droughts. There is much more our villages, towns, and bioregional groups can do to guide the water cycle back to less extreme behavior using simple, low cost traditional methods.Minni Jain is the operations director of the Flow Partnership, an organization that facilitates communities to self-organize to deal with floods and droughts. In India the organization has helped activate thousands of communities to use water catchment and water slowing methods like johads (check dams and ponds), ditches, swales, leaky weirs, and thickets that significantly slow the rainwater so that it does not gather into housing destroying floods. These methods also help replenish the aquifers. [ a photo of a johad ]In drought prone areas, these same methods are also useful to increase the small water cycle, and to help hydrate the landscape further into the dry seasons. Johads can catch the water from wet season and help irrigate the area in the dry season. In this podcast Minni Jain expounds on her organizations’ work in India, Britain and Slovakia. We also discuss how to build a water movement through community activation, viral social media, and integration of science and people working on the ground. Minni Jain has always struck me as a very wise woman, and it was a pleasure to hear her expound on many subjects.……………………………………………………………………………………………………………We are putting on an roundtable event to clarify what are the central narratives/tales of water, and to coordinate efforts to get these stories out to the public. If you would like to participate, the event is on Nov 3rd Thu 9am-1030am (Pacific Time) Here are some of the possible narratives to think about. What would be your top 5 water narratives/tales?A. Evapotranspiration cools earth B. Small water cycle creates rain C. Hydraulic lift keeps soil wet D. Wetlands cleanse water E. Cities can recycle stormwater F. Organic soil absorbs more rainwater G. Slowing water keeps continents hydrated H. Tile drainage wastes water I. Wetlands humidify winds lessening wildfires J. Wetlands replenish groundwater K. Groundwater is our water bank L. Groundwater increases the small water cycle M. Groundwater quenches wildfires N. Forests attract rain O. Biodiversity increases small water cycle P. Drought-fire-flood cycle , aka Watershed death cycle (from Zach Weiss) Q. Absorb rainfall to lessen droughts, floods, fire, and heat R. Dams block fish, sediment, wetlands, and groundwater S. Plants regulate heat via water T. Animals changes soil which changes water cycle U. Ecological succession tends to increase small water cycle V. Healthy ecosystems creates clouds which can cool earth X. Increasing small water cycle lessens urban heat domes. Y. Increasing land evapotranspiration decreases hurricanes and extreme large rainfall. Z. Regenerative agriculture saves water…………………..This is a reader supported newsletter/podcastIf you want to download and listen to this podcast on your phone, this is on Apple podcasts, or you can look for the Substack app in the app store, and then download it. There is an app for Android and one for Iphone. On the app look for this podcast, then click on the Substack icon button on the bottom right corner to download it onto your phone.………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

The groundwater beneath our feet, out of sight, hidden under soil and bedrock, is a golden resource, supplying our farms with irrigation water, and providing our cities with drinking water. Its invisibility and infrequent mentions in the mass media, belies its importance in keeping our society running. Perhaps because of this unseen significance, we have, all over the world, been overdrawing aquifers.Forty percent of California’s water comes from the ground. A century of overdrawing the water has led to the water table to drop hundreds of feet. In the Central Valley, breadbasket to the US, so much water has been taken out of the aquifers for farming that the bedrock has collapsed, and the ground sunk. In the photo below you can see where the ground was in 1925, 1955, and 1977.Professor Helen Dahlke, of the University of California of Davis, has been leading the (re)charge to replenish California’s groundwaters. She has teamed up with farmers, to guide the excess water from the winter rains to flood farms, thus creating temporary wetlands. Over days and weeks, that water then sinks down to replenish the aquifers.In this podcast Helen Dahlke shares about her research, the groundwater situation in California, the quest to replenish its aquifers, the droughts and intermittent large rains, the wetlands and floods, and the interdiscplinary efforts to bring back nature-based solutions to our water needs all over the world.…..If you want to download and listen to this podcast on your phone, look for the Substack app in the app store, and then download it. There is an app for Android and one for Iphone. On the app look for this podcast, then click on the Substack icon button on the bottom right corner to download it onto your phone. There is also a Climate Water Project channel on Apple podcasts and Spotify where you can download the podcast. ….You can subscribe to this newsletter for free, or if you would like to support the writing and recording of this newsletter/podcast, and help further various efforts to restore our water cycles that I am working on, you can also get a paid subscription.Readings:“A Farmers Quest to Beat California’s Waves of Drought and Deluge” .Wired magazine article: https://www.wired.com/story/farmers-quest-beat-californias-drought-flood-climate-change/“As Rains Soak California, Farmers Test How To Store Water Underground” . NPR article: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/01/12/509179190/as-rains-soak-california-farmers-test-how-to-store-water-underground Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Francina Dominguez, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Illinois has been figuring out where our rain comes from. She has been tracking water as it moves across our continents. The process of moisture hopping, or moisture recycling (also known as the small water cycle in other circles), is the movement of water from air to land to air to land and so on - rain falls to the land, and then evapotranspires back up to form rain again. She studied the droughts in the US Midwest in 2012, and found that the droughts there were related to the drought in California. Rains hop inland from California to the Midwest. When there is less water vapor in California, there will be a less moisture hopping inland. [1] Francina Dominguez has also been researching the behavior of rain in South America. Having grown up in Colombia, which is home to part of the Amazon rainforest, she was motivated to stop it from being chopped down. When she became a hydroclimatologist, she used climate models to study the effect Amazonian deforestation would have on the water cycle.Her simulations found something quite surprising.Climate modelers do not always know what effects will emerge out of their models. They put in various equations and various parameters into their models, and then they wait for it to emerge a result. When Francina Dominguez modeled deforestration in the Amazon she was expecting to find that moisture recycling (aka the small water cycle) would decrease as forests were chopped down. What she instead found, to her surprise, was that the moisture recycling stayed the same, and it was the wind that increased. When the trees were cut down, the wind blew in faster which made it harder for the water vapor molecules to coalesce to form rain. Deforestation led to wind increase, and the wind increase led to rain reduction. Or to state it another way as a maxim - forests makes less wind, less wind makes more rain. [2,3,4,5,6]Francina Dominguez has also studied the interaction of groundwater and climate. (listen at 51:58). At first glance it might seem that groundwater would not affect drought and rainfall patterns. After all groundwater is underground and not touching the air. But water is a complex systems phenomena, understanding one part often requires understanding how all the parts fit together. What Francina found in her models was that groundwater would have a significant effect on rain, because it was being brought up by the root systems of the vegetation, and then would evapotranspire into the air to increase the moisture content in the air. Groundwater levels thus affect drought and rainfall patterns. [7,8] Water all around the world forms a large, interconnected system, and Francina Dominguez has been helping clarify some of these interconnections.……………………………………………………………………………….Some excerpts from interview (with slight edits where there was some unclarity)Francina: All the wind patterns and the circulation is affected when you deforest, so you are actually shifting the rain downwind. In order to have rain you need convergence of this moisture in a certain region. When you deforest you are creating divergence, you are taking this moisture from the region, and having it rain downwind.The Amazonian deforestration has big local impacts, and in terms of the affect downwind of it , I don’t have enough evidence to link any kind of drought in Argentina to Amazonian deforestration. I do get asked this question a lot. When I started this research I thought for sure this is the case, but now I don’t know, none of my studies have conclusively shown this. The difference is that you have more water coming in from the ocean, so that even if you have less local water, you do not see a huge change in the precipitation in Argentina.Alpha: Why is there more water coming in from the ocean when you deforest?Francina: Because of circulation, this is the crazy thing about this problem, our hypothesis right now is that when you deforest you are creating a surface that is less rough, so the wind accelerates, so you have stronger winds over deforested regions, When you cut down all these tall trees, then you have an acceleration of the wind that then brings in more water from the ocean.Me: Doesn’t water vapor flow at heights as high as 1000m, the trees are only about 20m tall, how can something like a tree that is 20m tall affect something as high as a 1000m?Francina: Because surface roughness is super important up until the entire boundary level, which can be 2000 meter in height. So the surface roughness is a super important characteristic of the low level winds.Alpha: So by analogy you can imagine a smooth pipe and a rough pipe, where the rough pipe would create a lot of turbulent flow as water flows through it.Francina : Yes. If you deforest the Amazon, it will be warmer at the surface, you will have more convection, but on the other hand you also have less roughness. You have two types of turbulence, one type of turbulence is convection/buoyancy, and another type is turbulence because of the roughness. What we found is that in the Amazon the roughness is winning.Many of these processes are a function of the scale that you are looking at. Most of the work has been done is done with global climate models which are coarse resolution, so they have to approximate what happens in a grid scale, it’s too big to be able to a convective storm or details of the topography, in general when you go to higher resolution you are able to get more realistic picture of what is going on. This work was done at 20 km resolution. At larger cells there are many approximations and parametizations, so at higher resolution you make less assumptions.On groundwater-rain coupling:Francina: When you are doing climate modelling, you are really interested in sources of memory, parts of the system that vary at long time scales. The ocean is currently the most important source of memory for the climate system, that’s why we need to get the oceans to get the climate right. One of the things my group is working on is groundwater, and it’s a similar problem in that the groundwater varies really slowly. If you have vegetation that taps into that groundwater they have this continuous source of moisture than if they just rely on precipitation. We have shown for South America that when you include groundwater, there is this large region of the La Plata region, you are better able to represent the precipitation and temperature patterns because you are representing the groundwater better. If you do not have the plants that can tap into this groundwater then you are not getting that biophysical mechanism that links the below ground to the atmosphere. So what we are trying to do, is that say okay most models have a maximum rooting depth of 2 meters, but in reality you can have 20 meter root systems, especially in the Amazon. If you include the groundwater and the roots are we able to capture the longer scale oscillations are we better able to represent precipitation patterns.Alpha: We have wet season and dry season. In dry season the groundwater can evapotranspire to create rain, so there are less extremes of rainFrancina: Exactly.……………………………………………………………………………….If you want to download and listen to this podcast on your phone, look for the Substack app in the app store, and then download it. There is an app for Android and one for Iphone. On the app look for this podcast, then click on the Substack icon button on the bottom right corner to download it onto your phone. This podcast is also on Apple podcasts and Spotify in the Climate Water Project channel.(If you like this post, feel free to share it with your friends by clicking on the share button)References[1] Herrera‐Estrada, Julio E., J. Alejandro Martinez, Francina Dominguez, Kirsten L. Findell, Eric F. Wood, and Justin Sheffield. "Reduced moisture transport linked to drought propagation across North America." Geophysical Research Letters 46, no. 10 (2019): 5243-5253.[2] Eiras-Barca, J., Dominguez, F., Yang, Z., Chug, D., Nieto, R., Gimeno, L. and Miguez-Macho, G. (2020), Changes in South American hydroclimate under projected Amazonian deforestation. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci., 1472: 104-122. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14364[3] Sud, Y. C., Shukla, J., & Mintz, Y. (1988). Influence of Land Surface Roughness on Atmospheric Circulation and Precipitation: A Sensitivity Study with a General Circulation Model, Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 27(9), 1036-1054. Retrieved Oct 6, 2022, from https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/27/9/1520-0450_1988_027_1036_iolsro_2_0_co_2.xml[4] Yang, Zhao, and Francina Dominguez. "Investigating land surface effects on the moisture transport over South America with a moisture tagging model." Journal of Climate 32, no. 19 (2019): 6627-6644.[5] Chug, Divyansh, Francina Dominguez, and Zhao Yang. "The Amazon and La Plata River Basins as Moisture Sources of South America: Climatology and Intraseasonal Variability." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 127, no. 12 (2022): e2021JD035455[6] Martinez, J. Alejandro, and Francina Dominguez. "Sources of atmospheric moisture for the La Plata River basin." Journal of Climate 27, no. 17 (2014): 6737-6753[7] Martinez, J. Alejandro, Francina Dominguez, and Gonzalo Miguez-Macho. "Effects of a groundwater scheme on the simulation of soil moisture and evapotranspiration over southern South America." Journal of Hydrometeorology 17, no. 11 (2016): 2941-2957.[8] Martinez, J. Alejandro, Francina Dominguez, and Gonzalo Miguez-Macho. "Impacts of a groundwater scheme on hydroclimatological conditions over southern South America." Journal of Hydrometeorology 17, no. 11 (2016): 2959-2978[9] Roy, Tirthankar, J. Alejandro Martinez, Julio E. Herrera-Estrada, Yu Zhang, Francina Dominguez, Alexis Berg, Mike Ek, and Eric F. Wood. "Role of moisture transport and recycling in characterizing droughts: Perspectives from two recent US droughts and the CFSv2 system." Journal of Hydrometeorology 20, no. 1 (2019): 139-154.[10] Gimeno, Luis, Francina Dominguez, Raquel Nieto, Ricardo Trigo, Anita Drumond, Chris JC Reason, Andréa S. Taschetto, Alexandre M. Ramos, Ramesh Kumar, and José Marengo. "Major mechanisms of atmospheric moisture transport and their role in extreme precipitation events." Annual Review of Environment and Resources 41 (2016): 117-141. [11] Talk by Francina Dominguez Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

When I was first beginning to awaken to the power of water to help restore our landscapes and climate, I stumbled upon Judith Schwartz’s turqouise book “Water in plain sight” in a bookstore, and thought, wow, there are so many wonderful ways we can help restore our water cycles. Little did I know at that point, that, to my delight, I would actually get a chance to get to know Judith, as I got immersed in the world of regenerative water and started in engaging in a variety of different water projects. It was great to be around the warmth with which she talked about water, and to see the twinkle in her eye about the subject.Judith pursued her interest in water and our ecology as a journalist, and has documented various ways we can restore our water and ecosystems in her books : “Cows save the planet”, “The Reindeer Chronicles”, and “Water in Plain Sight”, and has published articles in Scientific American, The Guardian, and Yes Magazine. In this podcast we talk about how animals can profoundly affect the water cycle, and in so doing also help restore our climate. Its an effect thats not often talked about, and that deserves more attention. Feel free to put in comment section your favorite animals that influence the water cycle. Here’s an excerpt from her book “The Reindeer Chronicles” on how reindeer affect the water, when its in the form of snow, and can thus affect the temperature of the landscape as a second order effect.“Reindeer can also help maintain permafrost by crushing the snowpack with their hooves, according to Sergey and Nikita Zimov, father-and-son research scientists in Russia. The Zimovs developed a project in the late 1980s, in which they brought herbivores that thrive in arctic conditions—reindeer, moose, Yakutian horse, bison, musk ox, yak, Kalmykian cow, and sheep—to their North Siberia reserve. The goal of Pleistocene Park, as they call it, is to re-create the productive Mammoth Steppe ecosystem that predated human expansion into far northern latitudes. The blanket of snow that cloaks the tundra for much of the year acts as an insulator, and this protects the soil surface from the cold, Nikita Zimov explains in a 2017 interview with PRI’s Living on Earth. “When animals trample down the snow, they actually thin that layer of snow, making it dense, and this allows much deeper freezing during the winter.” This sustained chill can extend snow cover to the spring months, which means maintaining higher surface albedo longer into the year. It also keeps the permafrost frosty, so that the microbial life in frozen soil doesn’t activate and consume organic matter, a process that releases greenhouse gases. In an experiment that compared areas with and without herbivores, the Zimovs found that soil temperature in places where animals grazed was lower by at least 15°C (27°F).”Judith Scwartz’s website is www.judithdschwartz.comAwhile back we were making a list of the top 100 ways to restore the water cycle. Some of the items on the list were animals. https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/top-100-methods-to-restore-the-water………………………………………….This Climate Water Project newsletter/podcast covers many aspects of regenerative water. And some of the ideas build on each other, so you can browse over archives at https://climatewaterproject.substack.comYou can subscribe for free, or you can help restore our water cycles by supporting my work in writing and putting out these newsletters/podcasts, as well as my work on various regenerative water projects, with $5 a month by subscribing. Or you can also help out by supporting me on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/watercology.Thanks! Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

In this podcast I interview Dr. Elizabeth Dougherty, executive director of WhollyH20. She was instrumental in helping get California to pass its greywater laws. She did this by bring different demographics together - the hippies who knew about what to do with water, with the Stanford engineers who were happy to learn about these methods, and the government officials who could implement the new water laws that allowed these new ways of working with water. She talks about getting Brock Dolman, now a water legend who runs the Water Institute at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, who back then was a long haired bare-foot hippie (edit: Brock Dolman wrote me to say he actually wasn’t bare foot back then ) to put on suits in order to be heard properly by formal administrators and public utilities workers. Elizabeth got her PhD in anthropology, and is interested in peoples relationship with the water cycles. Her organization has more recently worked with getting communities to connect with their watersheds, and talk about the stories of water in their neighborhoods, with one common, usually largely unknown, story being that neighborhoods have paved over their creeks. Telling these stories can help get a process called “daylighting” to bring these creeks back to the surface. In getting communities interested about their watershed, they learn about the various aspects of the water cycle, and are more willing to get water projects activated.Elizabeth also talks about the intersection of the diversity and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) movements, with the restoring-our-water-systems movement.We also talk about techniques you can use to get your local government to help restore the water cycle in your local neighborhood. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Nik Bertulis is a permaculture water educator, a designer of integrated water systems, implementing greywater, rainwater, stormwater and wetland systems. He cofounded Dig.coop a water conservation systems cooperative. He has designed many innovative water solutions for our environment.We talk about the importance of closing the nutrient cycles in our environment. What our society considers waste, our pee, our poo, our sewage, can be useful nutrients for the vegetation and soil. The distribution of pee and poo of animals moving around support the functioning of our ecosystems. Nik discusses how we can clean our sewage with nature’s natural biology and wetlands rather than with synthetic chemicals. Nik Bertulis and I will be teaching a “Climate Permaculture” class on Sept 17th 11am-1pm, 2022 . Permaculture is an approach to land management by harmonizing with nature’s ecosystem. Climate permaculture is an approach to climate by harmonizing with nature’s natural connections and cycles between land and atmosphere. For more info : https://www.eventbrite.com/e/413136320857 …………You can see the archives and past podcasts of this newsletter at https://climatewaterproject.substack.comYou can subscribe for free, or help support this newsletter and my regenerative water projects with a $5 a month subscription Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

In this podcast I had the honor of talking with David Maher about his work with Natural Sequence Farming, which is a landscape system to restore natural water cycles. We talk about how the water cycles impact drought, heat waves, rain, storms, and extreme weather. He advocates for urgent reversal in the global paradigm of drainage in the face of ecological and climate collapse, and is a firm believer that humanity either rehydrate the drained earth or face eventual desertification. I believe his voice needs to be heard a lot more in the regenerative water movement.David Maher is a master of rehydrating landscapes and replenishing groundwater, with two decades of experience in the field. He studied and worked with Peter Andrews (of Natural Sequence Farming). He learnt with aborigines who understood how the water moved in Australian landscapes. He has studied sustainable agriculture, terraced aquaculture, Fukuoka’s work, and learnt from Hakai Tane, and Tex Skewthorpe. Hakai Tane’s influence opened him up to systems science and complexity theory in understanding the water cycle. Michael Kravcik, Jan Pokorny, and Wilhelm Ripl visited them Peter Andrews and their work in Australia, which further helped him integrate the various aspects of the water cycle into his understanding.I find his way of framing Natural Sequence Farming quite intriguing, and also the way he looks thermodynamically at what is happening in the atmosphere and land in regards to water. He talks about how the land will heat up because we are not transferring away as much of that heat through evapotranspiration (we are not turning the heat of the land into latent heat), this means that we upset various heat balances on the planet, changing the temperature gradients, which leads to more extreme weather.Time stamps:1:30 Natural Sequence Farming16:35 Wetlands42 thermodynamics and water50 evapotranspiration and droughts, heat waves1:02:40 dissipative structures, hurricanes, extreme rain, atmospheric rivers, water cycles, nonequilibrium thermodynamics. He discusses the interesting the idea that as we dissipate less energy in the landscape as wetlands disappear, then we will dissipate more energy in the atmosphere, and have more extreme weather events.There are some more slightly advanced topics in this podcast so looking at some of the previous articles in this newsletter htts://climatewaterproject.substack.com can be useful .You can download this podcast on the Subtack app. It is on Apple podcast and Spotify as the Climate Water Project podcast.Also here is a glossary of terms used in this podcastr strategist - organisms that reproduce quickly in unstable environmentsk strategist - organisms that are living in stable environments. As an example you can have weeds and grasses as an r strategist that comes in first into environment. They then pave the way for k strategists which are the trees.leaky weir - a structure in the river to slow down the water like eg. check dam, bed control structure, and beaver dam analoguesbiotic pump - This hypothesis states that when water vapor, evapotranspired from forests, condenses to form clouds it creates a low pressure system that attracts ocean winds to it, that carry more water vapor to the forests. So forests create their own rain.second law of thermodynamics - entropy always increasessensible heat - the heat you can feel in the atmospherelatent heat - when liquid water turns into water vapor, some of the heat is stored as latent heat. When water vapor condenses back into clouds it releases that latent heat.short water cycle/ small water cycle - water that evapotranspires from the land, then falls back to land as rain, and so on.nonequilibrium thermodynamics - the study of systems and how they transport heat and matter when a system is out of equlibrium. The earth is in state of nonequilibrium as the sun is constantly hitting it with energy.dissipative structure - a stable state of a system in a nonequilibrium thermodynamic system. So for instance a hurricane is a stable structure that happens when there is a large flow of water vapor flowing upwards through the eye of the hurricane. It might be argued that the small water cycle is a dissipative structure.Further readingNatural Sequence Farming https://www.nsfarming.com/Peter Andrews “Back from the brink” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3747340-back-from-the-brinkABC news show about Natural Sequence Farming Wilhelm Ripl “Water the bloodstream of the atmosphere” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14728789/ for a thermodynamic perspective on water. Go to sci-hub.st/ and type in the doi number of the paper to get the whole paper to read for free (sci-hub allows you to read any scientific paper for free)Kravick, Pokorny, Kohutiar, Kovac, Toth “Water for the recovery of the climate: a new water paradigm” https://bio4climate.org/2017/05/13/water-for-the-recovery-of-the-climate-a-new-water-paradigm/…This is a reader supported publication. Please consider subscribing at the $5 a month to help this regenerative water movement. Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

In this podcast episode I discuss a plan to rehydrate California in order to help lessen the wildfires that have been hitting the state in the past few years. Elements of the strategy are also applicable to elsewhere around the world.Share in the comments section your thoughts on this plan, and other ideas for rehydrating CaliforniaStrategy:* Bring back the fog. California has lost a third of its fog over the last few decades [ref 1,2]. Vegetation uses the fog to keep hydrated. [ref 3-5] This can be done by lessening the urban heat dome effect in coastal California cities. Regreening our towns will decrease the heat emitted from them, which lessens fog. [ref 6]* Bring back wetlands in Central, Eastern and Southern California. Wetlands were once prevalent in Central California [ref 7] .Wetlands help create more humid air. As the winds, the Santa Anas and the Diablos, blow past these areas, they become less dry and hot. When the winds hit the mountains, they are less likely to fan wildfires. One way to bring back wetlands to the Central Valley is to have aquaponic wetland farms there. [ref 8] One way to bring back wetlands in Eastern california is to stop piping water from there to Southern California. Rivers will naturally create more wetlands if not dammed. Re-introducing beavers also helps rivers flow into floodplains and create wetlands.* Stop damming and piping so much of the water to Southern California cities and Central California farms. This leaves more water to hydrate the wilderness, lessening fires there. Places like Owens valley which got desertified for LA’s sake, can get regreened. Owen’s lake can come back naturally. Also undoing the dams will allow the sediment to create soil to grow more vegetation. Allowing rivers to overflow into floodplains hydrates the floodplains, and helps grow more vegetation there. Allowing rivers to run and overflow again will naturally lead to more wetlands in Central California again.* Stop using tile drainage systems in Central California farms which pipe out water from the soil to the ocean, so that the water is not used as efficiently in the landscape. Increasing the soil organic matter in farms will allow them to absorb more water and create less runoff. They then need a lot less water, and do not need to take so much water from dams. Currently 40% of Californias water is used for farms. This percentage can be much less while keeping the input the same.* Replenish aquifers in Central California by allowing rivers to overflow onto farmland during wet season. [ref 9] This creates a temporary wetlands on the farms, and allows the water to drain into aquifers below. As aquifers refill, farms can use more water from below rather than have it piped from dams elsewhere.* Guide rainfall back into the landscape in urban areas, farm areas, and in the wilderness. Swales, terraces, berms, wetlands, raingardens are various ways to do this. Guide our storm drainage to refill aquifers and rehydrate the environment rather than runoff to ocean. As more rainfall is in landscape there will also be more evapotranspiration, which can then add to the humidity in the air to create more rainfall downwind and inland.* Use the aquifers below Los Angeles and San Diego to store rainwater. And guide the stormwater into wetlands which clean the water, and then pass it to aquifers below. Billion dollar stormwater wetland projects are currently underway in LA. This will allow southern california to pipe less of its water from dams elsewhere. Those dams will then not dry up so much of the wilderness. * Rewild California. As more soil builds and vegetation grows, the rainwater gets slowed down. It seeps underground, and then can come out months later to keep rivers flowing year round into dry and fire season. This year round flow keeps the landscape hydrated. Also the vegetation evapotranspires water to create more rainfall. There is an effect called moisture hopping where water vapor is transpired into the air to create rainfall downwind. Water from the ocean is brought inland that way [ref 10,11] Ocean water is brought inland on a conveyor belt which is activated by a continual chain of vegetation growing from shore to inland. This then creates rain inland which can help lessen wildfires. The small water cycle, which is where water moves from land to sky and back to land again, can be restored to its full capacity. [ref 12,13] You can subscribe to this newsletter for free or from $5 a month. Money goes to supporting the regenerative water movement.References* "Clearing and present danger: Fog that nourishes California redwoods is declining" Tennesen Sci.American(2010) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fog-that-nourishes-california-redwoods-declining/ * "Climate context and ecological implications of summer fog decline in coast redwood region" Johnstone, Dawson PNAS March 9, 2010 107 (10) 4533-4538; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0915062107* Berry ZC, Emery NC, Gotsch SG, Goldsmith GR. Foliar water uptake: Processes, pathways, and integration into plant water budgets. Plant Cell Environ. 2019 Feb;42(2):410-423. doi:10.1111/pce.13439Redwood leaves get 2-11% of their hydration through foliar uptake i.e. water coming through leaves * Limm EB, Simonin KA, Bothman AG, Dawson TE. Foliar water uptake: a common water acquisition strategy for plants of the redwood forest. Oecologia. 2009 Sep;161(3):449-59. doi: 10.1007/s00442-009-1400-3 * Qiao, N., Zhang, L., Huang, C., Jiao, W., Maggs-Kölling, G., Marais, E., & Wang, L. (2020). Satellite observed positive impacts of fog on vegetation. Geophysical Research Letters, 47, e2020GL088428. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL088428* Gautam, R., & Singh, M. K. (2018). Urban heat island over Delhi punches holes in widespread fog in the Indo-Gangetic Plains.Geophysical Research Letters,45,1114–1121. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076794* https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/dcfa9c9fa6464e89a45924a4ebec5a15?utm_source=social&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mapmonday-CaliforniaWetlands-051721* https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish* https://www.kcra.com/article/new-research-explores-how-farmers-can-help-california-rebuild-groundwater-supply/39840234#* Van der Ent, R. J., Savenije, H. H. G., Schaefli, B., and Steele-Dunne, S. C. (2010), Origin and fate of atmospheric moisture over continents, Water Resour. Res., 46, W09525, doi:10.1029/2010WR009127* Dominguez, F., Villegas, J. C., and Breshears, D. D. (2009), Spatial extent of the North American Monsoon: Increased cross-regional linkages via atmospheric pathways, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L07401, doi:10.1029/2008GL037012* "New water paradigm: Water for the recovery of the climate" M. Kravčík, J. Pokorný, J. Kohutiar, M. Kováč, E. Tóth http://www.waterparadigm.org/download/Water_for_the_Recovery_of_the_Climate_A_New_Water_Paradigm.pdf* Millán, Millán M. "Extreme hydrometeorological events and climate change predictions in Europe." Journal of Hydrology 518 (2014): 206-224 Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

In this podcast I interview Angelina Cook, who has been working tirelessly for many years protecting the waters in Mt Shasta and McCloud area, where she is on the Water Council.We have a discussion around grey and green infrastructure of water. Gray infrastructure is human built structures to manage our water system. Green infrastructure, also called nature based solutions, is nature managing our water systems. Gray parts of the infrastructure use dams to store water. Green parts of the infrastructure use wetlands and aquifers to store water. Gray infrastructure uses chemical sewage plants to clean the water, green infrastructure uses wetlands, microbes, fungi, mussels etc to clean the water. Gray infrastructure uses electricity and aqueducts to move water. Green infrastructure uses the sun to evaporate the water and the wind to move it around. Gray infrastructure uses levees, deeper channelized rivers, and dams to do flood control. Green infrastructure uses floodplains, wetlands, rich soil, and vegetation for flood control.Here is a list of resources and references on green infrastructure and nature based solutions.Conservation International on green-gray infrastructure https://www.conservation.org/projects/green-gray-infrastructureEnvironmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the US on “Why you should consider green infrastructure for your community” https://www.epa.gov/G3/why-you-should-consider-green-stormwater-infrastructure-your-communityEPA list of green infrastructure funding opportunities https://www.epa.gov/green-infrastructure/green-infrastructure-funding-opportunitiesAAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) on “Barriers to equitable implementation of green and nature based solutions” https://www.aaas.org/events/community-and-organization-panel-discussion-green-infrastructureFrantzeskaki, Niki. "Seven lessons for planning nature-based solutions in cities." Environmental science & policy 93 (2019): 101-111 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901118310888“A review of nature-based solutions for urban water management in European circular cities : a critical assessment based on case studies and literature” by Hasan Volkan Oral et al https://iwaponline.com/bgs/article/2/1/112/71868/A-review-of-nature-based-solutions-for-urban-water…If you would like to support this work please consider being a paid subscriber of this newsletter or joining my patreon at www.patreon.com/watercology Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe

Meteorologist Millan Millan’s research work discovered that rain was disappearing because land use was affecting evapotranspiration rates. In this episode he talks about what we need to do to restore rains and ecosystems.In the podcast excerpt below he talks about when he was working for the European commision, and was asked why the rain was lessening.Millan Millan : “The information came in that there was a perceived loss of Mediterranean storms, and I was assigned to look into it. Most of the Mediterranean used to be covered with marshes as far as 2000 as years ago, and at that time it rained quite a bit, equivalent to 2000 liters per square meter per year. Recently, as people filled in the coastal marshes and lagoons, as power plants, oil refineries, and housing were built, the amount of water being driven in by the sea breeze went down, as did the frequency of the storms.As sea breezes blows inland from the sea, the air has a water content of 14 grams per kilogram of air. It heats up by 16 degrees by the time it reaches 80 kilometers inland, which then requires a water content of 21 grams per kilogram of air to condense into rain.The sea breezes develop because there is differential heating between land and coast. That differential heat drives the sea breeze, and at the same time it contributes to heating up the air mass that comes in from the sea, and that added heat, what it makes, is that the cloud condensation level starts going up. And if you overheat the ground because you get rid of vegetation or you build up concrete surfaces, they add heat but they don’t add moisture. In the old times you have a certain amount of heating, and a certain amount of moisture added from vegetation. The land cools itself by evapotranspiring the water. Eventually the air humidity reaches a condensation point and you have a summer storm developing some time in the afternoon. And that cycle would go on for almost every day. And the following day the moist soil would contribute to the vegetation transpiring and put the moisture into the atmosphere again, and you would see the same amount of water going around and around for many days during the summer. If you change the land use cover you change that cycle. Our calculations show that as soon as you change an area 6 miles by 6 miles the precipitation downwind is already affected.That is also true in the Amazon. They find that as soon as they cut down about 36 square miles, precipitation stopped over that area. In the tropics 65% of the water that comes down during the rainy season in the summer, is water that precipitated during the three previous days. So 65% of the 2000 liters per square meter per year of rain, which is about 1300 liters per square meter per year, is the amount of water the forest requires to keep recirculating so that your net gain is the difference. The water that ends up in the river is the other 35%, capturing 700 liters.Land use alters hydrological cycle immediately. When you cut a forest, or when you build a road, there is immediate change of a little bit. People say its too little, but its not too little, when you add a little, and a little bit more, eventually you hit a threshold, a critical point, and after you cross that point, your regional precipitation disappears.Our results was first presented in San Diego, California in 1997, and the head of US forest service at the time, a fellow called Miller, said “if you what you said applies in California we will have serious problems with forest fires in about 25 years”Reference:Millan Millan’s research paper “Extreme hydrometeorological events and climate change predictions in Europe” ( https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/museecology/2014_con_PORTADA_J.Hydrol.pdf Get full access to Climate Water Project at climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe