Climate Water Project

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 h

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 underne

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 This is a

An interview with Erica Gies, author of "Water Always Wins" and writer for New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American and Nature. She discusses how our current 'grey infrastructure' solutions to floods and droughts, may cause more problems than they solve. Instead she proposes 'green infrastructure', nature-based solutions. She discusses the importance of not destroying the natural ability of the landscape to hold moisture, in order not to increase possibility of wildfires. For more info and newsletter climatewaterproject.substack.com

86 mins

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com

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. Didi Pershouse is landandleadership.org The Climate Water Project is at climatewaterproject.substack.com This is a newsletter you can subscribe to. Instagram.com/climatewaterproject

74 mins

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 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com

Zach Weiss is a land and water manager that helps restore the water cycle on our land. He also teaches a course to train people in water restoration. For the essay interview see here. For a link to his water course see here

67 mins

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 bac

Andrew Millison is one of the world's most known permaculture teachers. He travelled to India to document what he calls the worlds largest permaculture project, where 8000 villagers participated to build earthworks and reforest the land, which restored the water cycle to help the crops grow, and also brought back the rain. For accompanying article to this podcast https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/indias-regenerative-water-movement Time stamps for podcast: 1:10 Learning about water Arizona. Curb cut idea of Brad Lancaster 6:15 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 Africa 49:20 water situation in USA 53:57 dampening extreme weather through restoration of the land. Shock absorbers do lessen extreme flooding and drought. 56:10 On integrating climate movement and permaculture https://www.youtube.com/@amillison To support this podcast patreon.com/watercology

62 mins

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 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com