Climate Water Project

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 mois...

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...

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 atte...

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 con...

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...

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...

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...

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 wate...

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 wate...

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...

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...

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...

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 us...

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, th...

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 ha...

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 ach...

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-b...

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...

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.

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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 an...

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 Se...

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...

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...

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 an...

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 aw...

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...

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 Sinai

The 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...

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...

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...

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...

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 aro...

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...

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...

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...

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 California

Strategy:

* 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...

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...

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 2...