Climate Water Project

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

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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 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.”…………………………………….‍ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 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! This is a public episode. 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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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climatewaterproject.substack.com/subscribe