Climate Water Project

Restoring the world’s water cycles is a craft, one that takes time to learn, and a community to grow within. That community is being built. Water Stories is an education platform, community network, and hands-on career pathway dedicated to restoring the world’s water. It has been quietly growing, building a network of extraordinary people, advocating for landscape-scale change, and educating a new...

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...

I met Stephanie Betts a couple of months ago and was struck by her dynamic and enthusiastic energy. She had launched a pioneering, ambitious, and viable project to restoring the water cycle in a large scale systems way. Last week we sat down and talked about her project and her life. Stephanie Betts had worked in law and investment banking and was leading meetings between M&G (global investment ma...

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,...

I was mesmerized listening to John Cherry talk about groundwater, so absorbed that I didn’t notice that two hours had gone by. With lucid clarity, he laid bare the massive groundwater crisis engulfing us. Cherry speaks from a place of gravitas. He’s won the Stockholm Water Prize, known as the ‘Nobel’ of water, which is awarded in conjunction with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the same ins...

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...

In this podcast, I had the wonderful experience of talking with Douglas Sheil, professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, about forests. Douglas's academic adventures took him on a journey from his homeland to places like the rainforests of Indonesia, where he studied how local communities can help protect forests. He has studied forests in many forms of their complexity and wrote a we...

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...

A wonderful new documentary, Our Blue World , is out, and it offers a panoramic exploration of how communities across the globe are learning to live in greater harmony with water. The film highlights a wide range of innovative and traditional practices—from China’s sponge city initiative, to New Zealand’s recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person, to the ancient Peruvian techniques for...

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 phr...

Peter Andrews, also known as PA, was an Australian racehorse breeder who in the 1970s bought a piece of property, in the state of New South Wales, to raise racehorses. However the land he bought, the Tarwyn Park property, was degraded and the water on it was salinated. After a lot of thought and experimentation he developed his own set of restoration techniques. He looked at the dried up patterns...

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...

I met Sieger Burger a few years back, and we have had quite a few interesting conversations about water over that time. He is a hydrologist and writer. In this conversation we range over many aspects of the water cycle, with a focus on hydraulic redistribution (how plants bring up groundwater), and foliar water upake (the process by which leafs can take in water). During Sieger’s Dutch childhood,...

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...

Trees, stout and rugged, once dotted the valleys in the Makkah province in Saudia Arabia. An indigenous system of community land management called Hima allowed nature to flourish for thousands of years. But then in 1950s Hima was abolished, and desertification set in. People cut down trees, so they could have money to import food for their animals. The land became austere. The sun seared desolatio...

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 neighborin...

While in Spain, Nick Steiner, the water restorationist, and I were involved in discussions with folks from the Spanish hospitality sector about restoring the water cycles and bringing back the rains there. It began to dawn on us that eco-tourism could play a role in the regenerative water movement. Anna Pollock, who is from the UK, heard of our discussions, and contacted me. She has been a leader...

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 i...

I asked a friend of mine what her favorite podcast was and she said Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food. I suspect it might be quite a lot of people’s favorite podcast. The groundbreaking podcast interviews a lot of the key players in the regenerative food and agriculture space - the investors, the farmers, the growers, the herders, the locals, the educators, the policy makers, the bank...

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 mul...

Maladaptation. That is the word Stephen Robert Miller used to frame the essence of the issue - the problem that sometimes besets modern infrastructural approaches to water shortages, drought, floods, tsunamis, and cyclones. I looked up the definition of the word in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary - “a poor or inadequate adaptation”. The dictionary gives current examples of how the word has u...

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, lo...

From restoring peoples health to restoring the earth health, Didi Pershouse, brings her sweetness and wisdom to help heal humans and Gaia. She is the author of “Understanding soil health and watershed function”, and teaches ecological knowledge through her Land and Leadership Initiative. In conjunction with Walter Jehne, she has facilitated numerous water projects around the world. Recently, Didi...

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...

Displaying pictures of plants, soil and earthworks being drawn on a see-through whiteboard, accompanied with clear and articulate explanations, Andrew Millison’s water and permaculture videos have reached millions of viewers on Youtube, making Andrew one of the most well known permaculture teachers in the world today. Beginning in the desert like conditions of Arizona, Andrew learnt the ways of wa...