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
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Here is a transcript of part of our interview, edited for brevity, clarity, and understanding:
Nick Steiner Interview
Alpha: 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 Stories
Alpha : 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.
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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.
The joy of restoring water cycles : Nick Steiner