A list of the amazing people interviewed here over the last three years

water restorationists, permaculturists, farmers, authors, journalists, atmospheric scientists, hydrologists, physicists, facilitators, networkers, educators & collaborative project managers

Substack has a live video feature now. I thought to try it out. I plan to host a couple of Q&A sessions. You can come on and ask me questions about anything water related, or just listen in these sessions. I will host the first session this Sunday Mar 16th, 3pm PST. To get on, you need to download the Substack app. The event is for paid subscribers. Just before 3pm, Substack will send you a notification of the event on the app, and you can click on link and join.

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There’s been a lot of amazing people interviewed here on the Climate Water Project podcast. I’ve been blessed to speak to all these folks. I thought it would be helpful to make a list the people who have come on over the last three years. These incredible people have shared a lot of insights into the essence of regenerative water. Probably many things said in their interviews could be turned into aphorisms. There’s so much deep wisdom, that the interviews are probably worth listening to multiple times.

A new paradigm of regenerative water is emerging, its multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, and these are some of the key folks lighting that way forward. The interviews are presented in chronological order with which they came on the show. After their interviewee’s name, I reprinted a brief excerpt from the article, or wrote a little snippet about them.

Millan Millan : Land-use and climate change

“Meteorologist Millan Millan’s research work discovered that rain was disappearing because land use was affecting evapotranspiration rates. In this episode he talks about what we need to do to restore rains and ecosystems………… He talks about when he was working for the European commision, and was asked why the rain was lessening.” As a result he made the important discovery that deforestation, and the draining of the marshes had led to the loss of rain in Spain. This was because the land could no longer absorb as much rain, and could not evapotranspire as much water vapor to add to the ocean moisture blowing inland, to create rain. Millan has become a legend in the field.

Angelina Cook : Green & grey infrastructure for water

“Angelina Cook has been working tirelessly for many years protecting the waters in California’s Mt Shasta and McCloud area, where she is on the Water Council. We have a discussion around grey and green infrastructure of water. Gray infrastructure is human built structures to manage our water system. Green infrastructure, also called nature based solutions, is nature managing our water systems.”

David Maher : Natural Sequence Farming, climate change, and water

“David Maher works with Natural Sequence Farming, which is a landscape system to restore natural water cycles. We talk about how the water cycles impact drought, heat waves, rain, storms, and extreme weather. He advocates for urgent reversal in the global paradigm of drainage in the face of ecological and climate collapse. He is a master of rehydrating landscapes and replenishing groundwater, with two decades of experience in the field”

Nik Bertulis : Pee, Poo, Wastewater as Nutrient Water

“Nik Bertulis is a permaculture water educator, a designer of integrated water systems, implementing greywater, rainwater, stormwater and wetland systems. We talk about the importance of closing the nutrient cycles in our environment. What our society considers waste, our pee, our poo, our sewage, can be useful nutrients for the vegetation and soil. The distribution of pee and poo of animals moving around support the functioning of our ecosystems. Nik discusses how we can clean our sewage with nature’s natural biology and wetlands rather than with synthetic chemicals.”

Elizabeth Dougherty: Stories of our watersheds

“Dr. Elizabeth Dougherty, executive director of WhollyH2O. She was instrumental in helping get California to pass its greywater laws. She did this by bring different demographics together - the hippies who knew about what to do with water, with the Stanford engineers who were happy to learn about these methods, and the government officials who could implement the new water laws that allowed these new ways of working with water…. Elizabeth got her PhD in anthropology, and is interested in peoples relationship with the water cycles. Her organization has more recently worked with getting communities to connect with their watersheds, and talk about the stories of water in their neighborhoods.”

Judith Schwartz: Animals are helping our water cycle

As I was getting into water field, I remember seeing Judith Schwartz’s book “Water in plain sight” in bookstores. She’s done a lot of work to lay help awaken the general public to the many people pioneering regenerative water. In our interview we discuss how animals can help the water cycle, something that is often overlooked.

Francina Dominguez : How forests increase the rain

Hailing from Colombia, she was very interested in the Amazon deforestation. As professor at Univ of Illinois, she looked at how the forests affected rain. One of the intriguing things she found was that forests create turbulence which slows the wind, which can increase the amount of rain. Previous climate models did not have enough resolution to capture this effect properly.

Helena Dahlke : The plan to replenish the groundwater

California’s groundwater has been depleted to very low levels. As a University of California of Davis professor she has been looking at how to flood farms with the winter stormwaters, so that water can then seep into the ground and replenish groundwater.

Minni Jain : Communities can protect themselves against floods and droughts

“Not enough credence is given to a networked, community-based approach to floods and droughts. There is much more our villages, towns, and bioregional groups can do to guide the water cycle back to less extreme behavior using simple, low cost traditional methods. Minni Jain is the operations director of the Flow Partnership, an organization that facilitates communities to self-organize to deal with floods and droughts. In India the organization has helped activate thousands of communities to use water catchment and water slowing methods like johads (check dams and ponds), ditches, swales, leaky weirs, and thickets that significantly slow the rainwater so that it does not gather into housing destroying floods. These methods also help replenish the aquifers.”

Ties van der Hoeven: Regreening the Sinai

Ties van Der Hoeven proposed the ambitious project to regreen the Sinai. John Liu and Millan Millan joined the project. He proposed to the accumulation of lake sediment next to the Sinai (which would otherwise have to be dredged and gotten rid of), and use it grow plants and trees. They would turn the sediment into soil, and lay that over the desert sands, where they would grow trees. The trees would then help bring rain to the area.

Charles Eisenstein : Water and the Living Earth

Charles Eisenstein’s various books have managed to create mini movements, like his books The more beautiful world as we know it and Sacred economics. He writes in his book Climate “While most of the discourse around climate change focuses on temperature, water is the climatic factor that most directly impacts life. Life flourishes throughout the hot equatorial zone because of the presence of abundant rainfall, while deserts, because they receive little precipitation, are comparatively barren whatever their temperature...the water cycle and the carbon cycle are closely entwined. We cannot speak of one without speaking of the other. The shift of emphasis I am about to offer is nothing as simplistic as “Water is more directly impactful, so we should forget about carbon…..What we will see is that by putting water first, the carbon problem and the warming problem will be solved as well….The paradigm shift [is] …… a shift from a geomechanical view to a Gaian view, a living systems view. Whether we are looking through the lens of carbon or water, from the living systems perspective we see that climate health depends on the health of local ecosystems everywhere.”

Anastasia Makarieva : Biotic Pump

She was working with Victor Gorshkov on the theory of biotic regulation, when they were invited by Antonio Nobre to the Amazon to see if they could apply their theory of biotic regulation to the Amazon forests. As a result they came up with their theory of the biotic pump, which is the idea that forests can call in the rain, by creating a pressure vacuum that causes the ocean moisture to come blowing in. She has become a legend with her work.

Brock Dolman : Beavers, biology, and slow water

With his gift of language, and a background in permaculture and storm water management, he tried to capture the essence of the water paradigm, and came up with the catchy slogan “Slow it, spread it, sink it” that a lot of people now use. Brock Dolman has been instrumental in helping bring grey water and beavers to California

Rodger Savory : Cows, chickens, micros and fungi - how to turn deserts into grasslands

How do we restore deserts? Savory has been experimenting with mixtures of cow dung that naturally house fungi spores and bacteria in them, as a way to regenerate decertified land.

Andrew Millison: India’s regenerative water movement

A permaculture teacher who found his online video courses taking off, became a Youtube content creator highlighting water solutions around the world. His upbeat, artistic, videos have gone viral with many videos amassing over 1 million views. One of his more popular series was on India’s Paani Cup, where villages friendly competed against each other to restore the land and water cycles in their areas. Villagers who tracked meteorological data, found that as a result of the eco-restoration, their rains increased.

Zach Weiss : Halting our drought-fire-flood path to desertification

Tasked by his mentor Sepp Holzer, to spread the word about water cycle restoration, he moved beyond just doing the water restoration work, to also training a whole new generation in this work, with his organization Water Stories. His work has really helped shift the landscape, and introduce a lot of people to water cycle restoration. The animations from Water Stories really help to vividly and succinctly tell the story of the water cycle. He tells the story of the Watershed Spiral, and also of the Revived Water Cycle.

Didi Pershouse: Bread and Museums

Coming from a holistic healing and soil background, she soon became aware of the importance of water cycle restoration, and has partnered with Walter Jehne on a number of educational water projects. She has a talent for translating scientific water and soil concepts into more understandable metaphors, and we discuss here some of these metaphors like her one of bread and water.

Erica Gies: Slowing our waters

A freelance journalist, who writes for outfits like New York Times, she became intrigued with the issue of water while on her energy beat. After a couple of years of research, she produced the book popular book “Water always wins”, which chronicles the innovative water solutions people have used in different countries. She promotes that we create a slow water movement.

Stephen Miller: Maladaptations in the time of water crisis

Humans have responded with adaptations to climate chaos, but these adaptations are not always beneficial in the long run, in fact they may be maladaptations. Miller chronicles various maladaptions around the world - from Arizona’s water aqueduct, to Japan’s seawalls. He is the author of “Over the seawall”.

Leila Philip: Beaverland

Beavers have an amazing ability to restore our rivers, wetlands, and climate. Leila Philip, an English professor with an environmental focus, became intrigued with beavers, and studied them passionately. She ended up writing a book about beavers in a kind of fever dream. The book became a New York Times bestseller.

Koen van Seijin: Investing in water and regenerative agriculture

The host of “Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and food” hosted me on his podcast. I return the favor here. We discuss the regenerative water movement, and what it needs to take it to the next level. We contrast it with other movements like the regenerative soil movement. We discuss how we can finance the regenerative water movement.

Nick Steiner : The joy of restoring water cycles

“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.”

Anna Pollock: How eco-tourism can help the regenerative water movement

“Anna Pollock has been a leader in the regenerative tourism movement and in conscious travel. The 2022 Journey Award was given to her for her work in regenerative tourism. She has been guiding the hospitality sector to help the regenerative farming sector through their purchasing power of food, through their ability to educate guests about regeneration and organic products, and through helping farms develop home-stay programs.”

Silvia Quarta: Regenerating a farm and a semi-arid region

“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. ….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 1,000,000 hectares.”

Neal Spackman: Aborbing rains to bring landscapes back to life

Neal Spackman was invited by the Saudi Arabian to come a desertified region to see if he could help restore it to its former greener state. As they built check dams, and rock structures to slow the rainwaters, they, gradually over a course of many years revived the area with vegetation, an astonishing feat.

Didi Pershouse (part II) : Lessening LA wildfires; the water solution

I brought Didi Pershouse back on as my first repeat guest, because she and Walter Jehne had initiated a project called Rehydrate California. In the aftermath of the huge fires in LA, we discuss how rehydrating LA and the neighboring area can help lessen wildfires.

Sieger Burger: Plants drink water from the air

“Sieger Burger is a hydrologist and writer. In this conversation we range over many aspects of the water cycle, with a focus on hydraulic redistribution (how plants bring up groundwater), and foliar water upake (the process by which leafs can take in water. During Sieger’s Dutch childhood, he became interested in water - “water was fascinating to me. Water is this weird molecule that is both bringing life and also bringing death. It's really about water—where the sweet spot is, of the right quality. Not too pure, because with water, we can't have distilled water. Also, not too salty or polluted. You need to have the right quantity, if you have not enough, then we dry out, and if it's too much, then we drown.”

Willem Ferweda : How can we restore bioregions?

Willem Ferweda is the head of Commonland, an organization that helps facilitate multistakeholders to come together to look at how to restore the land, ecosystem, and water. It works to bring farmers, businesses, NGOs, local government, and academics together in a collaborative approach. They work to restore 100000 +hectares in a bioregion. This podcast is not in the Climate Water Project newsletter, rather you can find it on the Climate Water Project podcast on podcast platforms like Substack and Apple podcasts

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