Groundwater & climate crisis solutions: regenerative ag, rainwater harvesting and interdisciplinary collaborations - John Cherry part II

connecting hydrogeology with regen ag practitioners with water governance with an integrative approach to climate management

John Cherry is a pioneering hydrogeologist, a visionary who helps us to look past the obvious framing of problems to find the hidden architecture beneath. Where others see separate crises, he traces connections. Where conventional thinking stops at surface explanations, he digs deeper until a more fundamental pattern emerges. His method is integrative: connecting disparate fields, linking causes to effects across domains that rarely speak to each other. What emerges is a reframing so profound it reorganizes how we see the world.

Groundwater, that vast, invisible underground ocean containing 99% of all liquid freshwater isn’t just another environmental issue. It’s the foundation integrating everything: the buffer against droughts, the base flow of rivers, the sustainer of forests and ecosystems, the determinant of which civilizations endure or collapse. Cherry shows us that food insecurity, ecosystem collapse, public health emergencies, and certain refugees crises can trace back to a fundamental hidden variable: falling water tables. The drying of the continents impacts much.

He points us toward where society and academia need to focus - not just to understand the crisis, but to see the solutions already emerging in fragmented form across disciplines. Regenerative farmers rebuilding soil, communities harvesting rainwater, hydrologists managing aquifer recharge - they’re all working on the same problem without realizing it. Cherry’s clarity reveals the system behind these scattered efforts and shows us how to connect them across academia, agriculture, eco-restoranists, and water management.

When droughts arrive, we blame the climate. But Cherry reveals a deeper, more unsettling truth: the crisis is also self-inflicted. We have drawn down groundwater so deeply that any perturbation sends the system into collapse. Climate naturally fluctuates, as the historical shows, but without groundwater reserves to buffer us, natural variation becomes calamity.

Cherry reframes droughts not primarily as climate events, but as groundwater depletion crises. It’s like depleting a savings account, when hard times come, there’s no cushion left. Our ancestors survived droughts lasting seven to fifteen years because the groundwater was there to sustain them. Now, a three-year drought feels catastrophic.

He traces the Syrian war partly back to this same root cause. Over thirty years, the population grew from 2 million to 22 million on irrigation-based agriculture. They pumped groundwater faster than it could replenish. Then came a ten-year drought - not unprecedented by historical standards, but this time there was no buffer. Animals died, people moved to cities, social unrest grew into civil war and migration crisis. At its core, it was also partly a groundwater crisis.

There is also the contamination crisis that is urgent. Since World War II, we’ve been releasing agricultural and industrial chemicals onto and into the ground. Contaminants move slowly through groundwater - tens of centimeters per day, maybe a few meters - but over decades, this means most aquifers are now extensively contaminated with suites of compounds. Cherry raised our awareness of these issues, pioneered the field of contaminant hydrogeology, he has helped clarify how old methods of ‘pump and treat’ did not work, and helped bring in new methods of remediation.

The most widespread contaminant is nitrate from synthetic fertilizers. The current drinking water limit is 10 mg/L, set in the 1950s based on “Blue Baby Syndrome.” But fifteen years ago, when the Canadian government reviewed modern research, they found that nitrate above 1 mg/L is dangerous for infants and pregnant women. The government was supposed to notify provinces that the limit is outdated and should be one-tenth the current standard. They didn’t send the letters. Too politically explosive - it would mean hundreds of millions of people are drinking contaminated water. No country has the political nerve to make that change.

Nitrates are also associated with a variety of other public health issues. When you have elevated nitrate combined with certain pesticides, you see higher cancer rates. It’s not just individual contaminants - it’s the cocktail effect. The human body is 99.4% water molecules. We’re now mixing dozens or hundreds of chemical compounds in our drinking water at concentrations the human body has never experienced in its genetic history. It’s an experiment with unknown consequences.

Cherry also reveals a bigger picture about reservoirs and how they contribute to drying our continents. This is counterintuitive to conventional hydrology, which promotes reservoirs as solutions to droughts and floods. But Cherry points out that reservoirs lead to large scale evaporation during extended droughts, and water table decline.

The planet has 62,000 large dams and 800,000 total. During long droughts, they become the problem - losing water to evaporation rather than storing it underground where it would remain accessible. Iran’s dams are going dry. Counter to our intuition, dams are contributing to continental drying, not preventing it.

Solutions:

The solutions exist, scattered across disciplines, often practiced by people who don’t realize they’re managing groundwater.

Regenerative agriculture offers a triple benefit. Just as industrial agriculture, which brought in the the so-called Green Revolution, depleted soils and groundwater, regenerative agriculture can restore both. Healthier soils absorb more rain, which percolates down to recharge aquifers. It eliminates nitrate contamination at the source by replacing synthetic fertilizers. And it rebuilds soil structure and organic matter.

Yet Cherry couldn’t find a single paper connecting regenerative agriculture with groundwater recharge. This research desperately needs to happen. How quickly will nitrate levels decline as we transition away from chemical fertilizers? How much additional recharge will improved soils provide? We need regenerative agriculture practitioners talking with hydrogeologists - cross-disciplinary collaboration that doesn’t currently exist. And this collaboration needs to work with water managers and public health officials.

Rainwater harvesting is happening globally but below the radar of academic science. These are the methods Andrew Millison has documented beautifully in his videos - refugee camps in Chad restoring land with half-moon crescents that capture rain and raise water tables. Eight thousand villages in Maharashtra’s Pani Cup project capturing monsoon water. These efforts raise the water table. The water soaks in, recharges aquifers, and feeds rivers as base flow during dry months.

Managed Aquifer Recharge is the hydrologists’ term for deliberately routing water underground. Create systems to capture wet season water or treated wastewater and guide it down through infiltration ponds, injection wells, ditches and furrows. Use aquifers as storage instead of surface reservoirs - no evaporation loss, and tree roots can access the water during droughts.

Orange County, California has practiced this since the 1950s, bringing water from Northern California, treating sewage, and putting it back in the ground. It supports millions of people sustainably. The engineering is more sophisticated than building a dam, but the results are far better. Cherry notes that beavers are among nature’s best practitioners of managed aquifer recharge.

So why aren’t these connections better known? The answer is disciplinary silo-ing. We have hydrology, forestry, soil science, ecology, landscape architecture, environmental science, but the essential connections to groundwater aren’t drawn clearly in any of them.

Meanwhile, engineers running water agencies often graduate without taking a single groundwater course. Not one. Environmental engineering students, same thing. These are the people making decisions about aquifers and water supply, and they’ve never studied groundwater.

Cherry is doing what pioneering leaders do: pointing at the gaps, showing where research needs to happen. Jules Charney, the legendary climate scientist, was famous for this, helping other academics see where they could open up new subdisciplines, orient their research. He made the careers of the next generation of climate scientists by showing them the unexplored pathways. We have a visionary hydrologist doing something similar now in Cherry, who’s pointing where to focus attention. He’s calling for hydrogeologists to work with regenerative agriculturists to understand how soil health affects groundwater recharge and how quickly nitrate contamination will dissipate. He’s urging collaboration between hydrogeologists and ecologists to flesh out the groundwater-ecosystem connection, how water table depth determines which species survive. He’s identifying the need to figure out our global water budget better by measuring and understanding groundwater, since it’s such a large and uncertain component. He’s challenging us to examine how reservoirs are contributing to the drying of our continents and to continue developing methods for using aquifers instead of dams for water storage. The knowledge exists in fragments across different communities. It needs to be connected. And that knowledge then needs to be connected with water managers and governance.

Part of Cherry’s response is the Groundwater Project - an initiative to create books connecting these different fields and sharing knowledge across boundaries. It grew from his groundwater textbook, which trained a generation of hydrologists. When people asked for an update, he realized the field had become too vast for one book. Now dozens of volunteer authors in 32 countries are creating texts that connect groundwater with various dimensions of environmental science. The goal is making specialized knowledge accessible and showing how it all connects.

Cherry argues we need major educational programs in groundwater, similar to what happened with oceanography in the 1960s and ‘70s. Oceanography developed dedicated university programs at undergraduate and graduate levels, integrating geology, physics, chemistry, and biology into a coherent discipline. Given groundwater’s fundamental importance to food security, ecosystems, and human survival, we need the same comprehensive approach.

Cherry offers a reframing of our environmental priorities. While media and politicians focus intensely on CO2 emissions as the primary emergency, Cherry argues the global freshwater crisis, with groundwater at its core, may be more urgent and immediate. The drying of the continents - the decline of water tables everywhere- is the canary in the coal mine.

Natural climate has always fluctuated. What’s different now is that we’ve removed the buffer that allowed civilizations to survive those fluctuations. Lower water tables and less forest cover contribute to hotter local climates, more intense fires, and worse flooding - impacts often attributed solely to atmospheric changes when groundwater depletion is a significant driver.

Cherry’s key argument: if we’re not fixing agriculture, vegetation, and soils, we’re not truly organizing to address climate challenges, regardless of what we do about emissions.

……

You can listen to whole audio and read about part I here. The audio podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple podcasts. Here is an edited, abridged version of part II of our interview.

John: Because groundwater is out of sight, out of mind, it’s not on the mind of water managers in general. Groundwater monitoring is totally inadequate. I’ve spent much of my career trying to develop better groundwater monitoring equipment. The records for groundwater over the decades are pitiful. The ability to manage our aquifers and even understand our aquifers is minimal in many cases because we just don’t have the basic data. We monitor lakes, rivers, streams, and rainfall, but we don’t monitor groundwater in any way that you could say is truly modern and useful, except for China. China now has a monitoring network that’s so extensive and amazing, it’s beyond belief.

Alpha: Your framing of droughts as really being because we’ve depleted groundwater is a really important framing that I don’t hear anywhere very much. Sometimes we think there’s a climate crisis, but a lot of the crisis stems from depleting the groundwater. If you think of groundwater as like the bank, then our earth system is like an economy that’s depleted its savings. Whenever there’s any perturbation, it’s in crisis because it hasn’t got any savings.

John: You hit on a really good analogy there. It’s like the bank. The climate’s always changing. I was involved in a study in Southern California where we used a particular methodology, and we were able to look at the periods of drought in the greater Los Angeles area going back 500 years. If you look at that part of the world going back 500 years, there have been three or four major droughts where a major drought is seven to ten or fifteen years long. We can’t even imagine that. But if we look at the paleohydrology story that’s got nothing to do with CO2 emissions, paleo hydrology tells us that as human beings, long droughts are coming. What seems to be a crisis drought is only three or four years long now, and we should be preparing for the long ones.

If we think that drought and all those things are caused by human CO2 emissions, if we think that that’s the main crisis of the next few decades, then I think we’re doomed because the crisis of the next few decades in most cases is basically trying to provide enough food and enough energy to stop all these other crises, which is water poverty, energy poverty, and disappearing cropland. When you pump water inappropriately and you pump it too much, then you’re pumping up salts. The water can be fresh, but the salts are left on the ground. So land is being lost from agriculture because of salt accumulations. In California, when you pump water too much, your land surface goes down. Along the coast when you pump too much water, seawater comes in.

Hardly any of this is monitored appropriately. So we’re losing land, we’re losing fresh water. All of that’s happening just all around the world with the population growth. Some people will look at the Syrian war, which caused major migration over 30 years. The population grew from 2 million to 22 million, and it was irrigation-based. Syria had a drought for nearly 10 years. When people look at the causes of that civil war, country people had to move to the city because the animals were dying. That’s an example where social unrest grew so large that the civil war resulted in migration. According to some people, many of the migrants now who are migrating from one country to another, when you trace that right back, it’s got to do with water. And when you trace it back to water, it ends up with groundwater.

Alpha: I don’t think many people are connecting groundwater with these refugee crises. It’s an important causality that needs to be understood.

John: Furthermore, the one or two experts in the world who look at this, they go to refugee camps with water-driven migrants ending up there. In many cases, the water crisis in the refugee camps is about as bad as what drove them in the first place, because there’s so little expertise to actually solve the water problems at the refugee camps. In many cases, the only possible solution is drilling wells. If you drill wells, you have to drill to the right depth and to the right formation. If you just bring a drill rig in and just let loose drilling, then in many cases, you end up with lack of success.

Alpha: Speaking of refugees, Andrew Millison made a video on the permaculture of the Chad refugee crisis, where they’re learning to build these half crescents, which are basically like swales in permaculture, which capture the rainwater when it falls. These half-crescents help re-vegetate what was destroyed, and they re-grow the soil too. But it’s also recharging the aquifers.

John: That’s a really important point. That type of work is referred to as rainwater harvesting. Andrew Millison is wonderful in bringing attention to that all over the world. Rainwater harvesting now is happening below the radar screen. The academic community generally doesn’t know much about it, we don’t study it. But in essence, successful rainwater harvesting raises the water table.

You’re one of the leaders in looking at the big picture of forests and roots, and Millison is a real leader in looking at the hydrologic cycle and how we can repair it. In the industrialized countries, we refer to rainwater harvesting as managed aquifer recharge. In Los Angeles, Orange County and Los Angeles is based on managed aquifer recharge because they keep the water coming in by pipeline from Northern California, and they’ve treated sewage and they put it back in the ground. That’s why Orange County can have a population of a few million people.

The possibilities of rainwater—if we want to have land that supports people and agriculture, a key factor, if not the key factor, is to prevent the rain from running off too fast into the ocean. To do everything we can do to slow it down. That’s why sustainable agriculture is so important because if you take a degraded soil and you apply the right types of sustainable agriculture, that soil holds the water when it rains. If it holds the water when it rains, that means you get more recharge. All of this is so connected and there’s so much hope that can be built around these changes—regenerative agriculture, rainwater harvesting, all these little swales and gullies that you drill into the sides of hills.

Alpha: It’s interesting that we have this groundwater crisis which is connected to refugee crises and water crises - a big problem for government and water management, and then here is this more niche realm with all these regenerative agriculture, agroecology, and permaculture people doing swales and other earthworks. These people have the solutions about how to recharge the aquifers in the restoration. It’s not just about restoring the trees, sometimes you have to first restore the water and recharge the aquifers.

John: What’s interesting, and you’ve noticed the importance of groundwater, the water table and forests, is almost all the work that’s being done to increase recharge is done without realizing that the overall goal is to increase recharge. In other words, the end result is the right end result without the water table and without groundwater hydrology being in fact understood. We could say, well, it doesn’t matter if we understand it if it’s working, but I guess my argument is if we understand it better, we can probably do it better and do it at more locations. At least then it’s tied to the water cycle.

Alpha: I think if there was a larger understanding of this whole groundwater crisis around the world, then the governance would want more of these projects. You’d want to expand and scale up a lot of these smaller permaculture projects or other projects because this kind of holds the keys to the solution.

John: My biggest disappointment when I see the whole emphasis on reducing CO2—when we totally focus on that, then we’re not realizing that if we’re not fixing agriculture and fixing forests and fixing soils, then we’re not organizing to deal with climate change.

Climate change is going to be there regardless of greenhouse gases, because natural climate change is basically what’s caused civilizations to collapse. Natural climate change is what’s dominating whether civilizations collapse or they move. The fact that we can’t see groundwater and the media can’t either—in my experience, people like me generally aren’t sought out, because having an interview with a groundwater hydrologist puts you into a realm where you know nothing. Also groundwater hydrologists in general aren’t able to explain groundwater to the point where it’s meaningful.

I got into my big picture stuff because I realized that when I received the Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize, I realized that my interviews with the media were failures. They were failures because I couldn’t answer the question, why is groundwater important? It’s taken me years to get to the point where I can have such a conversation with you, because we hydrogeologists, we talk at one another. How do you talk to people about something that they can’t see? They can’t see, they have no idea if it’s important. And then somebody like me comes along and says, well, it’s all important. That just doesn’t sound credible.

In university education, where are the weak links? Weak links start in university. You can get an engineering degree in water resources or environmental engineering and not take a groundwater course. In fact, most graduates of civil engineering programs and environmental engineering programs don’t have a groundwater course. These are the people who go out and run the water agencies. Then the environmental studies people, in many cases now they’re running the water agencies, and these people don’t even have a first course. I sometimes, when I’m at conferences, make a joke: we don’t want engineers taking a groundwater course, because then they’ll actually think they know something about it. You have to take a few courses.

You found in your work, you recognize the connection of groundwater and forest and climate. That’s really important big thinking. Millison has realized the amazing importance of rainwater harvesting, rainwater management.

I haven’t found a single paper that looks at the connection between regenerative agriculture, organic agriculture, and groundwater. If we’re going to switch to regenerative agriculture, and we’re not going to use chemical pesticides, and we’re going to make the soils more able to hold water, which makes them better for agriculture—well, what’s that got to do with the groundwater regime? If we switched everywhere, if we switch to regenerative agriculture, would we have nitrate pollution? If we switch to regenerative agriculture, we’re not going to have pesticide pollution. But the most widespread and probably the most impactful groundwater pollutant in the world is nitrate coming from chemical fertilizers. So if we switch from that, how quickly will that happen? What will it do for nitrate? Nobody’s studying that.

Alpha: So there’s a dual problem with groundwater. There is the contaminant problem, a lot of that problem is from ag stuff, and then there’s the depletion of groundwater. A lot of these regenerative ag and eco-restorations they’re doing, sometimes they don’t realize that the real benefit of what their doing is actually the increase of the groundwater. Even when you’re doing the right thing, it’s good to raise awareness of how you fit into the bigger picture of how it all is so important.

John: There’s no, as far as I know, recognition in the regenerative agriculture field of how it relates to the hydrologic cycle and how it relates to recharging groundwater and how that relates to stream flow and wetlands. It’s all connected. The groundwater scientific community, we don’t study that because there’s no research grants for that. Back in the ‘70s, I had some research money, there was research money to investigate those things. That research money was made available just to better understand the water cycle with the groundwater component. There are no agencies that fund that now.

The World Bank released a report two years ago basically saying that if we look at the world in general, the groundwater pollution problem is worse than the depletion problem. Furthermore, water poverty affects at a minimum a third of the world population. By definition, if you’re in water poverty, you’re walking more than a half hour to get your water, which is walking done by women and children. If you’re in water poverty, you’ve got water that’s contaminated with fecal matter and you’re getting sick all the time. Many of the people who are living in water poverty have both the walking problem and the fecal contamination problem.

That affects a third of humanity. That problem can only be solved in general by having more wells. Millions and millions of more wells properly drilled because all that surface water is polluted or it’s dried up. But we’ve got this groundwater depletion problem where millions and millions of wells are pumping too much water, causing depletion. So I call it the water paradox.

That paradox causes a lot of confusion. People think we can’t go drilling millions of wells in Africa. Well, yeah, we’re going to have to drill tens of millions of wells in Africa. There’s lots of water there to supply drinking water, to supply family water. And then connected to this is rainwater harvesting.

In India, not that I know much about India, but I’ve done a couple of visits there. In India, they have places where it’s almost like a drought much of the time, yet they’ve got a meter or two of rainfall. How can that be? It’s just when the monsoon rains come, it runs off so fast that when the monsoon rain escapes to the ocean, they’re basically in a drought circumstance. That’s where rainwater harvesting comes in to be so important.

Alpha: So it ties into this whole slow water concept. In India, they have this Paani Cup in Maharashtra, where 8,000 villages are capturing the water in the monsoon season. In general people don’t realize that when water goes in the aquifers, it comes out again in the rivers. So it keeps the rivers running into the dry season. It’s part of this slow water paradigm. I’m wondering how much hydrology understands, have they been talking about this whole idea of slow water and how the groundwater helps slow the arrival of the water into the dry season?

John: The groundwater science community—we’re a small, shrinking community in North America and the number of professors teaching it is going down. The scientific community, we don’t pay much attention to the whole slow water, fast water thing. That’s terminology that’s not in our books. Rainwater harvesting isn’t part of our mindset at all. Managed aquifer recharge is like in Orange County. But that’s a far cry from all the things that need to be done just to prevent water from running off.

The agricultural community, as we mentioned, has no idea about groundwater. So they have no idea of the benefits they may be bringing that everybody needs to know about, which is what you just mentioned.

Alpha: I do think in hydrology, you have these terms base flow and residence time, right?

John: Yeah, that’s our terms. Residence time, for example, when you go into a groundwater basin and you start to pump it, then you change the flow system entirely. The water at a location that may be 1,000 years old very quickly becomes 10 years old because you’re drawing water straight down or you’re changing the length of the flow path. If you then change your flow system where you’re getting your water from for drinking water, and the water is younger than 50 or 60 years, it’s open for whatever contaminants are there. The licensing—when a company gets the license to produce a pesticide, all sorts of tests are done. But none of the tests that are done are related to groundwater directly, none of them.

Alpha: Could you define a little bit the idea of base flow ?

John: When it rains, then during and shortly after the rain, the water is mostly rainwater from the rain. Once it stops raining and water is still flowing in the stream, where does that water come from? Well, it’s not coming from the rain because it stopped raining. So that’s groundwater that’s seeping into the stream. We call that base flow. All rivers and streams have their base flow and most of the water flowing in rivers and streams is base flow. The water flowing in streams almost all the time is base flow. So that’s groundwater.

If you deplete your aquifers and you deplete your groundwater, you’re basically affecting surface water, it’s just there’s a lag. I might also mention, like 40 or 50 years ago, I did an experiment with my colleagues. We went out to a little watershed in Ontario and it started to rain heavily. So we collected the rainwater during the rain. At the same time, we collected the stream water. And at the same time, we collected some groundwater samples.

We collected the rainwater samples to analyze it for oxygen-18 and deuterium. We basically analyzed the water molecules for the isotopic composition. If you’re lucky when it rains, the rain that happens to be raining will have a very different signature for oxygen-18 and deuterium than your normal water. We were lucky—the signal of the rainwater was very different, which depends on where the rain is coming from. We found that most of the water that was coming out the stream wasn’t rainwater.

What the rain had done, the rain had pulsed the water table to cause groundwater to very quickly flow into the stream as a result of the pulsing. That didn’t fit the way that you do a base flow separation at all. But it’s just an example—I would say in general, we hydrologists can’t even answer the question of where’s the water in a stream coming from in detail. It’s base flow and it’s coming from groundwater, but hydrology is still a very primitive science.

Engineering hydrology isn’t primitive because they’ve got all sorts of models and they need to build dams and design culverts. In terms of a pulse and response system that’s good enough for engineering, but actually understanding the hydrologic cycle in detail, we’re not in good shape. I was focusing on that for five or ten years early in my career and then the money dried up and I moved somewhere else. We scientists are always happy if we have money to study something interesting. But the focus is almost never on studying what’s really important in the long term to make decisions about water.

The World Bank report on the state of water stated that basically groundwater quality is a crisis. I think they even use the term groundwater is now a chemical soup in many places. Does that mean that governments are allowing wells to be pumped that have levels of contaminants that are too high? If it’s a city, they do testing, but they do testing of each contaminant at a time. In many cases, you might have 200 contaminants, each one below the drinking water limit. Well, what’s the effect of all 200 on the human body? And now you have PFAS to add to it.

We’ve talked about that groundwater is a crisis because aquifers are being depleted, but it’s also a crisis because we’re drying out the land, and it’s a crisis because in most places the water is not pristine.

Alpha: You wrote a paper on peak groundwater. Can you say a bit about how this concept came about and what is peak groundwater?

John: In 2009, a journalist in the UK wrote a book, I think titled “Peak Water.” A scientist in Oakland, California with an NGO there, Peter Gleick, published a paper in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science. He defined peak water scientifically and had some very nice graphs. He said to the world, peak water is a useful concept and he had some American data. I thought that paper was quite revolutionary and would get a lot of attention. And it didn’t. In fact, it died.

Alpha: Could you explain what peak water is?

John: Peak water for a country would be—and this is peak freshwater—it’s just like peak oil. You’re busy using your fresh water. When you reach the peak, there’s no more water to use. In other words, it’s like oil. If you try and use more, there’s no more to be had. You’ve dammed all the rivers and you’ve got your rainfall. So peak water in general would be the water that’s available to be used usefully in your society that you can’t increase.

Now peak groundwater, that’s an entirely different thing. Peak groundwater means that when you pump your aquifer, you’ve gone beyond what’s sustainable. You’ve pumped it, you’ve drawn down the water table, you’ve increased the recharge, you’ve done everything you can to bring more water into the aquifer. But if you put in more wells, you don’t get a greater supply of water. So that would be peak groundwater, which we defined and quantified in that paper, at least conceptually.

As far as I know, that’s the first paper looking at the concept of peak groundwater. If you’re busy pumping water out of your aquifer and the water levels are going down, what the farmers do is drill deeper wells. At some point, you can’t drill deeper. Once you’ve drilled your deep wells, then you start drilling more wells like in the Central Valley of California. At some point, if you tap all the water in your aquifer and you can’t increase the rate, then you’re at the peak.

In a rational world, when irrigation gets going to produce food and food is sold around the world, we would want to know whether the water in the food is sustainable water or whether it’s unsustainable water. If you’ve gone beyond the peak for any aquifer, then it’s all unsustainable, you’re beyond the sustainability point.

Alpha: How does ecosystems depending on the groundwater factor into the peak groundwater definition?

John: Gleick pointed out that there’s peak fresh water. Then he said there’s peak ecological water. He pointed out that we’re far beyond peak ecological water because we’ve drained up so many wetlands. If you actually want to include ecology in your sustainability concept, then you’ve got peak ecological water. We’re basically drying out the continents almost everywhere. The springs have dried up, you don’t see flowing wells, but there’s almost no literature on how all this drying up from over-pumping is affecting ecology.

Now there’s a new term that’s being used, it’s called groundwater-dependent ecosystems. That term is now widely used, but there’s almost no published papers on it. I tried to get research money on that many years ago. Actually, I tried to get a research project going many years ago, and I actually had money and I couldn’t find any ecologists to work with.

When it comes to the hydrologic cycle, I don’t think we’re in good shape for understanding. When it comes to understanding the hydrologic cycle and ecology and groundwater, we hardly know anything. That’s why I’ve enjoyed reading your work so much. You’re in the business of connecting the dots. You find these very knowledgeable people to interview that I would never find because I’m in my silo. Universities are siloed.

Students that get degrees in environmental engineering and environmental science, they don’t know much about the environment because to know much about the environment, you’d have to be in a very well-designed, multi-disciplinary integrative program. What I’m trying to pitch as I move forward with the groundwater project, I’m trying to pitch that we groundwater scientists frame groundwater better as a system. It’s not taught as a system. It’s not framed as a system. The book that I wrote that made me quite famous in my little niche isn’t written to address groundwater as a system. Each chapter is a piece of the story, but it’s not put together.

When Millison and all these wonderful people do their great work that’s showing great positive responses, those responses are in many cases depending upon how the groundwater system and in particular how the water table is influenced as we discussed.

Alpha: This whole ecology-groundwater connection is really interesting because it seems to me biomes would flip as you deplete groundwater, right? Because if those trees, they don’t have as much water drawn, especially over a couple years, then those trees will flip to a different biome. I don’t know how much ecologists are looking at this or groundwater people are looking at this.

John: We groundwater people—I don’t know if a groundwater person is interested in trees. In my search to get authors to do books for the groundwater project, I’m still trying to find an author who would be willing to write a book for the groundwater project. Foresters aren’t interested in the water table. I’ve found one little group in Sweden that have published papers where they look at groundwater and forest.

Early in my career, I dug a pit at a location where I wanted to see what the cracks in the clay were like. I got a big backhoe and we’re digging away. I began to track the roots. The roots in this clay deposit, which was very important hydrologically, the roots were the pathways for the water once you get down below the soil zone. Then I was starting to see roots that were paleo roots. These paleo roots were going really deep. We got down to 16 or 17 feet and the roots were still there.

That opened up my eyes. This was a prairie landscape, semi-arid, about 15-20 inches of rainfall. That got me interested in, well, roots—how deep do they really go? You’re the person who’s actually written more on this than anybody else. But it’s the discontinuities in the scientific system, the discontinuities in the research world, the siloing of expertise in universities, that these really important things—like how deep do the roots go? When it gets dry, which roots are operating?

Alpha: So you’re saying there’s all this silo-ing. There’s the hydrogeologists and then there’s the freshwater people, there’s the hydrogeologists, and then there’s all the people that depend on water, and then there’s these regenerative agriculturists and permaculturists. They all kind of have different pieces of the picture. How are we going to bring all these groups together? Because we need to understand how it’s all interconnected.

John: My thing that I’m trying to do personally is the groundwater project started off just to produce a dozen or two books on groundwater. Now I’m realizing we have to have books on every topic where groundwater has some relationship. So I’m trying to find expertise. In some cases, I’m concluding I’m going to have to get authors together. But it’s not going to be solved by the odd paper in the refereed literature. We have to somehow basically do what you’re doing, but do it more in academia and do more of it.

John: The water management community has, for 100 years, in their mind, you build a dam and you then have a reservoir of water. But nobody realizes that an aquifer is a reservoir. Dams are reservoirs, but an aquifer is a reservoir. Therefore we need to get water back into the reservoir. That’s what rainwater harvesting is all about on a very local scale. That’s what managed aquifer recharge is on a much larger scale, say in Orange County. Just the whole thinking about surface water and groundwater, it just doesn’t have any logic.

Alpha: Can you say a bit about the benefits of storing your water in aquifers as opposed to these manmade dams?

John: Now it’s very popular, the term managed aquifer recharge, and there are conferences on it. It kind of got going in Orange County, California, where they called it artificial recharge. Back in the ‘50s, in Orange County, they basically realized, wow, we’ve got to get more water in the ground. You’ve got the pipeline coming from the north and you’ve got rainfall. So they began to just dig pits. The soil there is very coarse sand. So they realized there that they could start operating their aquifer by just basically getting water into it. Then you pump it out. When they pumped too much, seawater was coming in, so then they used sewage around the coast to pump water in there to keep the seawater from coming in.

An aquifer is basically—it should be considered like a pipe. An aquifer is like a whole bunch of pipes and it transmits water and it stores water. You can either build your reservoir on the surface and cause the rainwater to basically pile up behind it, or you can arrange your whole infrastructure so that lots of rainwater goes into the subsurface. If you put it on the surface, it evaporates.

When you look at water vapor and all that now, so much water vapor is coming from evaporation from surface water bodies. My point here is that aquifers are capable of storage. If you want to store rainwater, you can either store it in an aquifer or you can build a dam and store it behind a dam. But if you want to escape evaporation in dry climates, then you don’t want to build dams, you want to use your aquifers.

Now that means the engineering is much more tricky. You’ve got to find the aquifer, you’ve got to find the part of the aquifer. Building a dam is so easy and it’s so politically attractive. Storing water in aquifers is much more sophisticated. But now we’re paying the price, like Iran’s paying the price. But in engineering education, none of what we’re talking about here is in engineering education. It’s not even in geoscience education in hydrogeology.

Alpha: I want to ask about the contaminant issue and how that plays into the world picture. Also how did you get into the whole issue of contaminants in groundwater?

John: I graduated with my PhD from the University of Illinois. I graduated from Saskatchewan in ‘62 with a geological engineering degree. By luck, I got a summer job with a research group looking for groundwater in Saskatchewan, a very dry place. In the summertime, I worked with some students who got master’s degrees and PhDs. So I was interested in groundwater. I got a PhD at Illinois and I learned all the standard stuff. But all you learned back then was about aquifers and pumping.

Then I did a postdoc in France to learn about water chemistry because I realized, I’m supposed to be a hydrogeologist, but I don’t know anything about water chemistry. Then I came back to Canada with a job at the University of Manitoba to be a hydrogeologist, not that anybody knew what that was. Then no sooner had I arrived there, but a student arrived in my office saying that she spent the summer working at the Whiteshell Nuclear Establishment, which is a miniature Oak Ridge, where they were developing parts of the Canadian CANDU nuclear system.

This summer student, a second year civil engineering student who happened to be a woman, the only woman in engineering at that time, she also happened to be American, married to a Canadian. She said, well, Dr. Cherry, I’ve been out at the Whiteshell Nuclear Establishment during the summer and I decided I would study where they’re burying their radioactive waste. She said, I put some wells in the ground and I found that they’ve got radioactivity moving. I think that’s a serious problem. She says, I think you should go out there and study that.

I said, well, but that’s not my expertise. I’m not interested in that topic. She said, well, I’ve told them that you would and they’ve got money for you. I think you should feel responsible. You should feel responsible to do that as the only educated hydrogeologist within a thousand miles. So we went out there and they had a bunch of money. I got into it and then I realized, wow, contaminant migration is really interesting.

I’d taken three weeks of a course in it at the University of Illinois by a professor who was at least a little bit interested in it. Groundwater contamination wasn’t a problem. But I started to study radionuclide movement in groundwater. It was great fun. It was like it was a totally new area. I just stuck with it. By the time a decade later, groundwater contamination became an issue, then I was the only expert around.

Alpha: What decade was that?

John: That’s the 1970s. I started in 1968. So after a decade, groundwater contamination was catching on. In 1980, in the US, the Superfund Act was passed. And another act was passed. Then all hell broke loose in terms of groundwater contamination because that legislation forced companies to put in monitoring wells on all their properties. Then groundwater contamination blew up as a really big field. I was one of the few players in the game. So I had all sorts of research money and students and postdocs. So that’s how I got into that.

What’s interesting, though, before I got into that, my education was all around the hydrologic cycle, water budgets, aquifers, all that stuff. So I had, shall we say, a classical education before I got diverted into contamination.

Alpha: So what is the biggest problem of contamination in the world today? What’s the issue right now?

John: I think the issue is nitrate. Nitrate is the most widespread contaminant from agriculture and from sewage. The drinking water limit for nitrate is 10 expressed as nitrogen and it’s 45 milligrams per liter expressed as nitrate. That drinking water limit is the same all across the world, more or less. It was established back in the ‘50s or ‘40s when they found that if you have too much nitrate in the water, babies can become ill. It’s called the Blue Baby Syndrome. This drinking water limit of 10 has been on the books since the ‘50s.

Then chemical agriculture comes along. In many parts of the world, much of the groundwater is approaching 10. In some cases, it’s been over 10. But is that a crisis? Well, it’s a recognized crisis because so many wells around the world are approaching 10 or going over like in the Central Valley.

Alpha: What are the consequences when it reaches those levels of contamination?

John: See, that’s the issue. The consequences are political. If you believe that the harm done was the Blue Baby Syndrome, then the consequences are political because if it reaches that level, it’s illegal to serve water to the public above that level. Nine is okay, eleven is not okay. That’s the party line.

But as I see it, and as many people see it, the crisis is because if you’ve got water with milligrams per liter nitrate, and if you also have in that water a bunch of pesticides and a bunch of other compounds, then the human body is really drinking this cocktail, which is, shall we say, a base load of nitrogen, of nitrate, with all sorts of other things in it.

Now, the Canadian government decided to do a review of the literature on nitrate 15 years ago. When they reviewed the literature, they found that in fact, modern research shows that nitrate above, say, one milligram per liter is dangerous for infants and pregnant women. So if you were to start over and set a drinking water limit, you’d set it at one.

What the federal government was supposed to do, they were supposed to send a letter to all the provinces saying, look, that drinking water limit of 10 is out of date. If you want to protect the citizens, then the level would need to be one. Therefore you need to make people know that they shouldn’t drink water above one if they’re pregnant or have infants.

That was so politically charged that the government actually didn’t do that. So there’s no country in the world that has the political nerve to change that limit because if they change the limit, then you’ve got hundreds of millions of people that are drinking water that’s harmful.

So 70% of the European population drinks groundwater, nearly 50% of the American population. Groundwater drinking is all over the world. The wells are generally designed not to be particularly safe. Many wells are not designed to be safe. They’re just designed because that’s the way you do them. When you want to renovate your kitchen, you get an inspector in, but when you drill a well, nobody inspects wells. So groundwater is, no matter what question you ask, an area of astounding lack of information and astounding ignorance. The ignorance in most cases is in the wrong way. People think that because water comes out of a well, it’s more likely going to be safe than river water. That was the case 70 years ago, spring water.

When people go up in the hills in China and in various other places and they sample the water from farmers up in the hills in the little villages, and they test it for fecal bacteria, they find that 30% of the water has tested bad for fecal bacteria. Yet these people are drinking water from springs. So how can spring water be so harmful?

Well, if you have the animals and if you have latrines, basically, and you’re out in the boonies, then you’re going to have fecal-contaminated groundwater. If the water has E. coli in it, then it likely has viruses in it. So what do we know about viruses in groundwater? Almost nothing. There are only, I’m sure, four virus-in-groundwater experts in the US. We only have one in Canada.

Who goes out and samples these wells properly and analyzes them for viruses? Well, hardly anybody. Hardly anybody because the sampling is tricky. To have a lab that can actually identify the harmful viruses, it takes a very sophisticated lab. I collaborated with one of the guys that ran such a lab. He’s now retired. I’m not sure if his lab’s still running. He was finding viruses all over the place. He was finding viruses in wells in the city of Madison, Wisconsin. Once he found the virus, we did our calculations and said, well, yeah, we should have expected viruses.

There are so many aspects of groundwater contamination that are where there’s so little information. Governments don’t want to go there because as soon as the word gets out that the wells in a community are contaminated, the public says, well, has it harmed us? That’s a hopeless question. Everything is done to avoid that question—has it harmed us? Are the pesticides harming us?

So the depletion problem and the water poverty problem and the water-for-food problem, that’s huge. Then the World Bank’s conclusion was that the quality problem is even greater. The quality problem relates to the fact that how are we going to know when the groundwater is killing people? That’s tricky.

In epidemiology, I have to find an epidemiologist, and those are the specialists who should be interested in this problem, but they’re not doing much work on it because there’s no funding and they probably aren’t interested because they probably haven’t thought of being interested in it.

Alpha: So there’s a whole public health possible crisis in many places in the world. This is the connection of nitrates through agriculture and on top of also fecal matter and viruses through the groundwater. So it’s all these other crises that are connected to the groundwater—food and water. It’s also this public health thing. So really, I mean, we really should be paying so much more attention to groundwater, I guess, in the whole picture.

To deal with nitrate issue, it does seem like we need a big transition from this industrial farming to regenerative farming.

John: The guy who wrote the book on that—it’s a wonderful book called “The End of Plenty” by Joel Bourne Jr. He does work mostly for National Geographic. He wrote a wonderful book that I stumbled upon in 2015, “The End of Plenty.” He graduated in soil science long ago, became a filmmaker and a writer. His conclusion is if we’re going to proceed as a civilization and not destroy the planet, we’re going to have to solve the food crisis. His conclusion was that it could be done with regenerative agriculture. He wasn’t an environmentalist, but that was his conclusion. So that registered on me greatly.

But going along with that, regenerative agriculture, I think in most cases increases groundwater recharge. So that—regenerative agriculture needs to be tied to that. Then the people doing all the rainwater harvesting out there, the Millison’s and what-not, that’s all about the water table. The whole rainwater harvesting thing, is raising the water table. That’s improving the ecology. That means there are going to be more trees and wetter soil. All of this is about slowing water down. So the slow water movement is correct. People don’t quite know that it’s key, but it’s important.

Alpha: Well, thank you. This has been an interesting conversation. Do you have a final word to leave with everyone.

John: When it comes to young people, young people want to find employment, they want to get educated and find meaningful employment. Young people aren’t going into groundwater science. They’re not going into geology. They’re going into environmental studies. That’s leading to fewer and fewer people that can participate in solving these problems that you and I are talking about. There’s great opportunity for young people in university to get a little bit more groundwater education and their opportunities will be huge.

..

Part I of our interview.