How to activate your local community around water

Using the principle of ecological succession to grow a social movement

How do you activate your watershed/bioregion to restore its water cycles? Use the principle of ecological succession in your community organizing of your watershed. Start with simple projects, which then pave the way for more complex projects.

Here's an example of an ecological succession of projects:

1. Just talk about water to your friends. Bring up the idea of whether more trees can create rain, or importance of soil to absorb rain, or how groundwater might lessen wildfires. Get into discussions with people. If you have the issue of fire, flood, drought, or heat wave in your area, or the issue of food security or water scarcity, you can bring up how restoring the water cycle can help deal with those issues.

2. As some people show interest, you can send them articles or videos about water, and see what they think. You can bring up the topics of slow water, small water cycle, groundwater’s impact on the water cycle, trees creating rain, the flood-fire-drought cycle, how restoring soil and forests lessens floods, how restoring groundwater lessens wildfires etc. Here is a guide to restoring your local watershed.

3. When there seems to enough interest, you can start a club with people in your area to discuss some of these books, articles, and topics.

4. In this club some people may be interested in doing projects on the ground to restore the water cycle. Together you can read up on ways to guide water into the ground, learn about building up soil sponge, different earthwork methods like swales, terraces, ponds to guide the water into the ground.. Then you can start trying out the simple projects, and move up to more complex ones. You can have gardening and landwork days where you go to each other’s piece of land and work it together. You might connect with a permaculture, agroforestry, syntropic agriculture, or Natural Sequence Farming groups in your area to learn more about these techniques.

5. In your club, as it progresses, you might find people who are interested in learning to become speakers about this topic. You can all do little practice talks with each other. Start small e.g. one minute talks. You can quiz each other, and ask each other questions. You can go on social media and ask questions in different groups. You can post longer videos of your talk or essays on your thoughts and get feedback from experts to make sure your talk and thoughts are on point. And when you feel comfortable you can then give a talk at your local library, school, business, governmental group. You do not need to claim you are an expert, just say you are trying to initiate a discussion.

6. As you and others on your team give talks around town, you will incite interest in different demographics and organizations - nonprofits, businesses, government, educational about how the issue in your area of flood, fire, drought, heat wave, water scarcity, food security and how restoring the water cycle will help. For instance you might get a local Audubon, Transition Town, Sierra Club, Rewilding group or Rotary Club interested. And they might then spread it to other nodes in their network.

As you build a local collective that creates interest in water restoration, this opens the possibility for many other different actions to begin to happen. It could pave the way for land owners to hire water land managers to restore the water cycle on their land, it could pave the way for local policy change, it makes it easier for organizations to offer flood, drought, and fire insurance where the money collected then goes to restore the local ecosystem, it helps create interest in starting bioregional learning centers (of the type Joe Brewer talks about), and it can help build the bioregional network of regeneration where we link each others efforts up.

….

This is a reader supported publication.