The Los Angeles wildfires hit close to home for me. In the wake of the fires, I started working on an expansion of an article “Rehydrating California to lessen wildfires” I wrote a couple of years back. Then I remembered that Didi Pershouse and Walter Jehne had run a Rehydrate California project awhile back. So, instead, I thought to have a dialog with her, as a way to provide an overview of the subject.
Didi has a wonderful, warm personality, and is a leader in spreading the word about regenerative water. She teaches workshops about soil and water, wrote the book The Ecology of Care, and founded the Land and Leadership Initiative. I had her on for a great previous podcast where we talked about metaphors for understanding water and soil - bread, museums, and wicks.
Here is a portion of our dialog, edited for clarity and context. You can listen to the audio for the full dialog. (The title picture above is the Ballona lagoon in LA which spanned thousands of acres in 1900.)
Alpha Lo: I was around in many of the California wildfires during the 2010s. At one point, I thought, "How come no one's looking at the restoration of the water cycle to deal with the wildfires?" The talk was all about fuel reduction, cutting down brush and trees to stop the wildfires, but very few people looking at how we can rehydrate the land to lessen wildfires. One of the few who was talking about it was Zach Weiss, who was talking about restoring land and the small water cycle. His mentor, Sepp Holz, was talking about how draining the water from the land leads to more wildfires. Another one of the few was Milan Milan who was studying how the degrading of the landscape led to the drying up of the landscape, which lead to the loss of rain and an increase in wildfires in Spain in the 1990s. When he came to California, a US forest service person said to him, "If your ideas are correct, California is going to have a lot of wildfires in the 2010s." And lo and behold, it did.
At the start of this year, a number of us who had been promoting water cycle restoration noticed that wow, there's suddenly a lot more interest around this topic and its importance in relationship to climate change. The word was getting out. When the LA wildfires hit last week, it seemed like there was a lot more talk than in the past about how rehydrating the land could be a way to deal with wildfires.
Didi Pershouse: One of the phrases that's been going around is that wet wood is a lot harder to burn. So there's the basic principle that when vegetation is hydrated, when the trees and grasses have enough water, it helps with fire prevention. Even just when a lawn has more water in it, it affects the soil sponge. Healthy soil has pore space or void space. The structural integrity holds that together so that water can soak in and stay in this underground reservoir. In places like California, where there's a rainy season if you're lucky, you can have a much longer green season when you have water at the root zone for plants. There's an issue of plant health, particularly tree health. Trees are so long-lived that a tree under drought stress is much more likely to be stressed by viruses, fungal diseases, and insects. So you're much more likely to have damaged trees that are dropping limbs, falling over, etc., in a landscape where there's not enough water being held in the land at the root zone for the trees.
Not only is wet wood harder to burn, but fuel on the ground doesn't break down when its dry. Limbs, leaves, dry grasses that have been trampled to the ground by foot traffic in a dry landscape will just oxidize. They're going to slowly dry out, lose their biomass into the air, and become crispy, crumbly, and fire-prone. We see this in the Southwest, where fence posts put up a hundred years ago are still standing because they haven't rotted off. But in a wetter landscape, or in a more biologically active one where you have more fungal activity from saprophytic fungi that biodegrade wood, a fence post will rot off after 10 years. Here in Vermont, you can't leave a fence post forever, or a log on the ground will turn into beautiful soil in just a few years. I can't leave firewood on the ground here for my wood stove; it has to be up off the ground because the fungal hyphae and spores will go right into that and turn it into soil. So that's really different in places with seasonal rainfall that haven’t found ways to preserve the water that was once in the land.
In a more Mediterranean climate, you need the beavers, you need the wetlands, you need the soil sponge. You need a way of being in the land that does not disturb its ability to hold water. Those are some of the foundational ideas. There are ideas of biotic pump, cloud formation, precipitation nuclei, and the issue of transpiration and latent heat flux.
Alpha Lo: There's some interesting studies about soil moisture correlating with wildfire risk. For example, NASA and other researchers have looked at places with more soil moisture, and found they were a lot less vulnerable to wildfire risk. Nick Steiner, who works with Zach Weiss in water stories and does a lot of water restoration work, recently did a video where he shows a plant that he watered a lot and another plant that dried out. He then took a small blowtorch to both, and the one that was dried out just burned, while the one with water didn’t burn at all.
Didi Pershouse: Yep.
Alpha Lo: So, it’s key how we hydrate. Another factor I’ve been trying to raise awareness of is groundwater levels. In California, we've drained a lot of the groundwater, so much so that in the Central Valley, the ground is actually sinking because of groundwater loss. In LA, there's a freeway going through there called the Artesia Freeway. An artesian well is where if you swing a pickaxe into the ground, the groundwater will spurt up like a spout. That’s how LA used to be, with groundwater all the way up to the surface. When the groundwater is that high, plants are a lot more hydrated. If the groundwater drops beneath the roots, you can't bring up that water. If groundwater levels are reachable, the trees can bring it up, pass it into the soil, and also transpire it, making the air more humid. The groundwater also helps increase the rain through precipitation recycling. If we increase groundwater levels we will decrease wildfire risk.
People think that LA is a desert, but if you look at old photos from the 1800s, you’ll see it was actually wetlands in many places. Rodeo Drive was where the rivers met, with a significant chunk of Beverly Hills being wetlands. It's just that we've kind of forgotten because we paved over it. During the floods of the early 1900s, we channelized and concretized the LA River, which made it really ugly, and also funneled water out of the landscape without allowing it to infiltrate. Thankfully, we’re starting to restore some of it now.
Central Valley use to have big lake, Tulare Lake. The area was one-third wetlands.
Didi Pershouse: And now Tulare is basically gone. So, yeah, there's a tremendous amount of water that has been drained off of the land. I think of having groundwater as a result of the soil sponge. The soil sponge can replenish it. We've seen places where the groundwater levels come back up again when people start managing the surface better—allowing cover crops, diverse vegetation, less or no tillage, and not using nitrogen fertilizers, which break up soil aggregates and interfere with the microbial work that forms those aggregates. Without those aggregates, there’s no pore space between the mineral particles. When we interfere with soil sponge formation, groundwater levels decrease.
Alpha Lo: Right. Several researchers, Lucas Zeppetello and Marysa Lague, have shown that soil moisture in the southwest United States, including California, correlates with moisture from previous seasons. Less moisture in the spring and winter leads to more heat in the summer. So, infiltrating water into the land is key. LA had big rains last year, but because it didn’t stay in the landscape, it influenced conditions a year later, leading to more wildfires.
Paul Dirmeyer started the Global Soil Wetness Project, mapping soil moisture worldwide. By including soil moisture in weather and climate models they improved weather predictions. They found that soil moisture can influence the landscape hydration even long after it disappears initially. Some moisture moves down to groundwater and returns, some moisture hops through the air to nearby areas.
Didi Pershouse: It's interesting that LA had all that rain, but scientists are making the jump to how more vegetation leads to more fuel for fires when it dries out. While that's partly true, they aren't factoring in how we manage soil surface and water availability.
If the snowpack on mountains is intact and not polluted, it will gradually melt throughout the summer, providing water during dry seasons. If we don’t channelize that water and instead allow it to spread across the landscape, we can store it in soils or holding tanks. This is one way to address global warming’s effects. Snowpacks have been interfered with, especially due to pollutants.
The sequoias used to capture fog, and some still do. I remember a forester telling me that along the Pacific Highway, even during droughts, water would always be running across the highway because of fog-harvesting trees on the hillside.
Alpha Lo: Yes, fog is a key component of California's water budget, like a secret neighbor delivering water. Milan, the meteorologist, noted that California’s Mediterranean climate relies on cold ocean currents evaporating water in summer, which brings fog. Redwood trees get a third of their water from fog via foliar uptake.
But as we develop the coastal areas and heat them up, fog evaporates before reaching land. That’s why it’s important to rehydrate the coastal areas so that fog can travel further inland, helping reduce wildfires by adding moisture to the soil. Soil moisture has a memory that stretches over seasons. It moves slowly, moisture hopping through the landscape.
Didi Pershouse: It’s also about condensation. Fog, already in droplet form, gets captured by trees, dripping down to the roots and lower vegetation. It’s a process nature has perfected. Cool nighttime temperatures also help, as they allow water to condense on vegetation, replenishing the landscape.
If we take care of the land, we can capture water in many ways. We’ve interfered with these natural processes. Climate whiplash, like longer droughts and heavier rains, makes it even more important to slow down water flow. Slowing water down allows it to stay on the land and hydrate plants through the dry season.
Alpha Lo: Exactly. If water from the wet season isn’t captured and stored, it’s drained before the dry season. By slowing it down and using techniques like swales or permaculture earthworks, we can store water in the soil and groundwater for later use.
I remember Zach Weiss working on a project in California, where he built a pond to capture water, that kept vegetation hydrated. Hydrated vegetation is much more resistant to fire. When fires came, his neighbors’ land burned, but the land he worked on did not. Decentralizing water storage—having ponds and groundwater sources—helps us manage water more effectively, especially in times of crisis.
Didi Pershouse: Yes, it’s important to decentralize water storage. Relying on centralized reservoirs isn’t enough when you need water during wildfires or droughts. We need to store it on the land, in the soil, or in ponds to use when it's most needed. Without this, we face challenges in managing water during dry periods or extreme events like wildfires and floods.
Alpha Lo: Water stored in the land—whether through soil, groundwater, or vegetation—works as a buffer, especially when the system is hit by extreme weather. It’s about creating a resilient ecosystem that can handle both drought and excess rain by maintaining that balance.
And these solutions are scalable. If we applied these methods more widely—across cities, regions, and even nations—we could reduce the severity of floods and droughts and help protect our ecosystems from climate change. It's about working with nature, rather than against it.
California has a centralized way of managing water, using large reservoirs. It has an incredible number of dams—something like 1,500. Zach Weiss talks about how this system is very energy-intensive; California spends 20% of its energy budget just moving and cleaning water. This means that 20% of the state's energy contributes to global warming, which in turn further disrupts the water cycle. So, moving water around with large reservoirs and aqueducts is causing more global warming and not offering a sustainable solution.
It's also disruptive to ecological processes, like the salmon swimming upstream, which are a huge part of the ecosystem. Bears eat the salmon, and their waste helps fertilize the forest. A significant amount of the nitrogen in forests used to come from the salmon swimming upstream. By blocking the rivers, we’re cutting off this nutrient cycle, disrupting both the forests and their contribution to the small water cycle.
An analogy that was shared with me is that blocking our rivers is like clogging the arteries of our body. To further the analogy, think of society emitting industrial carbon as a person eating toxins. To regain our health we both need to stop eating toxins; and we also need to unblock those arteries. Decentralized water flow is critical to restoring the health of the landscape.
Didi Pershouse: There's a beautiful little book called Water : A Natural History by Alice Outwater, which talks about how animals like salmon, beavers, and buffalo managed water in the landscape. For example, the buffalo would roll in the ground, creating small potholes that collected water. Also, prairie dogs or gophers, with their tunnels, could store large amounts of water underground, helping it percolate down quickly. It's really about the anatomy of the landscape and how these animals, along with plant roots and fungi, play a huge role in water management.
These underground systems, which are invisible to us, are just as important, if not more, than the visible processes we can see with animals like beavers and buffalo. The complex soil food web, earthworms, and fungi all do vital work below the surface.
Alpha Lo: Beaver restoration is a big deal—at one point, there were somewhere between 100 million to 400 million beavers in North America, and they created massive wetlands. These wetlands help with precipitation recycling, and with landscape hydration that allowed more forests to grow.
Beavers also help regenerate the landscape, and efforts by groups like Brock Dolman and the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in California helped get beavers reintroduced to the landscape. There’s even managed to get a beaver department into California’s government recently.
Didi Pershouse: That's fantastic! I know another friend who's been working on beaver restoration, and there are several great books on the topic, like Eager. One of the amazing things about beaver dams is that they're designed to fail over time. When a beaver dam breaks down, it creates rich soils in the wetlands that then support different vegetation. This leads to a patchwork of ecosystems within ecosystems, which is essential for biodiversity.
This diversity is necessary for the proper functioning of ecosystems, including the rain cycle. Diverse forest landscapes contribute to the production of biogenic volatile compounds, which help create clouds and rain.
Alpha Lo: Beavers are truly amazing. I had Leila Phillips, who wrote Beaverland, on my podcast here. She talked a lot about the incredible role beavers play in our ecosystems.
Wildfire is a natural part of the ecosystem process. But when we dehydrate the land, wildfires no longer follow the pattern they use to. We now have much more intense wildfires. We have hotter, drier winds fanning the wildfires than in the past.
That’s another aspect I’ve been thinking about, inspired by Milan Milan’s insight when he studied wildfires in Spain. He could actually track which winds created the fires and measure how much moisture was in those winds. Because there was less transpiration feeding moisture into the air, the winds were drier, which contributed to the wildfires.
The timing of the LA wildfire was strange because it happened in winter, whereas wildfires usually happen in summer. I was talking to a friend in LA who’s over six feet tall, and he got blown over by the winds—they were that strong. These Chinook winds come from the Great Basin in Nevada, blow across the desert, go up the mountains, and then as they come down, they gain speed, becoming hotter and drier. By the time they reach LA, the Santa Ana winds are strong, dry and hot.
Some scientists, like Roni Avissar and Francina Dominguez, have studied how trees help slow down winds. When there are fewer trees, the winds pick up speed. On top of that, the Great Basin area has lost a lot of vegetation and groundwater, which makes the air drier and less humid. That’s a problem.
Reservoirs on the Owens Valley side of the Sierra Nevadas also capture water that would otherwise hydrate the landscape, making the winds even hotter and drier. If we rehydrated the landscape all the way from the Great Basin to LA, it would make a big difference.
Rehydrating, though, can create more vegetation, which could fuel wildfires if not managed carefully. That’s why the worse things get, the trickier the solutions become. We need a strategic plan to get water back into the landscape. That’s why techniques like terracing, swales, rainwater ponds, and groundwater replenishment are so important. If we can hydrate the vegetation, it’s less likely to catch fire.
Didi Pershouse: The same principles apply whether you’re looking at wind or water. A complex, “messy” landscape with diverse vegetation slows both. On mountaintops or flat plains, the more complex the vegetation, the slower the wind will be.
Alpha Lo: Unmanaged forests tend to have fewer wildfires. Chad Hanson, Curtis Bradley, and Dominick Dellasalla found that unmanaged forests on the West Coast had less wildfires than managed or plantation forests. In plantations, where forests are monocultures, or where logging has taken place, the risk of wildfires is much higher. Unmanaged forests retain dead logs and brush, which can absorb up to 20 times more moisture than soil. This creates a humid, air-conditioned environment that makes it harder for wildfires to take hold. Anastasia Makarieva, a Russian scientist, studied boreal forests and found the same thing: logged areas or plantations in Russia are where the wildfires happen, while unmanaged wilderness areas remain resilient to fire.
Didi Pershouse: We don’t hear enough about this. The idea that monoculture forests or heavily managed landscapes are more prone to wildfire isn’t widely understood, but it makes sense. In any system—whether it’s agroecology, permaculture, or regenerative agriculture—biodiversity is key to health. Diverse systems create resilience, whether it’s through feeding soil communities, retaining water, or supporting above-ground life like pollinators and birds.
Alpha Lo: Monoculture forests are like a body missing its defenses—the system is less equipped to deal with stressors like pests, drought, or wildfires.
In Iberia, they’ve planted huge eucalyptus monocultures for the toilet paper industry. Eucalyptus trees draw up groundwater faster than it’s being replenished, leaving the landscape drier over time.
It’s important to remember that drawing water up through vegetation isn’t inherently bad—after all it’s needed for transpiration and rain creation. But when water is being pulled up faster than it can be replenished, it creates long-term problems.
Didi Pershouse: And monoculture forests likely don’t produce the same terpenes, pollens, fungal spores, and other compounds that biodiverse forests do—compounds that are essential for healthy rain cycles and cloud formation.
Alpha Lo: I want to bring up some ideological shifts that have happened the LA Department of Water and Power. Many years ago, they were much more focused on a drainage paradigm of water management. But Anthony Lipkis and Accelerated Resilience LA, pushed for a new approach involving rain infiltration and the rehydration of LA. He got six other agencies in LA to study the idea. Those agencies then helped prod the LA Department of Water and Power to alter their ways. The department use to view stormwater as a problem to be funneled out as quickly as possible to the sea. "Now there's been there's been a shift in that thinking," Art Castro from the department says. "Now we see stormwater as an asset." As a result, they’ve started implementing rain gardens between streets and freeways. There has been progress, laying the groundwork for a broader paradigm shift in LA and California is happening. There is still a long way to go as LA is so overly concretized, with relatively little capacity for rain to infiltrate.
The Chinese Sponge City initiative is a great model. In any one city they will implement over 300 projects to improve rain infiltration and slow water flow. It has been successful in China, and other countries are now copying the Sponge City concept. This could serve as a template for LA and other California cities, like Fresno, Bakersfield etc. However, it’s tricky because implementing this would mean “undeveloping” some areas.
In China, they’ve adopted the concept of “negative planning,” which involves depaving and undeveloping to make space for nature to infiltrate rain. At some point, the US will need to generate cultural momentum around becoming aware that restoring floodplains and removing certain concrete areas is essential.
Didi Pershouse: That’s a critical point. I was talking two nights ago with a group I meet with weekly—the Land and Leadership Development Community, which includes people from LA. They’re part of a group called the Soil Sponge Collective. They talked about opportunities in neighborhoods where rebuilding is necessary. As people rebuild, it’s an opportunity to create not just fire-hardened houses but also landscapes softened against fire. Instead of paving everything or relying on rock gardens and bare rooftops, there’s potential to design LA to act more like a sponge city.
The LA River is a big part of this. In the sponge cities in China, you see marvelous parks along rivers designed to infiltrate water as it falls and flows.
Alpha Lo: The LA River is starting to be re-greened, which is great, but there’s still a long way to go. One challenge is that the river has been so narrowed that re-greening leads to difficulties as that causes the bends in the river to change.
There have also been proposed projects in LA for aquifer refilling, like a plan to drain stormwater towards a new wetlands park in Burbank . There are nine wetland parks proposed for LA County, but to make this happen, we need cultural momentum.
This year, there seems to be a growing awareness of the importance of restoring the water cycle for climate resilience and wildfire prevention. If we keep spreading this message, it will become easier for people to support the necessary changes, even if it requires sacrifices, like undeveloping parts of LA to allow more rain infiltration.
Didi Pershouse: When we toured California in 2018 with the “Can We Rehydrate California?” speaking tour, we saw similar challenges. I was speaking and listening to people during long sessions. At that time, California culture had just caught on to the idea of soil carbon as a way to address climate change. There was so much excitement about soil carbon as a drawdown solution—people were already doing soil carbon planning, using biochar, and promoting soil-focused initiatives.
It was like, “Don’t tell us about other solutions; we’ve already picked our plan.” There were real champions for promoting soil carbon, which isn’t a bad thing. But we were about seven years too early for people to really hear the water message. Michal Kravčík had the same experience. Around the same time, he gave talks about water restoration, but people weren’t ready to listen because they were so focused on soil carbon.
Now, we’re realizing that while the carbon cycle is important, it’s only part of the picture. We can’t adjust the climate through carbon alone—we need to address water, biodiversity, and other processes as well.
Alpha Lo: That’s a good point. I think we’re at the same stage with the water cycle restoration movement as the restorative soil movement was 10 years ago. Things are moving faster now, though, and I think the water restoration movement can take off more quickly.
For example, soil carbon reached the national debate stage during one of the elections, which was surprising. But the connection between soil and the water cycle isn’t as widely known yet. This year, it seems like people are finally starting to understand it.
We owe thanks to people like Walter Jehne, Zach Weiss, and Michal Kravčík, who’ve been pushing this message for years. Kravčík has been doing on-the-ground projects in Slovakia and elsewhere. He even came to Ventura, near LA, and calculated how much rain infiltration would increase rainfall in that area.
California, and LA specifically, has lost about 30% of its rainfall over the last few decades. Some of that is due to global warming and ocean warming, but not all. A significant portion—maybe half—is due to land degradation.
We need to push the message that restoring the land can restore the rain. Thankfully, more people are starting to share this message. Zach Weiss’s recent video on the LA fires reached half a million views.
Let’s summarize what we want to do to rehydrate California and LA to lessen wildfires. What's the strategic plan?
Didi Pershouse: Yeah, there is a larger strategic plan, and there's also what people can do locally. We start by thinking about what people can do as they rebuild, or as they're building new homes, or planning commissions for their neighborhoods, etc. It’s about softening the landscape while hardening the houses. So, harden the structures to make them less flammable, but also de-pave, create rain gardens, and plant Miyawaki mini-forests with lots of diverse vegetation close together. And finding ways to put gray water, or leftover water, back into the land. Finding ways to capture water as it moves through the landscape. Green rooftops, rain gardens, and permeable pavement for driveways. Anything that allows the water to soak in. On a larger scale, that's like turning the LA River into a whole Sponge City park.
Alpha Lo: Yeah, those are great suggestions for local efforts. Also, hugelkultur, where you use logs to absorb water. Let your lawn grow, turn it into a polycultural piece of land.
At a slightly larger level, at the municipal level, we could create watershed councils that look at restoring creeks, restoring land, infiltrating rain, pushing for more permeable pavement, replenishing groundwater etc. Grass Valley, California, is a town where the groundwater is at a level where tree roots can in some places reach, but in others not. Working with swales, ponds, leaky weirs, could help increase groundwater levels to levels where it would lower wildfire risk in the area.
Water management experts and land managers could work with state legislators to create laws that allow more decentralized water bodies, promote beaver restoration, and similar initiatives. There are probably 50 plus organizations in LA interested in rehydration, so they could come together to create a rehydration plan. We also need to focus on the area all the way from San Bernardino to the Great Basin, including the Central Valley, and cities like Fresno, and Bakersfield. The more these areas are rehydrated, the more moisture gets recycled, the more that helps areas like the Colorado River and even the Midwest with downwind precipitation recycling. This is important on a larger scale. Once we have enough momentum, we can shift the narrative and policies.
Didi Pershouse: Yeah, I agree. I have three other areas I think we should focus on. We've talked about the homeowner, neighborhood, city, and state levels, but also thinking about three types of land management. In forestry, we need to shift away from monoculture plantations and the idea of managing by cutting. Instead, we should focus on increasing water supplies within the forest. This could include allowing more beaver activity, using fungal biostimulants to help degrade wood, and bringing in what’s needed to help eucalyptus trees degrade so that we have more humus and less fuel on the ground. We also need healthier forests by increasing diversity and recognizing how to create windbreaks to protect these areas. For grazing, we need to move away from areas where grasslands are just cut or left unmanaged with only a few animals grazing randomly. This leaves woody, flammable shrubs, which animals will eat if they are properly managed. Shifting to holistic management means making decisions about grazing, using fencing, and moving animals in large groups. Some people are using goats, which are great at clearing out flammable plants. Lastly, in vegetable farming, we need to shift away from monocultures and move towards polycultures, using cover crops and animals to graze them down. Tillage is one of the main things that destroys the soil sponge and makes it harder for rain to be absorbed. We need to preserve the soil structure to allow for more water retention. When you use four plant families and sixteen different species, quorum sensing occurs, and the soil food web becomes much more active. This activity helps store more water underground, as more organisms interact and the underground ecosystem flourishes.
Didi Pershouse: So, shifting away from monoculture in both forestry and farming is essential for these systems to thrive.
Alpha Lo: Cool. Yeah, beavers, soil, cover crops, polycultures—those are all great strategies. I also want to add that, at the larger level, once we have enough momentum, we need to address the whole human-made dam paradigm. Dams are blocking the natural flow of water, and the Klamath River is an example where they are starting to work with indigenous people to remove dams. We need policymakers, sustainable land groups, and indigenous communities working together to "un-dam" rivers. Hydrologists have mainly studied how dams work, but they should focus on how they don't work, because they’re actually degrading all the land downstream. That land cannot then absorb the rain as well, and so decreases precipitation recycling. Its the atmospheric scientists who study precipitation recycling, and its the ecologists who maybe are most likely, if they even do, to realize that the land is not infiltrating rain to provide for precipitation recycling, so hydrologists can forget that factor when they build dams. It’s crucial to bring all these groups together—hydrologists, climate scientists, and ecologists—to demonstrate why dams are a huge problem. This is a larger goal, and it will take time, but we’ve already started with the Klamath, so maybe we can start removing the 1,500 dams in California. Once we start doing this, we’ll see huge ripple effects in rehydration.
Didi Pershouse: And if that water were available, I think the green vegetation would stay green longer into the dry season, which would reduce flammability and extend the time those plants are putting out root exudates, feeding the soil food web, and creating the sponge structure. It all builds on each other. The hopeful thing is that we’re starting to see how it all works together. We don’t have to say, “Here’s a problem and here’s a solution,” because we can start to find these key intervention points. If we do this, 25 other things will change in ways we can't even imagine yet.
Alpha Lo: Yeah, exactly. When the dams come down, it will allow for decentralized water storage, and the landscape will continually be hydrated. That means plants will stay hydrated, reducing wildfires.
Didi Pershouse: Yes, and keeping the snowpack for longer is part of that. We need to stop crop burning and tilling in the Central Valley. The soil has been degraded to the point that it’s like flour, not bread. When wind comes through, that soil is lifted into the air, and some of it lands on the snowpack, reducing its ability to retain water. If the soil structure is healthy, the wind can pass through without moving the soil. This will help keep the snowpack longer. And it also cools the surface temperature. If soil is covered, it might be 80°F, but uncovered soil could be as hot as 160°F. This difference impacts the air temperature, which can be 20-30 degrees warmer above pavement than above soil or grass. This can make a huge difference in air temperature.
Alpha Lo: There's also a danger right now where many people think the solution to wildfires is just chopping down redwood trees to prevent fire. It's crucial to get the message out that if we hydrate vegetation properly, we don’t need to chop it down for fire prevention.
Didi Pershouse: Hydrating the landscape itself helps prevent that.
I suggest that we take context-specific situations—like the Central Valley, LA, or other regions—and really unpack them. We need to examine how all the pieces fit together in those places. Depending on who gets involved, we can choose a few regions or bioregions to focus on and work through their challenges. The goal would be to produce some write-ups that can be handed to policymakers, neighborhood leaders, or community groups. These documents could say, “Here’s how you can prevent flooding, fires, droughts, social unrest, water insecurity, food insecurity, and even landslides.”
Alpha Lo: A bioregional plan is so crucial, and something like that could be handed over to the local hydrology department or other relevant agencies—it would have a real impact. The Transition Town movement actually started in a similar way. Permaculture students in Totnes, UK, created a plan to address local economics and resource management, and that grew into a viral movement.
Permaculturists often do final projects designing plans for individual pieces of land, but imagine if they took on entire bioregions instead—like LA County, Cascadia, or other watersheds. They could create comprehensive watershed, soil, and land-use plans for those areas.
We can have city planners, permaculturists, regenerative land managers, regenerative water people, local hydrologists etc working together, to co-create these regional plans for soil, water, and land management that integrate permaculture principles with urban planning strategies.
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The word has been starting to spread about using water cycle restoration to deal with wildfires, but there are still so many more sectors, and organizations and people that this word needs to spread to. The more those groups and people hear about this from different angles, the more likely they will investigate this way of dealing with wildfires that they may have never thought of before. If you forward this discussion onto different folks and organizations that would be awesome!
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