Last month I had a chance to catch up with Zach Weiss about his work with Sepp Holzer and how it inspired his own teaching and projects.
I first met Zach at the Living Soils Symposium in Montreal, Canada, where we both were speaking, in 2018. We sat at a table outside the main hall with several other presenters and compared notes.
I must confess, I was uncomfortable, because I had had an extreme response to his presentation. For most of it, I appreciated how much his description of the water cycle resonated with my own understanding, but then suddenly he switched to what seemed like endless footage of heavy equipment moving massive quantities of soil to dig out ponds in a landscape that looked like my own in Vermont. This was so utterly against my sense of what was needed. My presentation had been about soil as living tissue—the body of the land—and my work was all about creating conditions for the structural and functional integrity of the soil sponge to form, so that it could function as a huge water catchment covering the entire landscape, far beyond what any pond can do.
Inside my head I was screaming NOOOOOO!!!!! as I watched his footage of the living tissue of the land being destroyed.
But the late great Carol Sanford (whose core process was to “disrupt certainty” in those she worked with—including me—in her Change Agent Development Community) always called me out on my unwillingness to work with certain people. So when Zach got in touch this summer about joining my retreat, I jumped at the chance to disrupt my own certainty and see his work in a new light—having seen his project Water Stories grow over the years since we first met, and I invited him into conversation.
I also have been humbled by how challenging it can be to grow the sponge in some circumstances (extreme compaction, extreme drought, or extreme topsoil loss on hillsides as we experienced in Vermont during the sheep craze when all our forests were cut), and I am a lot more open to different interventions being needed in different contexts to jumpstart the water cycle.
I hope you will enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Keep an eye out for a mini-workshop we hope to do when he returns from his trip to India.
(If all my subscribers were paid subscribers, I could offer most of my teaching for free. Imagine that.)
