Intervention Points for Rehydrating Landscapes and Restoring the Living Climate

A rapid fire list, and a special workshop tomorrow.

Quick news flash: workshop tomorrow (Wednesday, Oct 29, 11 AM EDT) (also my son’s birthday) with Peter Bunyard, co-author of Cooling the Climate: How to Revive the Biosphere and Cool the Earth in 20 Years. Learn more and sign up here to join live or watch the recording.

Ompompanoosuc River, © Didi Pershouse

Many of you are reading this because you are interested in how biosphere processes can help with climate mitigation, resilience, and water cycling.

Most of my colleagues in this community are known for their advocacy and interest in a particular biosphere process, or practice. For some it’s the biotic pump, or beavers, or biochar. Having a favorite way of intervening is fine, as long as we don’t dismiss all the other options as if they were just side dishes on the menu of life.

It’s interesting to note how our passion for our favorite intervention got started. Most of you know my work as being about the “soil sponge.” That started because I experienced horrendous flooding in Vermont in 2011 that got me thinking about what happens when rain meets soil, and why it’s so different from one place to another.

For a number of years after that I was on the workshop and lecture circuit, co-teaching with one or the other of two beloved colleagues: Peter Donovan and Walter Jehne. With Peter, my half of the gig was often teaching how and why to test the rate of water infiltration during field days (while he taught about soil carbon sampling and the seven generations of sunlight). When teaching with Walter, I showed how the soil sponge provided resilience to flooding, drought, and erosion, so that he could show how it also served as a foundation for temperature regulation through a cascade of hydrological processes.

I remain faithful to my beloved soil sponge as a foundational aspect of what makes life possible—and what makes life wonderful—on land, but I now get to teach about both the soil sponge AND cascades of sunlight energy AND the whole hydrological/living leg of climate regulation in my courses. That’s because Walter and I are stuck on opposite sides of the Earth, and Peter and I are putting down roots on opposite ends of our Turtle Island continent.

For those who may have gotten caught swirling in an eddy of a single intervention, and lost track of the complexity of life, today I want to give a broad overview (not complete, just a quick sweep of what’s currently in my mind) of many different ways we might intervene as we work to restore the living climate and a planet with food, water, and shelter from the storms, for all of life.

I’m sorry that this post has these interventions in a list, and likely not a perfectly organized one. If you want to see them as not a list, please go outside, and watch the sky, and the clouds, and the vegetation. Take off your shoes and feel where the ground is hot and dry, and where it is cool and moist. Play with some rocks in a stream. Go for a walk in the rain and watch where it soaks in, collects in a puddle, or gathers force. In later posts we can make some fun graphics, but I want to at least show you the list in my mind, (which is surely partial.)

Please put your additions of what has temporarily slipped my mind in the comments!

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HOW WE CAN HELP

EARTH and WATER

1. Sinking more water into the land via small living structures (soil and vegetation) that infiltrate and hold water

   1. Providing conditions for the soil sponge structure to develop so that water can sink in where it lands. (diverse vegetation, no tillage, eliminate synthetic inputs that breakdown aggregates, etc., eliminate all pesticides/biocides.

   2. Reducing horizontal movement of water via vegetation and plant litter (millions of tiny microdams that slow and swirl the water, allowing it more time to soak in, and so it doesn’t erode the soil)

   3. Capturing and slowing vertical water as it falls, by allowing tree canopy and multistory vegetation, so droplets have more time before they reach the ground and don’t compact the soil.

2. Reduce runoff by transforming sealed surfaces

   1. Transform pavement through depaving, permeable pavement, etc.

   2. Install rooftop gardens on all flat roofs (malls, data centers, etc.)

   3. Break up intense soil compaction using deep rooted plants (tillage radish, chickory, etc.,) or with ripsowers and other equipment, in combination with biological inputs into the narrow channels.

3. Capturing more water uphill (and in dry areas) via larger structures so it can sink in, or be used to keep vegetation alive during dry periods

   1. Ponds

      1. Beaver restoration and protection

      2. Excavation of ponds

      3. Dew ponds

   2. Swales

   3. Slowing streams via Low Tech Process Based Restoration

      1. check dams

      2. gully stuffing

      3. induced meandering

   4. capturing urban runoff

      1. rain barrels

      2. underground structures

4. Increasing plant-available water in soils (beyond infiltration)—For successes such as those with pre-monsoon dry seeding in Andhra Pradesh.

   1. Create conditions for mycorrizhal fungi that can access water that plants can’t access alone

   2. Create diverse soil food webs (plant diversity, biostimulants, compost) so that biological or metabolic water is released by soil life as it eats and excretes

   3. Create conditions for deep soil sponge to develop so that water vapor can condense into liquid within the pores

5. Fog harvesting

   1. Protecting or planting trees with fog harvesting structures, especially along coastlines

   2. Human-made fog nets

6. Dew harvesting

   1. keep soil covered with plants

   2. build structures such as the barn roof in Water in Plain Sight

7. Reducing Evaporation from the soil surface

   1. Vegetation that cools the soil surface via shade, and via latent heat flux from transpiration

   2. More plant litter/mulch

   3. Reducing wind through multi-story vegetation and wind breaks

   4. Addressing soil salinity

SKY and WATER

1. Increasing high albedo cloud formation and rain formation

   1. Protect and restore forests and diverse landscapes that provide natural airborne condensation nuclei in the form of VOCs, pollen, spores, and precipitation nuclei in the form of bacteria.

   2. Protect whales, penguins, and other ocean life that provide nutrients for plankton that create DMSP that is broken down by bacteria into DMS

   3. Reduce emission of pollutants that create haze (mostly from burning fossil fuels)

   4. Eliminate pesticides that kill bacteria in water, soils, plants, and sky.

   5. Reduce airborne soil from wind erosion

      1. vegetation and regrowing soil sponge structure

2. Allowing nighttime heat to escape via the “nighttime radiation window” by priming daily rainfall, so that there are clear skies with less water vapor and humid hazes.

3. Protecting and restoring the Biotic Pump

   1. Protection of existing old growth and mature diverse forests, particularly in the tropics.

   2. Restoring coastal forests, and connecting broken links between coastal and inland forests

   3. Forest fire prevention without clearcutting or overthinning

AND THEN…

1. Trusting biodiversity to do its work, and creating conditions for intense diversity

   1. Burying/composting bodies in the soil: green burials of humans, carcasses of animals, anything unused from slaughter, as well as bodies of plants.

   2. Miyawaki mini forests, agroforestry, agroecology, pollinator gardens, pollinator strips,

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In reality, there are places and purposes for each of these interventions—and generally we want to be doing many of them at the same time: which is why we need all of us to have a passion, but also all of us to be able to have a clear image in our minds eye of the whole system at work as a multitude of mutually reinforcing processes.

• How do we choose an intervention?

• How do we know what effect it is having?

• And how do we know where the most important places are to use that particular intervention?

I have plans to explore all of these, but not in this post!

Here’s what’s coming up:

• Tomorrow, author and environmental scientist Peter Bunyard and I (along with last week’s guest Rob de Laet) will be looking at the biotic pump and the Amazon Rainforest. Sign up here.

• In future mini-workshops we will be exploring context: which interventions to choose in specific circumstances.

• Ali Bin Shahid
  and I will be exploring which locations might be trigger points that can help the whole system shift (or trigger a spiral of degeneration).

• Dr. Katie Ross and I are planning a series on Observation, Monitoring, and Meaning.

• In our Land and Leadership Development Community we frequently talk about other sorts of upstream interventions in our own unique places, and within ourselves as well: such as shifting the worldviews and paradigms and policies that drive us to thinking, being, and acting in degenerative versus regenerative ways.