permaculture

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe@silcom.com>]

The New Water Alchemists
https://craftsmanship.net/the-new-water-alchemists/ 
<https://craftsmanship.net/the-new-water-alchemists/>

Animals, plants, soil, and air have long collaborated to regulate our climate 
by stimulating “the water cycle”—until we disrupted their partnership. The 
good news is that there is a clear pathway to reconciliation.
by. Judith D. Schwartz
The Water Innovators | Craftsmanship Quarterly, Winter 2017

Chris Henggeler and his family manage a 300-square mile ranch in a desolate 
corner of Australia called the Kimberley. Through a variety of low-tech 
management practices, they have single-handedly turned much of the dusty 
landscape green, with rivers and creeks once again flowing generously. Photo 
courtesy of Kachana Pastoral Company
Australia is the world’s driest inhabited continent, and a nation cursed by 
headline-grabbing weather extremes. In 2013, Australia’s Bureau of 
Meteorology famously added dark purple to its weather maps to denote 
over-the-top heat waves, the no-longer-rare days when air temperatures breach 
122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius). Australia’s history since 
European settlement has been riddled with droughts and floods so dire they’re 
etched in the books as significant natural disasters. The millennium drought, 
known colloquially as the “Big Dry,” persisted for 15 years until finally 
doused by epic rains and floods that lasted from late 2010 into early 2011.

As for wildfires, the most devastating since 1851 have names, including Black 
Christmas and Black Tuesday. Most recently and most deadly were the Black 
Saturday bushfires of 2009 in the southeastern state of Victoria, which 
killed 173 people. The sheer extent of Australia that goes up in smoke is 
mind-boggling. An estimated 60,000 bushfires, many of them extensive, flame 
through Australia each year. (Between one-third and one-half of these are 
attributed to arson.) According to several tallies, between 130 and 220 
million hectares (or 321 to 543 million acres) are burnt each year by either 
wildfires or intentional controlled burns. That’s a patch of earth somewhat 
bigger than the nation of Liberia. The carbon emitted from these 
conflagrations dwarfs the amount spewed by fossil fuels.


“I think of this as solar real estate. And I look at myself as a capitalist,” 
says Chris Henggeler, referring to his land in a hot, desolate corner of 
Australia. And his cattle? That’s “middle management,” he says. “They’re our 
plumbers and electricians.”
In the Kimberley, a remote area in the Northwestern quadrant of this 
continent, Chris Henggeler manages Kachana Station, a chunk of rugged terrain 
that spans nearly 300 square miles. With a long, craggy coastline, the 
Kimberley is about as thinly populated a region as you can find. Try to 
imagine the outback of the outback: dramatic canyons and gorges awash in hues 
of ochre; eighteen-foot-long crocodiles lazing on the river banks; 
eye-catching birds like the red-tailed black cockatoo; sparkling waterfalls 
like “the Horries” (for horizontal), which flow sideways (only in Oz). It is 
hot here year-round.

When Henggeler first visited the property in 1985 with his brother and a 
business partner, he found a worn-out landscape that hadn’t been managed for 
decades. Land surfaces were riven by gully erosion, waterways so full of silt 
they scarcely flowed. Wide areas were swept clear by recent fires, leaving 
brown and dusty soil. It didn’t take long for Henggeler to decide: let’s 
invest.
Though Henggeler now raises plenty of cattle on his enterprise, called 
Kachana Pastoral Company, he doesn’t sell livestock. His “product,” rather, 
is restored land or, as Henggeler puts it, “enhanced natural capital.” He 
considers his approach “environmental capitalism,” which entails recognizing 
and making use of the income opportunity inherent in 12 hours of free solar 
energy. “All this is beamed at us. We just need to harness it,” he says. “I 
think of this as solar real estate. And I look at myself as a capitalist.” 
The central element to creating wealth at Kachana, he says, is better 
management of the water that falls from the sky.
The Water Innovators | Craftsmanship Quarterly, Winter 2017
Henggeler’s property, called Kachana Station, dry season, 1992. Photo 
courtesy of Kachana Pastoral Company


And the cattle? That’s the “middle management,” Henggeler says. “These cattle 
had never seen humans before we arrived. Now they’re working—they’re more 
like oxen. They’re our plumbers and electricians on the landscape.”
If all this strikes you as unrealistic, look again. In the few areas that 
Henggeler has thus far been able to target—given the limitations of his 
“upper management” (that would be humans)—he reports they are growing grasses 
faster than they can expand their herd. Bare ground has drastically 
diminished. The cattle are healthier and there are 10 times as many of them. 
A creek that was a desiccated channel in the early 1990s now has clean, 
flowing water throughout the year. More springs are surfacing and locally 
endangered animals and plant species are thriving. Creeks now flow longer 
into the dry season, and the land rebounds more rapidly from bushfires.


The reasons that Henggeler’s land bounced back so dramatically have to do 
with some very basic but often ignored principles of biology. This includes 
the cycling of carbon, the building block of life. When cattle eat, they make 
use of the organic carbon that is in all plant matter. As they 
graze—defecating, urinating, and stomping down the foliage under their 
feet—the cows return organic material to the earth. Meanwhile, a grass 
plant’s response to being nibbled is to release carbon compounds (sugars) in 
the root zone. As the soil grows richer, it attracts worms and dung beetles, 
which create paths for air and water and provide ongoing feasts for 
microorganisms. These are the “little beasties” above and below the ground 
that, in Henggeler’s lexicon, are “the workers”—the labor force that upper 
management strives to keep productive.

The new levels of soil nutrients and moisture stimulate additional plant 
growth, thereby setting up a beneficial feedback loop. With new moisture 
throughout the environment, the system itself begins to deter fire. 
Furthermore, the accumulated carbon helps prepare the land for rain. 
Enhancing ground cover or “armor,” says Henggeler, “changes raindrops from 
bombshells into mist-irrigators that help to grow grass. Reinvest your carbon 
and you can become productive.”

Henggeler’s philosophy and methodology draw directly from a Zimbabwean 
wildlife biologist named Allan Savory, who has, since the 1970s, been 
developing a system of land stewardship called Holistic Management. Many 
people, upward of 3 million to be precise, are aware of Savory primarily 
through his 2103 TED Talk, “How to Green the Deserts and Reverse Climate 
Change.” The 22-minute presentation sparked a lot of attention and 
immediately entered that dubious media category of “controversial.”
The Water Innovators | Craftsmanship Quarterly, Winter 2017
Henggeler likes to point out that grass in areas like this is not here 
because of the water. The water is here because of the grass. Photo courtesy 
of Kachana Pastoral Company

To many viewers, the idea that grassland ecosystems require periodic animal 
impact stood in flagrant opposition to what they’d been taught. But years of 
observation convinced Savory that grazing animals and grasslands are 
interdependent: time and again he saw land deteriorate when animals were 
removed. In nature, plants are to a large extent managed by herbivores, and 
those plant-eating animals are managed by predators. The alteration of the 
landscape and the absence of natural predators have left a management void. 
With what we now understand about rangeland systems, this void can be filled 
in a way that at once bolsters ecological function and economic viability. 
This is especially crucial in areas with seasonal rainfall, where ruminants 
play a pivotal role in maintaining moisture from one rainy season to the next.

A number of vegan activists and a few range-science researchers have sought 
to discredit Savory’s theories. From what I have been able to tell—based on 
my own reading and conversations with other ecology experts—their arguments 
are based on just a few academic articles, which are about experiments that 
don’t actually test the Holistic Management model. Some assess grazing 
systems that appear similar—like “mob grazing” or “short-term rotational 
grazing”—but are actually quite different. Savory says there are at least 13 
grazing systems with names that have been used interchangeably with Holistic 
Management.
To be fair, Holistic Management is difficult to measure. Standard research 
protocol calls for carefully monitoring a set of clear, controlled variables. 
Under Holistic Management, landscapes are seen as constantly evolving, with a 
host of constantly changing variables. In that sense, they are very much like 
the natural ecosystems that Savory strives to mimic.

“Sao Paulo is following on California’s footsteps,” said Antonio Nobre, a 
scientist in Brazil. “This area has been green forever. But for most of 2014 
people were looking to the horizon and seeing the same atmosphere as you’d 
see in the Sahara: the same layer of dust and blue sky and heat. People are 
scared, shaking in their boots.”

When I wrote “Water in Plain Sight” (published in 2016 by St. Martin’s, and 
from which this article is adapted), I was motivated by my conviction that 
water should be integral to discussions of climate change. I don’t mean 
merely from the perspective that a changing climate will put stress on 
available water sources worldwide—an important link and one that is generally 
known. I also mean the influence of water on climate. While researching my 
previous book, “Cows Save the Planet” (published in 2013), I learned a lot 
about the carbon cycle in our soil, and how that cycle intersects with 
others—the nutrient cycle, the energy cycle, and the water cycle. Water, I 
have come to understand, can be a particularly powerful ally as we grapple 
with climate change.
To learn more about the ways of water I spent two years visiting or talking 
to people in California, Mexico, Brazil, West Texas, Australia, and Africa. 
At each stop I found what might be called new water—water held in the soil, 
cycled through plants, captured as dew. This provided insight into how water 
flows across the land and through the atmosphere—insights that can help us 
replenish our water resources and make the best use of what we have.
The Water Innovators | Craftsmanship Quarterly, Winter 2017
In the Ariaú region of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, along a tributary of 
the Rio Negro, dusk is an ideal time to see the jacarés, or alligators, that 
live along the banks. This is actually the Amazon’s dry season, November; the 
riverbanks are covered in water during the rainy season, as well as much of 
the forested shores themselves. Photo by Pamela Petro
ARBOREAL AIR CONDITIONERS
In early 2015, Sao Paulo, Brazil—a megacity in a country known for its 
legendary rainforests—was suffering from a severe drought. The network of 
reservoirs that provides water to nearly half of the city’s 20 million 
residents languished at a mere five percent of capacity. Experts predicted 
that, without strict rationing, the water supply wouldn’t last 10 weeks. Some 
apartment dwellers saw their water shut off without warning, for up to five 
days. Commentators noted the irony that Brazil, which has been called “the 
Saudi Arabia of water”—was confronting such a dire shortfall.
If cattle were managed well on native grasslands, we could stop cutting down 
the rainforests to make room for them. These trees would then be around to 
maintain the water cycle, through functions that have generally been 
overlooked in rainforest discussions.
“Sao Paulo is following on California’s footsteps,” said Antonio Nobre, a 
senior scientist at Brazil’s National Institute for Amazonian Research. “This 
area has been green forever. But for most of 2014 people were looking to the 
horizon and seeing the same atmosphere as you’d see in the Sahara: the same 
layer of dust and blue sky and heat. People are scared, shaking in their 
boots.” In response, he said, Brazil’s government ignored the problem “as if 
the next wet season would save us.”
Judging from the latest scientific evidence, if Brazil fails to maintain its 
forests there won’t be many more wet seasons.
Granted, much of the rainforest is being decimated to make room for cattle. 
But if livestock were raised in native grasslands that require animal 
impact—and managed in the adaptive manner that Henggeler and Savory have 
found effective—we could start leaving the rainforests alone. These trees 
would then be around to maintain the water cycle, through functions that have 
generally been overlooked in rainforest discussions.

The idea that there’s a connection between forests and water sufficiency is 
far from new. Plato and Aristotle wrote about how deforestation leads to the 
loss of water resources. In his 1864 book “Man and Nature” (original title: 
“Man the Disturber of Nature’s Harmonies”), George Perkins Marsh catalogs 
numerous troubles observed during his diplomatic and literary travels. “When 
the forest is gone,” Marsh wrote, “the great reservoir of moisture stored up 
in its vegetable mould [soil or humus] is evaporated, and returns only in 
deluges of rain to wash away the parched dust into which that mould has been 
converted. The well-wooded and humid hills are turned to ridges of dry rock.” 
More recently, popular histories such as Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” and David 
Montgomery’s “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations” are full of cautionary 
tales about societies—the Mayans, Pacific Islanders, communities in the 
French Alps—that squandered their tree cover, only to face catastrophic 
flooding and drought.

On a superficial level, most people understand the value of trees beyond 
supplying wood. Their roots stabilize the soil, allowing it to hold rainfall 
rather than letting water stream away, carrying off the topsoil’s nutritious 
stores of organic matter. Tree canopies also intercept downpours, so the 
water doesn’t pummel the ground, leaving craters and overwhelming the land’s 
ability to absorb it.
During the daily “transpiration” process of a single tree, the heat consumed 
represents three times the cooling power of an air-conditioning system in a 
five-star hotel room.

On a deeper level, however, trees do a lot more heavy lifting for the 
environment—and for climate regulation—than most of us realize. Just for 
starters, the shade of a tree canopy cools the ground so that moisture is 
less prone to evaporate, thus keeping water in the system. Trees also recycle 
oxygen and water vapor, which improves the quality of the air and lends it a 
soft humidity. Everyone knows how soothing it is to be near trees. (There’s 
even a healing practice in Japan called Shinrin Yoku, translated as “forest 
bathing,” which research has found lowers stress and boosts immunity.) Bill 
Mollison, the late biologist and teacher considered the “father of 
permaculture,” has found that the rainwater that filters through the canopy 
is distinct from ordinary rain. “It’s a much richer substance,” Mollison 
says—a kind of arboreal elixir with a different ionic makeup. This 
“throughwater” contains trace elements that rainwater doesn’t necessarily 
have, he says, and it’s less acidic. “The most nutritious pasture,” Mollison 
says, “is near trees.”

And trees cool the air—significantly. Jan Pokorný, a Czech botanist, argues 
that trees are the world’s most perfect air conditioners, largely because of 
a process they go through called “transpiration.” Every day, trees and other 
plants emit water vapor through small openings on the underside of their 
leaves (in grasses, on the blades). Think of this as the plant “breathing,” 
or, more precisely, “sweating.” Consider an ordinary tree, whose leaf crown 
spans about 16-1/2 feet (or five meters). On a sunny day, Pokorný says, this 
tree would have at least 150 kilowatt-hours of solar energy shining upon it. 
Given sufficient water, over the course of the day the tree would transpire 
upward of 26 gallons of water (more than 100 liters). The heat consumed 
during that process represents three times the cooling power of an 
air-conditioning system in a five-star hotel room, Pokorný says. And he isn’t 
the only scientist thinking this way. Research from Australia found that tree 
canopy cover of a mere 40 percent cooled an area by nine degrees.
In a verdant tropical forest like the Amazon, the soil-plant-sky circuit is 
running very quickly. This makes the carbon, nutrient, and water cycles all 
accelerate. The rate of transpiration in the Amazon Basin is such that each 
tree is a veritable fountain. On a given day, Nobre writes, a large tree in 
the rainforest “can pump from the soil and transpire over a thousand liters 
of water.” That’s more than 260 gallons—from one tree, in a single day.
With the growing mounds of data like this, why are discussions on climate 
change so narrowly focused? Says Pokorný: “Our understanding of the role of 
water and plants in landscape functioning is the equivalent of medicine 
before Pasteur.”
The Water Innovators | Craftsmanship Quarterly, Winter 2017

And the water at Kachana Station now goes on and on. Photo courtesy of 
Kachana Pastoral Company
DEAD TREES, DEAD RAINCLOUDS

In 2014, Nobre published a massive review of 200 scientific articles on the 
Amazon, drawn from authors around the world, called “The Future Climate of 
Amazonia.” As might be expected, it made a strong case for protecting and 
even replanting the rainforests—not just for Brazil’s sake but also for 
climate stability across the globe. One of Nobre’s conclusions gave new 
meaning to the term “rainforests.” These forests don’t merely exist because 
of the rain; to a large extent, the rain—in Brazil and elsewhere—exists 
because of the forests.

Nobre’s argument rests on yet another foundation of the water cycle: how our 
atmosphere creates rain. To form rain droplets, water vapor molecules need 
some kind of particle to coalesce around: typically, minute flecks of dust, 
pollen, salts, or soot. This microscopic debris serves as condensation nuclei 
and promotes the formation of clouds.

In recent years, a range of biologists have learned there is a difference 
between condensation particles that produce rain and those that don’t. (Among 
other factors, the first are large enough to become heavy after condensing 
with water, and thus fall as rain; the second are smaller, and thus linger in 
the atmosphere.) The latter, unfortunately, are the form that humans are 
generating in rising amounts. These include fumes from the burning of fossil 
fuels, chemical pollutants, and—according to Walter Jehne, an Australian soil 
microbiologist—“three to five billion metric tons of dust from bare, eroding 
soil surfaces.”

The Water Innovators | Craftsmanship Quarterly, Winter 2017
Allan Savory founded the Africa Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe in 
1992. Since then, holistic planned grazing has revived huge areas of the 
surrounding landscape. The Dimbangombe River now extends a full kilometer 
farther upstream than anyone, including the chiefs and elders of the five 
local tribes, can remember. Wildlife populations have rebounded and there’s 
less flooding during the rainy season. Photo by Tony Eprile
This might explain some of the forces behind the historic drought in the 
Western U.S., especially in its primary fruit and vegetable producer: 
California. In some regions recently, whenever weather predictions have 
called for rain, the skies have indeed filled with dark clouds. Yet the 
clouds now often continue on their merry way, without releasing a drop.

Amazonia seems different, however. Here, the air is nearly empty of the 
standard heavy particles that produce typical rainfalls. (This also is true 
of the air above the ocean, which helps explain why many maritime stretches 
receive little rain.) But the Amazon gets lots of rain—in some places, upward 
of nine feet a year. How does it manage this feat?

Again, thank the trees. It turns out their leaves emit carbon-based gases, 
called biogenic volatile organic compounds—what Nobre calls “scents of the 
forest” (or, inspired by the animated films his two daughters watch, “pixie 
dust”). When the sun shines on these tiny iotas of matter, they oxidize and 
precipitate into fine dust particles with an affinity for water. There’s only 
one problem: some 300,000 square miles of Amazonia has been deforested; 
that’s an area the size of two Germanys or two Japans. Nobre likes to convert 
this expanse to units that Brazilian readers understand: 184 million soccer 
fields.

The argument that forests spread rain beyond their own borders has been most 
audaciously explained by a theory called the “biotic pump.” This idea, first 
described in a 2007 paper by Russian physicists Victor Gorshkov and 
Anastassia Makarieva, drew lots of attention, quickly becoming controversial. 
(One biotic pump paper was published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, an 
esteemed scientific journal, only after an unprecedented 
two-and-a-half-year-long discussion period.) The science, expressed in the 
rarified language of physics, basically reflects the dynamics driven by 
transpiration. In a mature, robust forest, the Russian physicists argue, the 
concentration of trees creates a lot of transpiration. The moist air rises 
and the water vapor condenses, producing a partial vacuum. This creates 
what’s called an air pressure gradient, enabling the forest canopy to draw in 
moist air from the ocean.
Conversely, without sufficient forest cover, the ocean creates the stronger 
vacuum, dumping rain on sailors instead of on farmers. Should such a fate 
befall the Amazon, the Russians say, it could mean a rainfall decrease of up 
to 90 percent.

Scientists who have looked into the Russians’ theory have found alarming 
evidence that it might be on target, with wider consequences than we’ve 
realized. As but one example, climatologist Roni Avissar, now dean of the 
Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of 
Miami, and colleagues at Duke University found that deforestation in the 
Amazon Basin correlates with lower rainfall in regions as far away as the 
American Midwest. Apparently, when it comes to the water cycle, we all live 
in the same neighborhood.
The Water Innovators | Craftsmanship Quarterly, Winter 2017

As the sun comes up, herders at the Dimbangombe Ranch, in Zimbabwe, lead the 
cattle from the lion-proof kraal where they’d spent the night to where they 
will graze for the day. Dickson Ncube, the herding supervisor, describes how 
he has seen the land change: “There was plenty of bare land. There were 
gullies and sinkholes. Then we started bringing in the cattle. The gully is 
still there, but now there is grass so there is no erosion.” Photo by Tony 
Eprile
T
hat is a scary prospect if Brazil’s rainforests continue to decline. Amazonia 
could then lose its pumping power; in Gorshkov and Makarieva’s language, the 
forest could lose the moisture “tug-of-war” to the ocean. In a worst-case 
scenario, Antonio Nobre writes, Brazil’s humid tropical biome, with all its 
biodiversity, “would resemble present-day Australia: a vast desert interior 
fringed on one side by strips of wetter areas near the sea.”

THE HIDDEN CAUSE OF GLOBAL STRIFE
Consider these quick facts: 663 million people, or one in ten across the 
world, lack access to clean water. Every ninety seconds a child dies of a 
water-related disease, usually diarrhea from inadequate drinking water, 
sanitation or hygiene—death and suffering that is preventable. (For a tour of 
some innovators who are beginning to solve this problem, see our story, 
“Precious Drops.”) Women and children collectively devote an astounding 125 
million hours a day to water gathering, which can mean carrying across long 
distances heavy vessels of water of dubious quality on their heads or backs. 
This is time that could be spent on schooling, caring for children or other 
relatives, and income-yielding work.

In Nigeria, Lake Chad, once among the world’s largest inland lakes and a 
center for fishing and agriculture, has shrunk to one-twentieth of its size 
since the 1960s. The lake’s dwindling, combined with land degradation and 
shifting monsoon patterns, have greatly aggravated the area’s food shortages; 
as the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard puts it, “the sun eats our land.” This 
makes for prime recruiting conditions for a radical group, particularly among 
young people who see no viable future. According to Africa News, many Boko 
Haram “footsoldiers” are refugees from neighboring Niger and Chad who have 
been displaced by food shortage and drought. The result is a revolving door 
of poverty, terror, and environmental collapse.
In the dry heart of Texas, in the midst of the state’s multiyear drought, one 
rancher decided to see how much water he could gather by designing a barn 
roof that collected the night’s dew. At 4:30 a.m. one morning, he found water 
streaming into his tank at a rate of approximately 60 gallons a day, enough 
to cover nearly all of the family’s water needs.
To zero in on a hotspot in the news, let’s look at Syria. While the 
circumstances that led to Syria’s civil strife are obviously complex, the 
lack of water has clearly played a role. From 2006 to 2010, the years 
immediately preceding the country’s ongoing unrest, much of the country faced 
severe, persistent drought marked by water-related violence. In 2010, the 
United Nations reported that 80 percent of Syria was susceptible to 
desertification, and since then conditions have only deteriorated.

Gianluca Serra, an Italian conservation biologist who spent more than a 
decade in Syria, points to a factor you’re unlikely to hear about in 
geopolitical debates: unrestricted grazing across the Syrian steppe, dry 
grasslands that cover more than half of the country. He says that for 
centuries, Bedouin pastoralists grazed their herds sustainably—in a fashion 
that allowed for plant re-growth before reintroducing animals. The advent of 
the modern Syrian state, however, changed that. In 1958 the central 
government nationalized the steppe. The result was something of a terrestrial 
free-for-all in which urban investors bought high-value livestock, such as 
cattle, and put them out on the land. Serra writes: “The customary link 
between the natural resource and its user was interrupted—abruptly disowning 
the traditional ecological knowledge of this ancient people.”

Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Institute, has observed 
and written about international water dynamics for three decades. “Twenty 
years ago,” she says, “I raised the issue of possible wars over water. I’ve 
come to be less worried about water wars per se than of a constellation of 
threats that stem from droughts and water shortages.” Primary among them, of 
course, are food shortages, and the rising grocery prices that follow. It’s 
not surprising, then, that many political analysts have attributed the Arab 
Spring to the rise of food prices. “The relationships between water, food and 
political volatility have the potential to be more destabilizing than in the 
past,” says Postel.

The Water Innovators | Craftsmanship Quarterly, Winter 2017
Allan Savory regularly visits Sizinda, a rural community of 140 households 
near Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Precious Phiri, who has worked in Sizinda as a 
trainer with Savory’s Africa Centre for Holistic Management, says that now, 
“The river doesn’t flash flood and it doesn’t dry up. People bring picnics 
down to the river to talk about our dreams and aspirations. Elephants and 
buffalo are now coming to drink here.” Photo by Tony Eprile

THE DESERT’S SECRET WATERFALLS
Katherine and Markus Ottmers live and work in the dry steppes of far West 
Texas. Their ranch sits at the bottom of Big Bend Valley, a place so remote, 
Katherine says, it’s “like living on the moon.” Since rains can be few and 
far between, they’ve designed the main building at Casa de Mañana—their 
fifty-by-fifty-foot “rain barn,” the off-grid headquarters for Ottmers 
Agricultural Technologies—to collect both rainwater and condensation. But 
they had no idea of just how much water they harvested solely from dew until 
one morning in winter 2012 when the valve burst on one of the water tanks.

Markus was outside doing some ironwork when he noticed water gushing from the 
tank. “Hey, Brad!” he called to his coworker. “Go see how much water is in 
there. It can’t be full. We haven’t had any rain in four months.” Not only 
were they rainless; they’d been providing for a herd of some 50 goats, and 
between six and eight people were regularly taking light showers at their 
place.
Brad checked, and the tank was indeed completely full. Markus rose the next 
day at 4:30 to monitor the tank. Here, at the edge of the Big Bend, in the 
midst of Texas’s multiyear drought, a bleary-eyed Markus discovered that 
water was streaming into his tank at a rate of approximately 60 gallons a 
day, enough to cover nearly all of their water needs.

“I was wondering who the water fairy was,” Markus recalls, as he walks toward 
the tank to show us the gauge. A tall, restless Texan, he possesses an 
impatient turn of mind that flits toward puzzles and plans that most would 
dismiss as quixotic if not impossible. Among his other areas of 
expertise—which include precision earthworks, glass blowing, welding, straw 
bale and geodome home construction, mycology, and beehive removal and 
rescue—Markus is a certified permaculture trainer. Katherine, too, is a 
master of many trades. She’s long worked as a landscape designer and has 
since become a certified Holistic Management educator.
The source of the collected water—the water fairy that proved more generous 
than anyone had guessed—was condensation, Markus tells us. “That water going 
into the tank is from the roof, because you can see I’m not standing out here 
with a squeegee,” he says. “This is because there’s heat on the roof, and 
breezes coming through. The roof cools off, and then the warm air flows 
create the condensation.”
T
he Water Innovators | Craftsmanship Quarterly, Winter 2017
Some say the Amatola Forest near Hogsback, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape 
Province, inspired J.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” Scientists have been 
discovering that healthy forests like this one can maintain water sources in 
many ways we’ve never known before. Not only do they collect rain, they also 
help produce it. Photo by Tony Eprile

The barn was structured for solar gain in the winter and shade in the summer. 
While maximizing comfort (obviously precious in this harsh environment), the 
design also accentuates temperature differentials. Its volume of water is 
made possible by a four-foot difference between an upper and lower roof. As 
the afternoon progresses, the galvanized tin upper roof is “superheating.” 
The tin extends out over a lower roof (also made of tin), thereby casting a 
shadow and breaking the sun. “The more we can bump up the difference between 
hot and cold, the more we can create moisture.”

To put the Ottmers’ achievement in perspective, consider the attitude toward 
water held by some of their neighbors. When I checked into the Wild Horse 
Station, a group of rentable cabins tucked into hills along the route to a 
nearby ghost town, the proprietor respectfully encouraged us to be sparing 
with the water. “That’s what’s going to get us down here,” she said. Although 
the community had recently been graced with higher-than-usual rainfall, 
complete with greened-up hills and banner wildflower displays, “all that rain 
isn’t helping us.” Apparently, the area’s water table had been steadily 
falling.


In the 1990s, the Slovakian government was preparing to construct a dam at a 
cost of $350 million. The project threatened both the environment and several 
700-year-old villages. Thanks to prodding from an innovative hydrologist, 
Slovakia instead built a series of swales, slopes, and other small structures 
made of wood or stone. In 2011, when torrential floods afflicted much of 
Slovakia, these towns escaped relatively unharmed, saving the government an 
estimated 500,000 euros.

Markus drew inspiration for his rain barn from a lowly insect. In the Namib 
Desert, an ultra-arid area on the western coast of southern Africa, 
enterprising little crawlies called the Namib Desert Beetle gather water this 
way: they climb to a crest of sand dune and, as fog rolls in from the sea, 
they lift their legs as if doing a handstand. Tiny droplets of water roll 
down their bellies and into their mouths so they can drink. “The beetle puts 
its ass to the wind,” Markus says. “We built the building copying the 
beetle.” To explain, Markus drops down on bent knees and wiggles his backside.
My introduction to the Ottmers’ began when I met Markus’s wife, Katherine, in 
Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the 2014 Quivira Conference, an annual event 
focused on enhancing Western landscapes. I was immediately intrigued by the 
way she talked about water, how she seemed to have a different relationship 
to it than anyone I’d met. “We’re so sensitive to water that we can tell the 
little shifts in the moisture in the air,” she said. “We’re like the desert 
plants that way.” Katherine said that in the desert, “we don’t have a lot of 
rain, but we have ‘moisture events.’” She told me about “nutrient dense fogs” 
with morning mists so thick “you can’t see the truck in the driveway.” She 
described how such events, which may materialize only five to eight times a 
year, kindle something different in the vegetation: “The plants are a lot 
happier with that little bit of moisture. Everything shifts right after that, 
as if there’s been some nutrient exchange.”

SOLUTIONS IN PLAIN SIGHT
Finding new water from dew is just the beginning of the innovations being 
devised in almost every corner of the globe. In the 1990s, the Slovakian 
government was all set to construct a dam to supply water to some of its 
cities, at a cost of $350 million. This alarmed Michal Kravčík, a hydrologist 
who was concerned not only about the dam’s impact on the environment, but 
also about the survival of several 700-year-old villages near Slovakia’s 
Torysa River sure to be destroyed by the project. So Kravčík proposed a “Blue 
Alternative.” Why not build a series of swales, slopes, and small dams or 
steps made of wood or stone, in order to slow and retain water? Kravčík’s 
alternative was adopted, and rainwater started moving into aquifers. Springs 
appeared and the Torysa River Valley now has dependable streams. This effort, 
implemented primarily by volunteers with the Slovakian organization People 
and Water, cost almost nothing and earned Kravčík the 1999 Goldman 
Environmental Prize.

Based on this project’s success, the Slovak Republic government instituted a 
rainwater retention program on a large scale under Kravčík’s management. Over 
the next 18 months, 488 communities built some 100,000 water-holding 
structures across degraded land areas. In 2011, torrential floods afflicted 
much of Slovakia, but these towns escaped relatively unharmed, saving the 
government an estimated 500,000 euros. The low-tech project also offered jobs 
to 7,700 people, most of whom had been chronically unemployed.
The Water Innovators | Craftsmanship Quarterly, Winter 2017
At Rancho de Mañana, Katherine and Markus Ottmers’ ranch near Big Bend, 
Texas, the burrows sometimes have to wait for the humans to vacate a shady 
spot under the cottonwood trees. Cool areas are at a premium here, as summer 
temperatures can exceed 115 degrees Fahrenheit. When it gets that hot, says 
Stacy, a local friend, “it’s like having a hammer on your head.” Photo by 
Tony Eprile
Sandra Postel of the Global Water Policy Institute notes the irony that 
throughout the world, so many hungry people live on farms. “In Bangladesh and 
all over South Asia,” she says, “during the long dry period there is water 
right there—beneath the farmers’ feet—but fallow fields.” The problem is 
starting to be addressed, however, by the advent of a simple device: low-cost 
water pumps, which can usually be operated manually, without the 
technological bells and whistles that add cost. When Postel was in 
Bangladesh, she says, a simple treadle pump could be found for as little as 
$35.
The advantage of a community-based water system is not just its low cost. 
Postel has found that the typical alternative—ambitious, large-scale water 
delivery systems of some kind—can be counterproductive. “If you’re 
distributing water on a large scale with big dams, reservoirs, et cetera, 
this can contribute to land degradation, and water can be lost along the way.”


Rajendra Singh, who has been called the “waterman of India,” certainly 
understands this principle. Singh initially came to the country’s hot, dry 
Rajasthan area as a young doctor, but quickly saw that the community’s 
greatest need was not the medical services he had planned to provide, but 
access to clean water. His approach was building johads, small 
crescent-shaped stone or earthen dams that were traditionally used to collect 
rainwater. This simple technique gradually replenished the area’s wells, and 
parched land started to turn green. Before long, villagers had joined in to 
make their own johads. Over a period of nearly 30 years, tens of thousands of 
johads have returned water and land fertility to more than 1,200 villages. In 
2015, Singh was awarded the Stockholm Water Prize.

I once had the chance to hear Singh speak, at the Restoring Water Cycles to 
Reverse Global Warming conference at Tufts University. He reported that seven 
previously dry rivers in his region are now flowing with water—quite an 
accomplishment in a place that receives nine centimeters (3.5 inches) of rain 
a year. “We’ve been converting ‘red heat’ to ‘green heat’,” he said. “Now the 
clouds come and bring the rain.”
The Water Innovators | Craftsmanship Quarterly, Winter 2017

At Casa de Mañana, the Ottmers raise poultry, produce honey, and take on 
other jobs such as bee removals. “One of the biggest tricks out here on the 
moon is to get a gig and make a living,” says Katherine. There is active 
bartering, she adds, so “you don’t need much currency.” Photo by Tony Eprile

“EVERY PLANT IS A PUMP”
The innovators I encountered while researching this book—and their insights 
about potential devastation or revival—raise an inescapable question: If 
water has such an impact on climate change, why isn’t water discussed in 
these terms? Walter Jehne, the Australian soil microbiologist, offers a 
simple explanation. He believes we’ve tended to emphasize CO2 (carbon 
dioxide) over H2O (water) largely because it is easier to measure in the 
atmosphere. Hydrological processes, he says, are also highly variable. This 
makes them difficult to model, and then link to other data on climate change.

To Peter Andrews, an Australian farmer and horse breeder, moisture in our 
atmosphere—or the lack of it—has been easy enough to gauge, at least 
ecologically. As a child taking refuge from a dust storm in an underground 
room, he saw the vegetation around his home near Broken Hill, South Wales, go 
whoosh! with the gritty winds. In his book “Beyond the Brink,” Andrews says, 
“Every plant is a solar-powered factory producing the organic material on 
which all life depends. Every plant is also a pump, which is constantly 
raising water from the ground to keep the factory operating.”


Water & Climate Change: Suggested Resources.
Looking over the long term of humanity’s role on this earth, Andrews tallies 
our plumbing bill this way: “Each day, the planet takes in a certain number 
of units of heat, which it somehow has to manage. In the past, billions of 
plants helped to manage the heat in situ. . . . Around a quarter of the 
planet has now been stripped almost entirely of vegetation. In other words, 
one quarter of the planet has been stripped of its ability to moderate 
temperature.”
In the 200 years since European settlement, he says, Australia’s green cover 
has been reduced by 70 percent. “The fact that all the major problems of our 
landscape have a common cause, a lack of vegetation, means that they also 
have a common solution,” he writes. And that, he says, is to grow more 
plants—trees, grass, and weeds alike.

Judith D. Schwartz is the author of “Cows Save the Planet” (2013). This 
article was excerpted and adapted from her latest book,  “Water in Plain 
Sight,” by permission of St. Martin’s Press LLC.
© 2017 Judith D. Schwartz, all rights reserved. Under exclusive license to 
Craftsmanship, LLC. Unauthorized copying or republication of this article is 
prohibited by law.
Published: November 29, 2016