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  • From: Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe@silcom.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] The New Water Alchemists/Judith Schwartz
  • Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2017 10:45:05 -0800

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


  • [permaculture] The New Water Alchemists/Judith Schwartz, Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, 02/05/2017

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