Can We Rehydrate California?
Saturday, January 25, 9:30 to 11:30 AM, (PST: Pacific US time zone)
Enroll in Course
It's 2025, LA is burning, I decided it's high time to return to the questions that Walter Jehne and I tackled back in 2018 on our "Can We Rehydrate California?" speaking and listening tour. Here's what we talked about on my podcast last week. And here is a video from our 2018 gathering at Paicines Ranch during that tour.
We explained back then, that the fires, droughts and floods that California experiences are related to degradation of the natural systems that cycle water. At the time, many Californians were getting super excited about soil carbon as drawdown, and creating new programs and policies related to that. Perhaps because of that, people weren't quite ready to hear what we were proposing (which I get, because soil carbon was also where I started in my journey). Slovakian hydrologist Michal Kravcik had a similar experience that year when he toured California talking about the New Water Paradigm.
Now people are ready to talk and listen about water and fire, and so are we.
I'm going to update our ReydrateCalifornia.org website that has been patiently holding space for seven years, and am offering a series of online workshops for us to explore the topic. The first workshop is Saturday January 25th. "Growing Fire Resilience: Can We Rehydrate California?" 9:30-11:30 PST (12:30 to 4:30 EST) The cost is $25, but your additional donations will help to make more possible.
Alpha Lo and I also had a phenomenal conversation in which we really unpacked a whole bunch of ideas of what can be done for Los Angeles going forward.
Restoring water cycles is a topic that is going viral. However, there is still a lot missing in terms of a holistic understanding. For example, many folks see the need to restore water cycles, but they see the necessary action as primarily about digging ponds (which--don't get me wrong--are great, especially when created by beavers), without also seeing the enormous landscape scale potential of growing a deep soil sponge reservoir that captures water everywhere, and holds it at depth protected from evaporation.
By capturing water across the landscape, we can reduce flooding and drought, but also, and importantly for fire:
- reduce the fire season by extending the length of green growth in places with seasonal rainfall,
- create healthier forests
- prime the daily rain cycle through transpiration
- cool the air and land surface
- and reduce fuel loads by creating moist surface conditions for fungi to easily decompose dry plants and wood so they are less flammable.
Your Instructor
Didi Pershouse is well known as an innovative international educator both in-person and online. She is the founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative. Her facilitator's guide Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function is used in over 90 countries.
She became deeply involved in the intersection of food systems and health systems while providing rural health care for two decades at The Center for Sustainable Medicine, and wrote The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities.
She has written a field training manual for the UN-FAO Farmer Field School Program and the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming Initiative in India, involving over 1,000,000 smallholder farmers. She was a contributing author to The Climate Emergency: How Africa Can Survive and Thrive; Climate Change and Creation Care; and Health in the Anthropocene. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.
She serves on the Planning Commission for her town, is a board supervisor for the White River Natural Resources Conservation District, and is on the board of directors of Regenerate Earth, Soil Carbon Coalition and the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition. While serving on the state appointed Payment for Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group, she helped to reorient the program back to its public roots. She led a successful effort to conserve the Zebedee Headwaters Wetland while serving as a Vermont Conservation Commissioner.
She is on the Vision Council of the Global Earth Repair Convergence, and a member of the Ecosystem Restoration Alliance. She is a lineage member of the Change Agent Development Community (stewarded by Carol Sanford), and is seeding new communities of practice in a Wisdom tradition that uses living systems thinking.