Can We Rehydrate California?
12/6/2025, 9:30AM PT. The first in a new series of winter strategy and action workshops with Didi Pershouse
Enroll in Course
Join your neighbors and colleagues on Saturday December 6th,
9:30 AM-11:30 AM PST (Check here to see this in your time zone)
as we begin our next
WINTER STRATEGY AND ACTION SERIES
FOR REHYDRATING CALIFORNIA (and beyond), .
All welcome, from everywhere!
Restoring water cycles is a topic that is growing in interest. However, our interventions need to be far more strategic and coordinated, and there is still a lot missing in terms of a holistic understanding of what keeps water in the land--including 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 and storing water across the landscape, we can reduce flooding and drought, provide natural cooling in urban and rural areas, recharge groundwater supplies, reduce irrigation needs, and reduce fire risk:
- Reduce the length of the fire season by extending seasonal green growth
- Reduce drought stress on trees to create healthier forests
- Prime the rain cycle through transpiration, bioprecipitation, and the biotic pump
- Dramatically cool air and surface temperatures by increasing transpiring green vegetation, slowing the spread of fire
- Reduce fuel loads by creating moist surface conditions for fungi to easily decompose dry plants and wood so they are less flammable.
Walter Jehne and Didi Pershouse tackled this subject back in 2018 during our "Can We Rehydrate California?" speaking and listening tour. We explained back then that the fires, droughts, heat, and floods that California experiences are related to degradation of the natural systems that cycle water-- and California's unique spot on the planet--and that we actually can address these right away through a living systems approach.
Now people are ready to talk and listen about rehydrating California, and so are we.
Last winter Didi hosted a series of mini workshops and podcasts bringing together a broad coalition of people and projects. The RehydrateCalifornia.org website has links to recordings and transcripts of previous workshops. You will find podcasts and more in the Rehydrate California section of The Wisdom Underground on Substack.
This upcoming workshop is Saturday December 6th, 2025. 9:30-11:30 PST. The suggested minimum donation is $25, but please be generous if you can, to make more workshops possible for more people. If you would like to make a larger donation to this project, please contact didi@landandleadership.org.
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.