Slowing our waters : Erica Gies

Zach Weiss launched an education and community platform Water Stories which trains people to restore water cycles via earthworks, soil restoration, and ecosystem restoration. Central is the idea of retention ponds and terraces which help slow water and help it seep into the aqufers below so the ecosystem has year round access to water. The education trains students to learn the art, find and take on clients. It also trains people to advocate for water cycle restoration. For more see https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/activating-a-global-network-of-water

https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/rewilding-beavers-and-water-restoration

To restore water, shift to regenerative ag: to shift the world to regenerative ag, redo global supply chains https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/supply-chains-and-insurance-the-secret

Patrick Keys, a professor at Boston University, studies the sources and sinks of rain in the moisture recycling process (aka small water cycle). He looks at how they are embedded in socio-economic systems.

John Cherry won the Stockholm Water Prize, known as the ‘Nobel’ of water, which is awarded in conjunction with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the same institution behind the Nobel Prize itself. He wrote the seminal Groundwater textbook that shaped our modern understanding of groundwater hydrology. He pioneered the field of groundwater contamination.

Lan Wang-Erlandsson is a researcher studying moisture recycling aka small water cycle. She focuses on the large-scale interactions between land, water, and climate, and their implications for social-ecological and Earth system resilience. She has conducted work on the planetary boundaries of green water, helped society understand moisture recycling as an ecosystem service, and collaborated with the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) on reports examining how moisture recycling intersects with the future of agriculture.For more info https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/planetary-tipping-points-of-green

Douglas Sheil is an ecologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He has worked on questions of how forests affect watersheds, how to restore and conserve forests, and also helped clarify explanations of the Biotic Pump. For more info https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/the-forest-water-connection-ecologist. You can help support this podcast by becoming a subscriber of the Climate Water Project newsletter.

Dr. van der Ent is a hydrologist who made a global map of the small water cycle, showing what percentage of the evapotranspiration turns back into rainfall on the same continent. For written article https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/making-the-map-of-the-small-water

A wonderful new documentary, Our Blue World, is out, and it offers a panoramic exploration of how communities across the globe are learning to live in greater harmony with water. The film highlights a wide range of innovative and traditional practices—from China’s sponge city initiative, to New Zealand’s recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person, to the ancient Peruvian techniques for guiding water into mountains so it reemerges as springs. It also delves into the Biosphere 2 project, where twelve people lived in a sealed dome for two years and had to rely on constructed wetlands to purify their water. The documentary further explores the shift along the Mississippi River from a levee-centered approach to one that embraces wetland restoration, as well as efforts to restore Ireland’s bogs—offering a hopeful vision of how we can reimagine our relationship with water. The film is produced by Paul O’Callaghan, directed by Ruan Magan, and narrated by Liam Neeson (the action movie actor) in his voice that oozes gravitas. For more see https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/our-blue-world-documentary-paul-ocallaghan

Laura Norman is a physical scientist with the USGS. Doing hydrological modelling of slow water. https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/putting-rocks-in-rivers-to-lessen